Educação ambiental e agricultura familiar urbana em Juiz de Fora: para além da dicotomia campo - cidade

Abstract

The present Works aims to investigate how the agricultural practices concerning urban territories located in the northeast region of Juiz de Fora, particularly around the MG- 353 Road, consist of a family-based agriculture; these practices can be associated with the environmental education strategies addressed from a counter-hegemonic critical perspective. In this manner, it intends to identify the apparent teachings in this agricultural practice (as a lifestyle) in urban environment, as well as the possible reactions such practices can produce in terms of the unsustainable model of urban growth in the status quo, including basing it on asymmetrical and unfair urban-rural relations. This investigation proposal emerged from the necessity of understanding the territories and agricultural practices in urban environment. Therefore, questionnaires and interviews were made to the farmers from the research sample in context, which were later analyzed under the Content Analysis method. Results from the research subjects’ answers indicated a new way of being/existing in the urban areas, and for the Field of Environment Education. A central goal guiding this work is to investigate the urban-rural way of life present in the family farmers’ practices of this region of the city in order to comprehend how the agricultural practices, within the urban sector, constitute in environmental education formative devices, formal or informal. Some data were revealed in this research, in which the multiple educational objectives present in the urban-rural lifestyle of urban agricultural practices, tends to convey a growing potential of involvement within the environment, where the territory can unfold in a education-promoting element, in which the urban area of Juiz de Fora proposes and realizes an “educator” city. This urban-rural way of life, whose metabolism engenders new ways of the space appropriation, can contribute a great deal towards the field of environmental education and for an education that proposes to be more dialogic and focused on sustainability in most variable aspects.