Projeto águas na cidade

Abstract

The Project Águas na Cidade has been developed by the research group MoM-EAUFMG in partnership with the Municipal School Professor Edson Pisani(EMPEPI). Our intent is to produce learning material for primary education by means of an approach of the dynamics of waters in the cities. These dynamics are observed in light of contemporary processes of Brazilian urbanization and its social and environmental effects, which are usually harmful. The pedagogy assumes the respect to the previous knowledge of the students about their neighborhood’s territory and their observations in daily life. We adopted a dialogic-interactive approach – that reaches a diversity of languages – as a tool for reflection and for the absorption of scientific systematic knowledge by the students, creating nexus between their life experiences and the contents they learn in school. The starting point is the school building and its surroundings, under the systemic logic of the water basins, contextualizing the school –in this case EMPEPI –in a micro-basin –Cardoso’s – part of a macro hydrologic basin, in our case, Arrudas`s, in Belo Horizonte. Although the middle and lower courses of Cardoso creek are already channeled under an avenue, its higher streams can still be found in natural bed. It therefore represents both conventional processes of urban water-engineering in Modernity and the few urban territories maintained in natural conditions. Hence it allows us to observe the effects of human actions on the dynamics of waters, creating possibilities for investigations of processes of social and environmental recovery in urban areas. The project was collectively conceived by teachers and students from UFMG and EMPEPI, based on critical interpretation of the documents from Ministério do Meio Ambiente, Agência Nacional de Águas, Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais, Base Nacional Comum Curricular, and also the teaching material provided by Programa Nacional do Livro Didático used by EMPEPI.