Representações sociais de meio ambiente e educação ambiental: memórias e práticas de professores da Educação de Jovens e Adultos

Abstract

This is a piece of research on the introduction of environmental education (EE) in the context of young and adult education (EJA) in public schools at Ilha da Conceição, Niterói/RJ. The environmental degradation that takes place at Ilha da Conceição is part in the general process of deterioration of Guanabara Bay. The EE is a field in dispute and it presents numerous trends that can be grouped into two axes - traditional and critical. Official curriculum guidelines suggest that teachers pursue the critical one. I noticed that environmental education in Ilha da Conceição is far from being critical. This fact me wonder why some teachers are approaching a critical EE while others are not. My theoretical and methodological framework includes theories of social representations and social memories. I aim to understand to what extent teachers' representations about the environment and their personal trajectories affect their positioning and their understanding of EE. I framed social representations in a procedural approach in which representation makes the concept of an object and its perception interchangeable. I understand social memories as personal, common, or public memories, given the length of a life trajectory. Environmental representations were divided into three categories: naturalist, anthropocentric and complex, perceived in other contexts. These representations were objectified in an untouched environment, as a resource for man and in the integrality that interactions between components give to the environment, respectively. These parameters were originated from previous studies, childhood experiences, school experiences, and social and political activism as motivations for the construction and transformation of social representations and adherences to social action toward environmental issues. The study was conducted with all teachers at work in Ilha da Conceição, covering all courses of the curriculum. Through semi-structured interviews with teachers who have a strong connection with the environmental thematic and that adhered to critical EE trends, I found out that school and family stood out in the memories of their experiences as being crucial to the development of their interest on the subject. These results confirm previous research and stress the importance of the political dimension as a motivator to critical trends in environmental education. That statement, we believe, can contribute to new approaches in teacher training processes and to the integration of environmental concerns in the public school curriculum.