Accents of Meaning in the Standardization of University Extension as Curriculum

Abstract

In December 2018, the Conselho Nacional de Educação (CNE), an agency of the Ministry of Education, published Resolução No. 7 (Brasil, 2018b), a document that redefined university extension activities by making them a mandatory component of undergraduate curricula. In response, institutions of higher education began issuing normative documents of their own, including Resolução No. 340 (UFMS, 2021), from the Undergraduate Council of the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul. This article aims, mainly, to analyze the dialogic relations between this document and the accents of meaning inferred from Resolução nº 7 of the CNE, considering the differences between their contexts of idealization and publicization. The analysis is justified both by the significance of these documents — understood here as concrete utterances — for the planning of extension activities within UFMS undergraduate programs, and by the limited scholarly literature on the subject. Grounded in the theoretical framework of the Bakhtin Circle, the analysis draws particularly on the sociological method (Volóchinov, 2021 [1929]) and the theory of genres (Bakhtin, 2010 [1979]). We highlight the dialogism embedded in the ideological horizon of Resolução No. 340 (UFMS, 2021), which echoes certain accents of meaning from Resolução No. 7 (Brasil, 2018b), while silencing others.