Formação inicial de professores para a educação ambiental: um estudo comparado em duas universidades no Brasil e Colômbia

Abstract

This thesis was structured based on research that aimed to understand how initial education for Environmental Education educators occurs in Brazilian and Colombian contexts. It is a qualitative, empirical study that employed a comparative education perspective and aimed to compare the initial education processes of Environmental Education teachers in the undergraduate Biology program at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS) and the undergraduate Natural Sciences program at the National Pedagogical University of Colombia (UPN). The choice of these two countries was due to the interrelation of the formation of their national curricula, which had transversality as a didactic-pedagogical foundation for approaching the environmental theme and the inclusion of environmental education in the laws and curricula present in the academic training of education teachers basic. To reach the proposed objective, we analyzed documents produced by international organizations such as the UN and UNESCO; laws, guidelines from the Brazilian and Colombian governments, and the Environmental Education Policies (PNEA) of both countries. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the professors who teach the subjects related to Environmental Education in the undergraduate courses at these universities. These interviews made it possible to understand what teachers consider relevant to teacher training for Environmental Education, their conceptions of Environmental Education, which made it possible to analyze how these conceptions influence the construction of the subjects, as well as other compositional elements necessary for this training. The results revealed that, in the undergraduate courses studied, teacher educators conceive environmental education from a conservationist perspective and that this is reflected in the construction of the courses related to environmental education from the analysis of their programs, and that, although some teacher educators conceive environmental education from a critical perspective, the courses they teach offer a naturalistic environmental education. The current initial formation goes through a conservative Environmental Education that reverberates in the classroom, not developing the students' critical sense of the current environmental problems. It is noteworthy that there is a need to provide a greater theoretical and methodological support for teachers who develop actions in EE in basic education from partnerships between school and university; actions that enable them to teach and promote the encounter of the human being with the environment and with the difficulties of the Brazilian and Colombian communities.