Environmental education and teaching of Sciences in public Schools of Alagoas

Abstract

This work discusses the theoretical and methodological articulations between the teaching of Science and Environmental Education (EE) in public schools in Santana do Ipanema, Alagoas, Brazil. It seeks to discover the concepts of Environment of five science teachers from those schools, and to understand how these concepts influence their teaching practices. To analyze the concepts of Environment presented by the teachers, Reigota’s categories were used: naturalist, anthropocentric and globalizing. In relation to the interference that those concepts present on the teachers’ pedagogical practices, Amaral’s classification was used. The results indicate that the concepts of Environment shown by the teachers are far from determining their Science teaching practices as EE, revealing that a reductionism still exists with regard to the understanding of the Environment. A correlation was also observed between the concepts of Environment, the teachers’ understanding of EE, and their views on the inclusion of EE in Science teaching. The work concludes that in all the teaching practices investigated, it was observed that Environmental Education is still dispersed in Science teaching, and is reduced to teaching on Ecology.