Diálogos sobre educação ambiental com estudantes do ensino médio : entendimentos e reconstruções em uma perspectiva crítica

Abstract

The acknowledgement that many human activities threaten life on the planet was reported in a more potent way as of mid-20th century and motivated a succession of events which contributed for a social debate about the natural environment and for the constitution of the environmental education, as a dimension of the education relevant to all the areas. In Brazil, the inclusion of the environmental education in the curricular policies was initiated in the decade of 1990 when, among other events, the MEC publishes the Brazilian National Curricular Parameters, including environmental education as a transversal theme. During this period, according to the different conceptions and actions, a plurality of practices in environmental education was initiated, which can in the conservationist, pragmatic and critical macrotrend. Based on the critical environmental education, which analyses the environmental concern in a broader way, incorporating the social, political and economic factors, in the current study we considered that an issue to be problematized is: Has the environmental education in schools contributed so that the students construct critical comprehensions regarding the socioenvironmental matter? In this sense, the main objective of this study was to comprehend the interpretations which high school students present regarding the environmental education, from their previous school experience and also as a result of participation in the process of communicative research, aiming to enable common understandings in a critical perspective, through intersubjective dialogue and reflection. Since this research has the intention of promoting a critical reflection about the socioenvironmental issues, the qualitative approach in the perspective of the Communicative Investigation was adopted as methodology and, by means of intersubjective and horizontal dialogue with the students, the techniques of in-depth interviews and communicative discussion groups was utilized. In synthesis, the results point out that the themes of the environmental education more internalized by the students were those related to the pollution of rivers, pollution of the air, issues with waste, precautions with the school and deforestation. On the other hand, it was little explained by them the matters related to the structural causes and mitigations for such environmental problems. Given these results, it is observed that the environmental education in schools, in general, is developed by means of themes and practices with conservationist principles which strive for raising awareness of individuals regarding their responsibilities in the environmental issue, but that do not progress in relation to the broader discussions on complex causes of the environmental degradation and on possibilities of transformation in the industrial-capitalist society, for the achievement of the socioenvironmental sustainability