Seguindo os caminhos da educação ambiental : história, natureza e práticas educativas em escolas públicas de um município ecoturístico

Abstract

The municipality of Bonito is going through a historical process of environmental transformation, in which the emerging appreciation of the integrity of nature begins to weaken certain previous economic practices based on land exploration. Ecotourism, therefore, has been responsible for the dissemination of another view of nature in the city, now associated with sustainability and environmental protection, giving rise to new management practices, including school-based ones. In this context, strategies are put in place to constitute an “ecological citizenship”, a kind of feeling of belonging to an ecotourism city, which enhances the nature of the place and awakens citizens to engage in its protection. In this work, we propose a look at the historical path of valuing nature and its influence on school practices, by following some of these practices in loco and trying to understand the process of students' meaning about the nature of the place. To this end, we used an approach inspired by ethnographic research, based on participant observation, informal conversations, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. For analysis, we take as theoretical-methodological basis the hermeneutic phenomenology in order to understand the meanings that emerge in the practices of environmental education in the context of an ecotourism municipality. From the constituted and analyzed data, we found different notions of nature among the students, which signal different meanings and senses, established from cultural and personal constructions. The environmental education practices carried out are motivated by the nature of the place, and are intentionally used as a way to raise ecological sensitivities, feelings of belonging and environmental responsibility. We believe that the process of valuing nature recognized in Bonito happens in an intertwined way with the potential for the development of ecotourism in the city, coming to co-produce environmental education practices aimed at building meanings for the conservation of the local environment.