Activating Community Practices between the beginning, the pandemic, and the aftermath

Abstract

This article aims to systematize and socialize the first six years of implementation of community practices at the Santa Rosa headquarters of the Faculty of Human Sciences of the National University of La Pampa. The stimulating but winding path that began was crossed by the pandemic scenario, the economic and political crisis of our country, the sustained advance of neoliberal values ​​that corrode collective bets in pursuit of greater social justice, inclusion and equity based on human rights and feminism.

Today, more than ever, those of us who make and defend the public university understand its nodal place in articulation and vital link with the society of which it is a part. In this sense, the strategy of strengthening its lines of extension and socio-community link is urgent in order to reinforce paths of dialogue, work and projects with the (other) territories as well as with those social sectors that persistently suffer the attacks and deepening of their historical disadvantages. The pedagogical power of social impact that these types of experiences have is based on processes that have been developed over time and that, at each moment, have had to face different types of difficulties.

In this task of recovery and synthesis, I first make a brief presentation of the institutionality of the Institutional Program of Community Practices in our Faculty. Then, I go over the main bets that were made to make these practices known and put into action at/from the Santa Rosa campus between 2017 and 2023 as dimensions of the process of their implementation. I close by considering lessons, challenges and projections in the current context of adversity that the public university as a whole suffers and that forces us to insist and resist from the classrooms and the different territories.