A percepção dos problemas ambientais urbanos como subsídio à educação ambiental: um estudo com professores da Escola Municipal Beatriz Rodrigues da Silva, Palmas (TO)

Abstract

Environmental education has sought to overcome the dominant paradigms in society, from which conservative and pre-established practices derive from a predominantly naturalistic teaching with a biological dimension, in contexts that are often displaced from the participants of the educational process. Based on this premise, this investigation proposes a phenomenological approach, focusing on the perception of the teachers of the Beatriz Rodrigues da Silva School about the environmental problems of the northwest area of Palmas (TO), also known as ARNOs. The purpose is to contribute with subsidies for a critical and emancipatory environmental education, duly grounded in the lived world by the school community itself, especially its experiences. The research was carried out through the collection of verbal descriptions, in the sense of listening to the participants (16 teachers from the aforementioned school), of procedures forreducing and identifying essences, under the focus of a variant of the phenomenological method. This is the so-called listening approach, through which participants express themselves freely without interference from the researcher. Additionally, two more complementary methodological approaches were carried out with the research participants to deepen the essences revealed to their consciences, forming a kind of methodological triangle, namely: asking questions and observing. Such approaches were covered by the application of structured and unstructured interview techniques and the indirect observation technique, respectively. Among the main results, it was found that the teachers' perception of the focused area is characterized by a plurality of meanings, transcends the limits of the natural dimensionand incorporates other aspects, such as locational, affective, urbanistic, landscape, historical, social, land tenure elements, among others. In addition, the participants perceive the environment and environmental problems mainly through the effects of the behavior ofhuman beings in their conflicting relationship with the urban environment, that is, under the aspects and problems experienced by the participants in their socio-environmental practices inthe context of the ARNOs. However, the environmental education practiced at the school in question still fails to reflect such complexity, which leads to the pointing of possible ways to face this mismatch.