Teatro do oprimido e educação ambiental : caminhos para uma formação docente crítica

Abstract

There is a range of possibilities for working with environmental education and teacher training, in addressing the diversity of situations that we can find in the classroom, in communities and school environments, and in everyday situations immersed in class society under capitalist logic. Environmental education paradigms find in teacher training a space for problematizing their tendencies, potentialities, and limitations, leading us to think and envision training possibilities based on new experiences of environmental education from a critical perspective, in the articulation of the social, environmental, artistic, and political universes. The Theater of the Oppressed, perceived as a social practice, enables instances of dialogue necessary for reflecting on the social asymmetries of Brazilian society and current socio-environmental issues, issues present in the lives of students. Together with a Pedagogical Residency Program of the Biological Sciences course at a University in the south of Minas Gerais, we sought to work on teacher training associated with research and dramatization through the Theater of the Oppressed, seeking to elucidate and delve deeper into the socio-environmental issues of the school communities with which we work. We took Historical-Dialectical Materialism as a theoretical-methodological framework for reading the reality of this research, Critical Environmental Education and Education of the Senses in conjunction with the Theater of the Oppressed in the reflection on space and on human sensitive dimensions for a political and ethical training in Environmental Education. The Theater of the Oppressed allowed the teachers in training to experiment with their body and sensitive languages in their internal relationships, with the people involved and with the environment based on the emerging questions in the research, constructing and analyzing their own understandings and actions performed on stage and their relationship with the studied reality. The teachers in training considered the Theater of the Oppressed as a space for preparing to deal with situations of racism and religious intolerance, among other adverse situations, in encouraging collectivity and dialogue, in studying the structure of the school and its constituent parts, and in developing communication, expression and sensitivity skills in teacher training.