Banca de DEFESA: AMANDA NOGUEIRA LESSA

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN TEACHER TRAINING: A LOOK ABOUT THE DEGREE COURSES IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES IN FEDERAL UNIVERSITIES OF THE BRAZILIAN SOUTHEAST

Curriculum, Environmental Education, Criticality, Graduation in Biological Sciences

The objective of this research is to reflect on how Environmental Education (EE) occurs in the curriculum of seven courses for Biology and Science teacher education at Federal Universities in Southeastern Brazil. The methodological bias used consists of a document analysis that encompasses the summaries and Political Course Projects (PPC) of seven Federal Universities in this Brazilian region. These documents are being investigated based on Discursive Textual Analysis. Two main categories were found in these curriculum documents: (1) Principles of Environmental Education present in the PPC and (2) Desired profile of the science/biology teacher for Environmental Education. The research also included a systematic review. This review intends to understand how research on Critical Environmental Education in teacher training in Brazil is taking place, from 2012 to 2022. It is hoped, with this systematic review, to locate possible affinities or distances between the research currently carried out and the conceptions of PPC used in the documentary part of the research. Recognizing the difficulties of working with Critical Environmental Education in Basic Education, we also propose the making of an educational product that will be a website for the teacher with proposals for activities linked to Critical Environmental Education, which encompass the three thematic units of the BNCC: Life and Evolution, Matter and Energy, and Earth and Universe. Faced with the growing need to discuss socioenvironmental issues, the questions that instigate this master's research arise: how does Environmental Education occur in the training curricula of Science and Biology teachers, based on the analysis of structuring documents from Federal Universities in Southeast Brazil? Are the concepts of Environmental Education and the teaching professional profile of these curricular documents aligned with the systematic literature review? Are Political Course Projects following the most accepted academic guidelines today? Based on the analysis of the PPC, it has already been possible to observe differences in approaches to Environmental Education. There is an appreciation of criticality, although there is still a pragmatic perspective permeating the speeches, in many cases. It was found that there are documents that specify how they want to work with EE, sometimes treating the environment from a socio-environmental perspective, encompassing Critical, transformative, and emancipatory Environmental Education. In other cases, there are documents that give less detail about how Environmental Education will be treated, and what is observed is the association of Environmental Education with ecological and pedagogical disciplines, citing legal apparatus as a justification. In these cases, the generalization of the intended approach, by these courses, confers ambiguity on the convictions of the PPC, generating commitment to criticality in teacher training.