Notions and distortions of professional practices vs. social and labor realities in the university context

Abstract

The link between higher education institutions, the context, and the government constitutes one of the main articulating axes of social development. The university's mission is to preserve the cultural heritage, generate knowledge, and transfer it to new generations. Together with the primordial values of humanity, it must guarantee that they can be inserted in these relationships. In this sense, a qualitative study was conducted with a complex approach in which diverse methodological aspects were integrated into the main design, which was ethnomethodology. The research was carried out at the Universidad Nacional Experimental Sur del Lago, Venezuela, and its objective was to evaluate the representation of the professional practice process from a multidimensional perspective. The results show that professional practices should occur periodically and not at the end of the formative period to avoid a late confrontation between theory and practice. In addition, a constant curricular transformation should be generated, updated, and contextualized according to the development needs of the social and academic environment.