A universidade federal brasileira e a importância da extensão na perspectiva da educação libertadora

Abstract

The university develops itself based on three fundamental roles: teaching, researching, and communicating with society through outreach. This educational environment is, in the first instance, constituted as a space beyond, meaning a political and public space for the production of science, but also a space to coexist, to live, to discover oneself, and to relate to the differences it harbors and also with the events and debates around the reality of the world we live in. In this regard, it is important to emphasize that precisely due to its political, autonomous, and human character, we understand the Brazilian Federal University as a public-political space from the perspective of liberating education for students and in constant communication with society. Given the oppressions generated in the structural formation of Brazil, it is part of the justification for this study to understand the relationship of the Brazilian Federal University to this unequal structural formation, based on the understanding of this institution as a space beyond; since the university's public-political space and democratic society are conditions for each other, and among the pillars of the university, extension plays the closest role to this. Methodologically, it was decided to analyze, in light of the Federal Higher Education Institutions as a whole, the perspective of extension in a federal higher education institution located in the Triângulo Mineiro, in the state of Minas Gerais, the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU), especially based on the evolution of extension actions in this institution from 2010 to 2022 in association with data from the Pró-Reitoria de Extensão e Cultura (PROEXC-UFU). Thus, UFU demonstrates in its guidelines and plans, as well as in the significant number of actions carried out and audiences benefited over this period, a commitment to the role of extension and the pursuit of communication with society. It is emphasized that universities need operating conditions for such actions to occur, and the processes of devaluation of public higher education, especially those occurring from 2019 to 2022, have significantly hindered their maintenance. Therefore, the consolidation of federal public policies that establish education as a common right for everyone is necessary to promote a liberating education.