Action-Research in higher education: a path to individual and social (trans)formation

Abstract

This research purpose is to investigate the possibilities of transformation generated by university students who experienced action-research in the period of academic education, in projects of an extensionist nature. Allied to this purpose, we seek to understand how the process of action-research interferes in the business education. To carry out this research, a Federal Institution of Higher Education (IFES) was chosen based on the intense extension work carried out by its professors. Six students, undergraduates and graduates, who participated as volunteers or scholarship holders in extension projects were delimited as corpus. This study fits into the descriptive-conclusive research model by non-probabilistic convenience sampling. The data analysis method was inspired by Discourse Analysis. The research data shows that the students began to have a broader understanding of the profession of administrator, after participating in the extension projects that adopt the methodology of action-research. The proposal of action-research must overcome the boundaries of the methodology and be transmuted into a form of social relationship between university actors in local communities, enhancing the training of administrators and training them for a more dense, broad and critical professional performance.