Parques urbanos de Pato Branco: potencialidades para práticas pedagógicas em educação ambiental crítica

Abstract

This research intended as its goal to analyze the environmental education practice at school encompassing urban parks, considering opportunities and difficulties faced by Elementary schools' teachers in using these areas, which are timely to a critical analysis about social-environmental questions in multiple aspects. For such, we seek to identify whether the urban parks are insert in the pedagogical practices and, to the concerns of the Historical-Critical Pedagogy basis nominated by Dermeval Saviani, pursuing to check the teaching staff comprehension about the environmental education critics. The research was exploratory and enforced by qualitative methods. There were twenty-nine 29 teachers' participants who worked from first to fifth grade on Elementary School in four public institutions in Pato Branco - Paraná. The data acquisition used a semi-structured questionnaire (on-line) and semi-structured interview (presential), verifying how the teachers comprehend the urban parks, as well they explore it during the environmental education work performances. Also, a documentary analysis was involved, mainly the Political pedagogic Project from the schools and the teachers’ education plans. The schools’ documents imply the Historic Critic Pedagogy as theoretical basis and a methodological approach, which was also quoted by half of the participants approximately. However, behaviorism and conservationist aspects were distinguished in the education plans and on the interviews, those conditions weren’t matching with a critic environmental education. The teachers usually begin their pedagogic practices with instrumentalization, not preceding it by contextualizing and discussing. Despite of the environment be a transverse subject, the pedagogical work focus on projects and commemorative days, even teachers identifying parks as potentially conducive for environmental education, almost one third of them affirmed to use the parks, reporting as main difficulties the lack of specific training, excess of red tape, the bad maintenance and the lack of infrastructure for those places. Through this research we aimed to contribute to a better comprehension about the Environmental Education, involving urban parks in a school practice environment, especially in a local city context. This exploratory analysis points to a rich variety and a higher demand of this subject, however, shows some piece of evidence that can be the basis to a decision making made by the public authorities.