A formação de professores de biologia atuantes no Ensino Básico e a construção de uma perspectiva interdisciplinar na Educação Ambiental (EA)

Abstract

Teacher training on environmental education (EE) is a key element of promoting the restoration of ecological systems and insuring inclusive and equitable human development. Science and biology teachers play a significant role in favoring EE at Brazilian schools. Our research question was whether legislative discourses, curricular matrix configuration and the teachers discourses about EE influence and are reflected in the discourses elaborated by preservice biology teachers. This study investigates the presence of EE in Brazilian educational legislation and in the curriculum matrix of Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF) preservice biology teachers undergraduation. It also aims to interpret the meanings of EE expressed in the legislative and curriculum discourse as well as the meanings of EE mobilized by students and teachers who are inserted in this biology teacher training course. Another goal was to investigate if the undergraduates have contact with experiences and interdisciplinary practices during their training, since interdisciplinarity is endorsed by official documents and by many researchers in EE as being the ideal way to approach the subject. The theoretical and methodological framework of French Discourse Analysis was adopted to identify social, political, and cultural influences expressed in the participants’ discourse. The discourse data comprised, besides written documents, the responses from voluntary undergraduate students and from school teachers that interact with them to a semi-structured questionnaire. Additionally, university teachers indicated by the pre-service teachers as teaching EE contents were interviewed. We found a supremacy of discourses in which EE meanings are restricted to conservation or preservation, including some that indicated confusion regarding the purposes of both EE and ecology disciplines. Among the three groups of participants there was little data indicating an association between EE and socioeconomic issues. The curricular matrix of this undergraduate course showed a predominance of hours devoted to courses that discuss the environment from the biological perspective in contrast to a small number of courses that discuss and promote EE from other perspectives. In addition, undergraduate students claimed that they had little contact with EE legislation and with interdisciplinary experiences. We also detected poor collaboration between the main training spaces (schools, Institute of Biological Sciences and Faculty of Education). This scenario, reinforced by the naturalistic foundater discourse of EE in Brazil, probably affects the constitution of the discursive memories of these students, their discourses, and their future pedagogical practice, making it difficult to foster encompassing and interdisciplinary approaches of EE in schools as legislation recommends. There is evidence that a small group of university professors is promoting shifts, hybridity and polysemy on the discourses of undergraduates, favoring EE meanings that also include social perspectives. Discursive change may be promoted in order to allow the development of more encompassing conceptions of EE, which take into account not only aspects of nature conservation but also cultural and socioeconomic issues. Recommendations are made in order to foster the development of citizenship at schools and to prevent the silencing of issues such as the conflicts and risks associated with environmental problems.