FEMINISM, POPULAR EDUCATION AND EXTENSION: CREATIVE RESISTANCE IN THE FORMATION OF POPULAR LEGAL PROMOTERS
Extension; Feminism; Feminist Popular Education; Popular Legal Promoters.
The aim of this proposal is to analyze the fruitful relationship between extension developed by public institutions of higher education (IPES) and education for gender equality and combating violence against women, based on the experience of the Popular Legal Promoters (PLPs) as extension projects. Understanding the transformative role that extension can and should play, and supported by the objectives established by the National University Extension Policy, we aim here to analyze extension actions that take on the role of popular extension, as proposed by Paulo Freire (1983), and propose educational actions to elucidate women's rights, reproductive rights and combating violence against women, more specifically those developed by PLPs, who find in extension a way to expand throughout Brazil. Based on Historical-Dialectical Materialism and Feminist Popular Education, a qualitative study was carried out, promoting a critical analysis of university extension policies in Brazil. Through a bibliographic survey and interviews with civil servants and students from ten IPES (UnB, UFG, IFG, UFJ, UFF, UFRJ, USP, IFSP, UFBA and UFPR) who are leading the PLPs course as an extension project, following the content analysis methodology proposed by Laurence Bardin (2016), we listed nine categories of analysis divided into the following dimensions: extension in the IPES; popular and feminist extension; and extensionist hope in the PLPs. As a result, we found that extension has been an important contribution to the expansion of PLP courses, with the IPES providing physical space, staff and scholarship holders to carry them out. However, extension lacks greater institutional support and public policies for funding and valorization. It was also possible to conclude that the PLPs, based on feminist popular education, teach the IPES how to carry out organic dialogue with communities, consolidating the social role that institutions should play, mainly through extension, but also generating transformative results in teaching and research. We characterize creative resistance as the strategies used by PLPs to confront the structural difficulties in carrying out extension, which characterize a time of precariousness in public higher education in Brazil.