Geografia e Educação Ambiental Dialógica: Conceitos e Práticas Ambientais na Reserva Extrativista da Prainha do Canto Verde-Ceará-Brasil

Abstract

“Geography and Dialogic Environmental Education: Environmental Concepts and Practices at Prainha do Canto Verde Extractivist Reserve – Ceará - Brazil” is a research resulting from the interconnection between Geography and Education. This interaction is given by the Dialogic Environmental Education (DEE), which touches both fields of knowledge in an attempt to create and maintain a dialogue through environmental concepts and practices. It is crucial to think about a DEE, which is constructed via a partnership between the diverse areas of scientific knowledge and local, popular experience in a dialogic manner that might stimulate real change. We intended to understand the contribution from the environmental practices to (elementary school) Geography in a DEE context, building an eco-praxis. Therefore, we have chosen the “Prainha do Canto Verde” Extractivist Reserve (RESEX), a traditional coastal community at Ceará state coastline, as the place for our research. It is an area delimited by a Conservational Unity for Sustainable Use, in which a community marked by struggle and resistance against speculation and by the defense of environmental conservation and land rights. The area is constituted by the morphological unity and coastal plan landscape, containing multiple faces: beach, storm beach, mobile and fixed sand dunes, interdune depression and coastal board besides the community nucleus. The theoretical basis is referenced upon the landscape geoecology (based on the geosystem theory) and the DEE (supported by an eco-relational perspective, based upon a integrated world perception that aspires a balanced and supportive relationship between the human being and him/herself, the other and the environment). After presenting the theoretical basis, we delimited the landscape unities and built the environmental diagnostics of the RESEX. From the analysis of the dialogic landscape, we identified the environmental practices existing inside the RESEX, based on dialogicity criteria. Finally, we pointed the contributions from the environmental practices to the elementary school Geography.