Saberes cotidianos e educação ambiental: um estudo em uma turma da educação de jovens e adultos

Abstract

This study deals with Environmental Education as a possibility to approach everyday knowledge and school knowledge in a Youth and Adult Education class. We understand the everyday knowledge in Paulo Freire's perspective, that is: the knowledge derived from the "reading of the world" and the "pronunciation of the world" in the subject's word. Such knowledge expressed by the participants of this research announces important learning for educators who seek to relate the experiences and speeches of learners with the contents or school knowledge developed in the school. Environmental Education is analyzed here in the field of studies that contribute to the critical formation and anchored in geography studies. In this perspective this study adopts as central the concept of "place"; or the place where everyday knowledge and school knowledge are given. The subjects participating in this research are youngsters and adults of a high school class in the city of Lavras - MG, together with them, and we seek to analyze how such knowledge are articulated with the school knowledge experienced in geography classes focused on environmental education. For the development of this research we adopted the qualitative methodology and the following methods of data collection: questionnaire to describe the profile of the participants of the research interview with conversation script and hiking trails recorded with photographs in the selected "places": school, places work and the places where they live to make explicit the daily knowledge of these young people and adults about Environmental Education. The word of the participants of this research shows the distance between the school knowledge and the everyday knowledge because they do not find in the learning developed in the school an association with the environmental problems recognized by them and them in the paths of life. In this study was not possible to relate the school contents with the everyday knowledge within the classroom because we did not observe school classes. We then support the photographs and speeches of the participants and the anchors in the theoretical foundation that supports this work. The most important finding of this study indicates to educators a teaching practice that seeks to value students as subjects of the production of knowledge and the school as a place of the intertwining of everyday knowledge and school knowledge. The track record of experiences is a pedagogical possibility for Environmental Education.