DISCOURSES ABOUT UNIVERSITY LIFE, THE PRACTICE OF ACADEMIC STUDY: STUDENTS CLASSROOM NOTES (THE ‘SEBENTAS ACADÉMICAS’, IN PORTUGAL)

This paper is an integral part of a broader investigation into the study practices in higher (university) education in different European countries. In this summary, the discourse constructed, disseminated and appropriated by the academic community is presented and questioned, through a practice that has been adopted since the birth of university: students’ classroom notes.

The focus on studying practices corresponds with a movement that considers the artifacts and gestures are subjects as given meaning by those who produce and use them. Knowledge of academic life is partly revealed through this relation with the knowledge and also with the books.

Regarding these notes, the following questions arise: What value is given to them by the agents that produce and use them? How have they been perceived by the academic community? What has determined the longevity of this practice up to current times, when students have a multifaceted mix of resources from printed books to information technology?

In order to investigate this fact, a historic perspective over a long period is chosen, which covers from the mid XIX Century to the present. The analysis is focused on notes produced in Portugal, by the students of Coimbra University, which were called “Sebentas Acadêmicas” (Academic Notes). More specifically, the study focused on notes made by students of Law.

For this, printed sources where used (academic writings, short stories, chronicles, student and teacher memories, periodicals) and from early on made a scathing criticism of teaching and the academic study practices. Furthermore, an oral history approach is used, through testimony and representations of some agents involved in the production and circulation of the academic notebooks (sebentas acadêmicas).

The conclusions reached through the questions put forward, and the answers received, show that traditional dichotomy of teaching-learning has been modified to a tripod of teaching-study-learning. This new setting aims to understand how the transmission of knowledge happens at university, from the strategies and study practices of students. In specific circumstances, it is possible to observe that tasks and responsibilities are being assigned to students, despite not being, in many cases, totally taken on neither by students, nor teachers.