Experiences and class senses in university: some considerations

Abstract

This article integrates reflections about teaching and learning at university. The main question could be made in this following way: which conditions does a class have to provide in order to favour cultural experiences so that professors and students can feel that academic life is worth it? Through psychoanalysis, philosophy of education and history of education, the debates about this question initially guides to experience,
which is understood in accordance with Donald Winnicott and Jorge Larrosa’s writings. The first author points out the cultural experience as one of the elements of human development and the second one articulates the experience knowledge to the class and to the teaching. In this way, it is possible to understand the university as a kind of refuge, marked by its own time, space and study modes. The present article also considers historically institutionalized school practices, especially the ones called “sebentas”. What kind of experiences has this kind of assumptions, made by the University of Coimbra students in the 18th century to register the professors’ lessons, produced? Which heritages can it take us back? The beautiful descriptions made in 1945 by Fernando de Azevedo about this practices allow us to think about what Inés Dussel and Marcelo Caruso
call “invention of the classroom” and enable us, in this way, to reflect about experiences which, in different moments, give direction and senses to university life.