Educação ambiental na formação inicial de professores de geografia nas universidades federais da metade sul do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

By defending that Environmental Education contributes positively to the training of teachers in Geography, the concern that originated this dissertation was started, in order to answer the question about: “How do teacher training courses in Geography at public universities from the southern half of Rio Grande do Sul, build their curriculum proposals addressing Environmental Education? From this context, we elaborated the general objective that aims to: Investigate what has been worked on in terms of knowledge on the theme of Environmental Education in the training courses for Geography teachers at Federal Universities in the southern half of Rio Grande do Sul, and whether this discussion it is established as a pedagogical construction in future teachers and in their practice. The research was developed permeating its construction in the themes of teacher training, Environmental Education and Geography teaching. The study used Bardin's Content Analysis technique (2011) for data collection and interpretation. Among the available instruments, the online questionnaire model was used to collect data from respondents. After carrying out the entire methodological path of document analysis, bibliographic review and content analysis, we elucidate the following points: the Normative Resolutions containing the guidelines that guide teacher training, teaching of Geography and Environmental Education present advances and setbacks in the released versions. The texts of the documents indicate autonomy for educational institutions to act, but do not take into account the reality of Geography courses. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve everything that is planned. We also noticed that course coordinators and professors who work with Environmental Education in the same course have different opinions about the presence of the theme in the course. The absolute majority of respondents associate studies on society and nature with Environmental Education and this is positive. The Logical Sequence Charts of the observed courses provide few mandatory disciplines with a focus on Environmental Education, but on the other hand they offer electives during the course sequence. The subject that allowed expanding the horizon of this dissertation was Curriculum Environmentalization. We argue that Curriculum Environmentalization is presented as a strategy to approach the theme of Environmental Education in a more comprehensive way in teacher training. We support our position based on Behrend (2020), Mota (2020) and Rodrigues (2022). Curriculum Environmentalization goes beyond the inclusion of environmental issues in curricula. It covers the segments of teaching, research and extension and makes it possible to reduce distances between basic and higher education through dialogue between its agents. Environmentalization also implies seeking to approach concepts related to the environment in order to study more and more socioenvironmental issues in formal and non-formal spaces, contributing to the development of critical and transformative mindsets. Its institutionalization is necessary. Based on the results of this research, we believe that Curriculum Environmentalization stands as an approach strategy as a way of transversalizing Environmental Education in the formation of Geography teachers.