Análise da utilização do jogo de educação ambiental crítica com estudantes em aulas de Ciências

Abstract

The planet Earth has been facing various environmental problems, mainly those related to pollution, unsustainable water consumption, deforestation, climate change, species extinction, solid waste generation, and air pollution. Considering this situation, it is imperative to provide students with studies, activities, and resources that lead them to reflection and action on environmental issues. Building socio-environmental responsibility requires educators to develop practices and actions focused on Environmental Education from a critical perspective, a topic of extreme necessity and global urgency. Thus, the objective of the research arose: to use an educational game of the pedagogical type in Science classes, based on the principles of Critical Environmental Education, to analyze whether 8th-grade students of elementary school develop a critical awareness regarding environmental problems. For this purpose, the board game – “Ecotrilha: a Critical Environmental Education” was developed with the aim of teaching students about environmental issues from a critical perspective. The research followed a qualitative, descriptive, and explanatory approach, conducted over twenty hours of Science classes in a Brazilian public school. Seventeen students participated in the application of the game and answered an essay questionnaire, with eight of them also participating in a semistructured interview. The collected data were organized through content analysis. The results revealed a significant diversity of emerging subcategories. The analysis of the responses indicated that, after interacting with “Ecotrilha”, there was not only a broader understanding of the topics at hand but also a tendency among students towards more analytical approaches and even the emergence of signs of critical awareness regarding the presented environmental issues. After the game, it was possible to observe relevant behavioral evidence among the students, such as the cessation of the habit of discarding trash on the classroom floor, highlighting the potential of using educational games of a pedagogical nature to promote Critical Environmental Education.