Representação de meio ambiente e a prática pedagógica: um estudo com professores participantes do curso de Educação Ambiental para Unidades de Conservação

Abstract

Several projects of Environmental Education (EE) are developed in Brazilian schools motivated by teacher training programs. It is, however, little study about the results of such training programs of these teachers, especially on issues involving their practices in environmental education. In the far western region of Paraná, this is also a reality. The presence of the Iguaçu National Park and Itaipu Binacional, through their respective environmental education programs with an emphasis on projects in formal education, promotes courses and moments of training for teachers from different areas and levels of education. However, the evaluation of these programs around the contributions in teacher education has been incipient. Thus, the present study investigated teachers who participated in one of the training courses offered by the Iguaçu National Park (INP). This is a qualitative research, whose research sample one (01) teacher in each municipality who attended the course in 2015. With regard to the data for analysis, these data were made from three different sources, as follows: personal notes taken during the course, interviews with teachers through focus group technique (FG) and practical projects summary of the texts developed by the teachers / course participants. Both the resulting document FG as the present text the projects were analyzed using content analysis methodology proposed by the French researcher Laurence Bardin. The results point to a negative reality, that the initial teacher training is deficient as to the socio-environmental theme, and although no formal teaching institutions offer continuing education courses for practicing teachers, these courses have not been sufficient to meet demand for teachers and change entrenched practices, as some pedagogical practices developed by the subjects of this research are directly related to the design environment. This concept lies in considering the environment as nature, which has the human being the causative agent of problems. The activities developed by teachers aimed to inform and educate people to solve problems through conservative and reformist approach. EE is not yet integrated into the political-pedagogical projects in schools, being relegated to projects and specific actions, fragmented and individualized. Finally, the course participants expressed the need for reflection and criticism of their practices, which denotes the importance of this course type as teacher training space.