Representações sociais de professores(as) a respeito de meio ambiente e suas práticas pedagógicas escolares em educação ambiental

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to comprehend the social representations of teachers about environment and the relationship between those representations andthe pedagogic practices in environmental education informed by the educator subjects of the research. Thereby, the subjects of this study comprehend a population of 51 teachers acting in the fourth and fifth grades of the Elementary School of the municipal education network of Pato Branco, city located in the Southwest region of Paraná. A bibliographic review is presented about environment social representations from the Theory of the Social Representations of Serge Moscovici; another one about the environment matter and environmental education, and, from this review, it’s agreed to the critical comprehension of environmental education, which underlies the analysis of the collected data about that construct; and a bibliographic review about pedagogic practice in environmental education, from which it’s also agreed to the critical comprehension. As methodological proposal, three instruments of data collecting are delimited, namely: free evocation technique, based on the Theory of Social Representations Central Core, applied to all the population, in other words, 51 subjects; documental analysis of teacher registries; and semi-structured interview, analyzed from the theory of content analysis. Those last steps were applied to eight subjects. From the analysis of all the data, it was concluded that the social representations about environment of most of the teachers of PatoBranco’s Elementary School network is “apprize to preserve the nature”, a naturalist-focused comprehension with anthropocentric aspects. The analysis of the interviews and the documents showed complimentary results. According to those results, all the teachers perform pedagogic practices directed to environmental education e 75% of that sample present pedagogical practices in environmental education strongly directed to conservative practices. Correlating the found data about social representation of environment and pedagogical practices, it’s concluded that the environment comprehension of teachers of the final years of the Elementary School of PatoBranco’s education network echoes directly to the pedagogical practices developed by them in environmental education. It’s observated that the pedagogic practices use as tools mediatic elements and private initiative projects, which are environmental education oriented and present a nature preservation focus. Thereby, critically comprehending, it’s observed the found results echo historical, cultural and social conceptions. Anyway, being the environmental education a tool for changes and the teachers one of the its main users, it’s necessary to help them to think about environment becoming acting subjects in the formation of critical comprehensions about environment, citizenship, society, geography, history, mathematics, Portuguese and other fields of knowledge.