Formative interlocutions in the Political-Pedagogical Projects of undergraduate courses of Agricultural/Agrarian Sciences in Brazil

Abstract

Pedagogical guidelines for the education in/of/to the rural areas must be based on the socio-educational development and on a constant dialogue between scientific and empirical knowledge. In this context, our objective is to identify formative interlocutions in the rural/countryside education in undergraduate courses of Agricultural Sciences in Brazil, through the analysis of their Political-Pedagogical Projects (PPP). This is a qualitative research with a descriptive and exploratory approach. It focuses on the theoretical background about rural educational project. It is also a document-based study that has as its source data from Anísio Teixeira Platform, connected to the Ministry of Education, as well as PPP emitted by the higher education institutions. The criteria chosen to establish the study’s time frame was the accessibility of the most recent information that were available during the process of information gathering – June, 2020. The results show that twelve of the studied courses had as their formative reference agricultural education – in terms of hegemonic production processes such as agribusiness, adopting a technicist approach. Only five of the studied courses were characterized by a formative framework aimed at the education of the rural areas – encompassing several expressions of rural life, such as family agriculture, peasantry and so forth. These courses make reference not only to these specific methodological approaches, but also to public policies related to this issue. Furthermore, we also identified in the institutions’ PPP a chaotic duality of concepts of education in/of the rural areas, on the one hand, and agricultural education on the other; such chaotic mixture of concepts is prone to be reproduced in the praxis of the teachers.

Keywords

• countryside education
• rural education
• licenciate degree in agricultural sciences.