Meio ambiente: representações e práticas dos professores e professoras de ciências e biologia

Abstract

The environment is represented by people in different ways, according to its economical, politic, cultural and historical contexts. In the same way, teachers, in their everyday practice make several representations to work with the theme environment at school. Then, the questioning about the inclusion of environment in some disciplines of the diversified part of the curriculum of the school, the teachers'role in such organization, their representation and practice are the reason that give origin to this research whose objectives were: to Know the social representation of environment of Science and Biology teachers who work with disciplines of the diversified part of the curriculum of the school; to identify the teachers new ideas or actions to environmental educations (EE); to analyze the relation between environment and the practical representation of such teachers. The methodology used to conduct the research was qualitative and the results obtained happened in three moments. The first was about public schools that had in their curriculum in 2003, disciplines of the diversified part related to the areas of Science na Biology. The second was about a semi-structured interview with 15 teachers. The third was about a questionnaire that was answered by other people, tem teachers of Science na Biology, aiming the complement of the interviews. The main results that werw obtained by analyzing the interviews and questionnaires made possible to identify four types of representation about environment. The 1st representation - the surroundings - gives emphasis to the elements that are near, everything that is around the spaces that being used by human beings and that need to be known. The 2nd representation - moralista behaviorist - it's related to the surroundings, but it's associated to the attitudes and behaviors before this environment. The 3rd representation - utilitarist anthropocentric - it says it's the environment that has, to supply the human beings. 4th representation - naturalist - it's related to natural environment, to the aesthetic questions of the environment. The representations associated to the new actions related to environmental education establish six categories: the practical naturalist (to know nature); the instrumental/experimental (to know the environment through the contextualization of the contents); the "vicariante" (to observe the environment, the surroundings to have it close and make it concrete); the moralist pedagogical (to make children conscious to save the environment); the idealist (to make children conscious to change their behavior andactin a way to preserve the environment) and the constructivist (to know environment problems and build knowledge. In a general way it's na evident fact the absence of any aspects of relation about the environment in the teachers' speech. Most of them can't explain the environmental question in relation to the historical, social, cultural, economical and politic aspects. Then, the existence of disciplines in the curriculum of the school related to the environment, don't bring significative constributionss to make the environmental education effective at school. Taking some exceptions into account, it can be said that the creation of such disciplines is more closely related to legal determinations and to some teachers' individual interests than to properly increase the discussion about environment at school.