From the countryside to the campus

agroecology as a movement in the dispute over higher education curriculum

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between the Agroecology course at the Federal Institute of Baiano - Uruçuca Campus and rural social movements in the Southern Coastal Territory of Bahia, considering the historical tensions between the legacy of the overseers' school, which trained labor for cocoa plantations, and the current demands for an emancipatory and contextualized education. The research, with a qualitative approach and exploratory nature, combined documentary analysis of the Course Pedagogical Project with semi-structured interviews conducted with leaders of rural social movements and institutional interlocutors. The results evidence a structural gap between academic training in Agroecology and the praxis of social movements, manifested in the limited participation of these subjects in the conception and development of the course, the prevalence of entrepreneurial and technicist approaches in the curriculum, and the low incorporation of ancestral knowledge and consolidated agroecological experiences in the region's settlements. The interviewed leaders conceive Agroecology in its expanded dimension - as science, practice and movement - articulated to the struggle for land, territory, food sovereignty and popular education, as opposed to the restricted perspective that tends to prevail in the academic environment. The study indicates that overcoming this gap requires not only curricular reformulations, but the effective construction of dialogical and organic relationships with social movements, recognizing them as political subjects who produce knowledge and protagonists in the dispute for a rural and societal project antagonistic to agribusiness.