EXTENSÃO UNIVERSITÁRIA: INSTITUCIONALIDADE E COMPROMISSO SOCIAL.

Abstract

This dissertation exposition the analysis of university extension, regarding the institutionality and social commitment, which enables the understanding of the extension as the practice of interlocutor actions that integrate the production and the systematization of knowledge to the learning process, as the locus of the inseparability between teaching, research and extension. The research identifies that the extension in Brazil presents several concepts and conceptions in its historical path in the context of higher education. After the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution and the Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education - LDB 9.394-1996, the extension appears as an indispensable element of institutional identity. The research, carried out on university extension at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), at the Pontifical Catholic University of Goiás (PUC Goiás), pioneers in the state of Goiás, and at Faculdade Mineirense (FAMA), a private institution in Goiás that is in its early years of operation, elucidates the historical trajectory of the institutions is conditioned by educational projects in effect or in edification; that they develop extension since the operating permit to the present day, contributing to local and regional development in their social function. The results obtained in the process investigated also demonstrate that the institutionalization of extension requires compliance with standards, criteria and theoretical references according to their purposes and their management, guided by the national curriculum guidelines. The analysis of the conceptual trajectory of the extension in Brazilian higher education, based on the connections between society and university, education and social practice, particularizes the consequences of this process in a period of societal transformations, especially in the relationship between the public and private sectors.