ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN INTEGRATIVE AND RESTAURATIVE VIEWS

educational curricula in the Amazon

Abstract

Environmental Education policies are tailored to different contexts, many of which are a far cry from reality in the Amazon. However, it is in the school, through disputes and negotiations, that curriculum standards approximate to social actors and therefore “materialize” in everyday life. In this sense, the school is constituted as social space-time in which environmental knowledge and environmental practices are confronted daily. It is within this space-time that teachers are challenged to engage in dialogue with reality and adopt integrative and restorative approaches to contextualize the history, culture and life of the Amazon. Thus, the challenge of integrating the curriculum to the social experience of the community, and therefore destabilize curriculum standardization, remains. Thinking about this social experience implies (re)gaining an understanding of educational practices that resignify environmental education in the curriculums of schools in the Brazilian Amazon, in this case the municipal education network in Castanhal, in the State of Pará. We adopted a methodological framework based on Social Representation Theory and the principles and methods of ethnography. A questionnaire was conducted with 121 teachers and complemented by two group discussions and participant observation. The findings show that the approach to environmental education draws mainly on naturalistic conceptions of the environment and the existence of a social movement among teachers that questions these conceptions, calling for other ways of thinking the curriculum and the environmental challenges faced by the region.