Educação ambiental e representações sociais: um estudo com professoras dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This work aims to identify and comprehend the social representations of environmental education of teachers of the initial years of the elementary schools of the city of Pato Branco. This research involved six teachers of an urban school and six teachers of a rural school. Initially, is presented the social representation theory, with a brief overview of its origins, concepts and ramifications. It is also presented the processes of objectification and anchoring. Thus, an understanding of education is exemplified in its broader sense, an environmental crisis comprehension, its contextualization based in local and international conferences and the conservative and critical currents that form the main framework for the environmental education developed in Brazil. To complement, it is explored the thematic of teacher formation and the introduction of the environmental education in the pedagogical practices of the teachers. As methodological proposition, three instruments of collecting data are used: interview, hierarchization of the evocations and analysis of documents, such as, syllabus and political-pedagogic projects of both schools. To analyze the data, it is used content analysis to identify and comprehend the representations of the environmental education. Based on the collected data, it is concluded that the social representations of the environmental education revolves around the awareness to respect and preserve the environment. Therefore, this education consists in a set of procedures aiming to develop the awareness to respect and to preserve the environment which is only considered on its natural aspects. The hierarchization technique corroborates this comprehension that the social representation of environmental education is related to development of the awareness regarding the respect and preservation of the environment. In the analysis of the syllabus and the class diary of the teachers, it can be observed almost total inexistence of registered activities developed in class. During the interviews and the documental analysis it can be noted that dialogs about environmental education are carried out. However, they are still related to commemorative dates. It is also noted that pedagogical practices of the interviewed people reflect, in a certain sense, the processes of formation of the teachers of environmental education. It is stressed the fragile formation of those teachers that are demanded, in several ways, to realize what is possible in order to not leave the students without the access to the knowledge, therefore justifying the point-specific activities found in the teacher’s materials. It is necessary the development of public policies related to the environmental education focused on teachers, beyond providing continuous formation also focused on environmental education and the distribution of related materials in schools, since the subject is current and it is part of the daily routine of the schools.