QUE EXTENSÃO CONSTRUÍMOS: (TRANS)FORMADORA OU MERCADOLÓGICA?

Abstract

This master's thesis aims to carry out a critical diagnosis, identifying and analyzing how extension activities were organized in the Letters licentiate course (in-person) comprising both specializations, Portuguese and Spanish, Portuguese and English, at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), after Resolution No. 7 of the CNE, which prescribes the curricularization of public outreach, until February 2022. This general objective stems from the following research question: what is the public outreach profile of the Letters course (in-person) at Faalc/UFMS, Cidade Universitária - Campo Grande? The proposed discussion falls within the interdisciplinary and transgressive field of Applied Linguistics (MOITA-LOPES, 2006; PENNYCOOK, 2006) through the analysis of the political and epistemological instruments that conceive and characterize public outreach in Brazil, at UFMS and in the undergraduate Letters course. This is an interpretive qualitative study (GIL, 2008), elaborated from comparative and historical (PRODANOV; FREITAS, 2013) documentary analysis (CELLARD, 2012). This work is justified by the importance of understanding, analyzing, and reflecting on public outreach, since this, combined with research and teaching, forms the indissociable foundation of university institutions. An additional argument for the researcher's motivation for the topic is her own relationship with public outreach activities, especially after perceiving distinguishing features for establishing a dialogue with the community outside of academia. The theoretical path was developed based on the notions of communication and dialogue (FREIRE, 2022; MATURANA, 1999; VERONELLI, 2019, 2021) and of neoliberal rationality and its relationship with education (APPLE, 2001; CATINI, 2021, 2020b; DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016), among others. The results demonstrate that, despite the basis that defines and characterizes public outreach in the undergraduate Letters course according to prescribed documents which conceive it as an interdisciplinary, dialogical, and transformative process, its development is marked by neoliberal rationality, since UFMS has focused on this perspective according to the institutional documents that were analyzed, mainly the 2022 Management Report (UFMS, 2023) and the 2020-2024 Development Plan (UFMS, 2021e). Furthermore, I observed the problematic lack of an official definition of what the analyzed course understands as public outreach because, since the university grants certain freedom to units and courses for planning and development, it is necessary to plan using clear guidelines that help the proponents of outreach actions to define both the target audience and the objective of each activity, in order to expand the interactive dialogue with the external community and its reach. Based on the analysis of three public outreach actions originating within the Letters course and selected because I was able to participate in them, namely, a program, a project, and an event, I stress the relevance of collecting material from outreach activities through the creation of profiles in wide-reaching social networks, such as Instagram, aiming to create a repository of content made by all participants in these actions (external and internal), as well as a space for interaction with the external community and dissemination of the science that is produced in academia. I conclude that the public outreach profile of the Letters course at Faalc is directly associated with the stance adopted by teachers when proposing activities, mainly concerning the objective and characterization of the target audience of each action, as well as by students, including their agency and engagement in these, since even though institutional guidelines must be followed in this construction, UFMS leaves the embodiment of this structuring up to each course. According to the analysis, public outreach in the Letters course tends to be (trans)formative, even though some institutional documents already indicate signs of marketing perspectives.