Representações e experiências de uma comunidade rural e escolar sobre o ambiente, Pouso Alto - MG.

Abstract

Considering the importance and necessity of developing an Environmental Education to understand the totality of the aspects that permeate the relationship between human being and nature, aiming to establish harmonical equilibrium, the present study seeks to identify the representations and experiences from a rural and scholar community about environment. This study has been developed in Pouso Alto district, Minas Gerais State(Brasil) with the participation of a rural community and about 55% of the teachers from the two local public schools in the urban area of this municipality that teach said rural students.The methodological procedure has been based in a qualitative approach, using for data raising, questionnairies applied to the teacher s group and interviews to the community. The analysis result allowed to verify that the anthropocentrical representations are more frequent among the teachers group, while naturalistic representations predominate in the students group and those that express a state of mind (feeling) are more present in the parents group. It has been verified that traditional representations of the Environmental Education, emphasizing the utilitarian perspective or as a way to the conscientization, have strong connections with the teachers environmental representations and being so, have influence on their educative practices. The interdisciplinary practices, on their turn, are not quite understood as an integrating and a team-work of the different subjects. However, it s possible to realize the teachers intention when approaching the theme in the various knowledge fields, despite students frequently points out that environmental matters are commonly discussed during Sciences or Biology classes. The environmental problems identified by both groups and the environmental changes reported by the community, frequently refer to the water diminishing and polution, the deforestation and the vegetation burning-over, very common in the urban-rural context. It has been concluded that both teachers and parents exert influence on values and ideas that permeate student s representations, indicating the necessity that education be thought under a critical perspective so as to make possible to the various groups a deeper comprehension and more effective action, essential to the environmental quality improvement.