Lomba do Pinheiro: Memory, Information and Citizenship

Together with teaching and research, university extension forms the tripod that today sustains the academy. Extension is said to have emerged in Greece, when lectures were open to the public, and reached its greatest expression in the European universities of the Middle Ages. In both cases, pedagogical transmission was vertical and authoritarian, flowing from the academy towards society. It was a time when knowledge did little to change the prevailing reality. The text analyzes an Extension Program carried out at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul/UFRGS, developed in a Community Museum in a district of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil. Extension should be a two-way street, where knowledge flows from the academy to the community and from the community to the academy. Extension has become more autonomous and transformative of both the university and society. In this way, the university has evolved to the point where there is an interface between internal knowledge and the culture found in the field of extension, and vice versa. With a strong basis in the New Museology, this work presents the importance of University Extension to scholars of the subject, based on effective participation in an Extension Program.