Collected course readings in rural extension: a space of tension between the discourse of applied sciences and the empirical rural experience

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the interplay between the production and application of knowledge in a corpus composed of collected course readings used in Rural Extension training courses on grain storage. The study departs from the following question: How is scientific knowledge displaced and put into pedagogical use? In terms of methodology, we take these two fields as two levels that include distinct ways of producing utterances, according to Foucault’s ideas on enunciative modalities. We believe that there is tension at the pedagogical level (the level of saying) between the scientific knowledge practiced out of the domain of science (in rural extension), and knowledge seen as “traditional” in terms of grain storage. The results indicate that the instrument ‘collected course readings’ works a further enunciative modality of scientific knowledge which erases the tension between ‘traditional’ and scientific modes of knowledge production.