O compromisso social da educação ambiental em contextos escolares: um processo de ressignificação de saberes e fazeres na construção de projetos socioambientais

Abstract

The present dissertation is the result of the Master in Management and Evaluation of Public Education, of the Stricto Sensu Professional Postgraduate Program of the Faculty of Education, Federal University of Juiz de Fora. Based on empirical observations and the approach to qualitative research, it explored knowledges and practices intrinsic to two Environmental Education projects, elaborated and implemented by two state high-school schools, which were adjudicated to the Regional Superintendence of Education of Juiz de Fora, an institutional body of the Secretary of State of Education of Minas Gerais. The interpretive analysis, when appropriating the theoretical-methodological plot of a multiple case study and the assumptions of Critical Environmental Education, aimed to understand what extent the Environmental Education projects, henceforth, complexify their respective contextual realities, injustices and social and environmental conflicts. The resulting inferences, due to the emphasis given by the respective projects to purely ecological issues, indicated the preponderance of conservationist and pragmatic perspectives of Environmental Education in educational contexts. These, by making invisible the social relations that are constituted and at the same time are constituted from the confluence between the mode of organization of capitalist society and nature, make it impossible to problematize social and environmental injustices and conflicts at the heart of the movements that they intend, only, the reproduction of the status quo of socially and politically privileged social classes. In order to break with this historical trend, the research culminated in the proposition of an educational action that envisages the formation of learning networks as a strategy for the collective construction of socio-environmental projects, to be implemented in socio-educational environments, based on the re-signification of knowledge and actions related to Environmental Education.