Educação ambiental e sua relação com atitudes, valores e comportamentos ambientalmente responsáveis dos indivíduos de uma instituição pública federal de ensino

Abstract

Environmental Education is understood as the processes through which men and the society build social values, knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies for the conservation of the environment. Based on the inclusion of environmental education into the educational process, the construction of values, attitudes, skills, and competencies are built so that the individual can act proactively in protecting the environment. Values and attitudes, in that sense, are the psychological constructs mentioned by the literature as predictors of behavior. Based on that, this research aims to answer the following research problem: what is the relationship between the perception of Environmental Education and the environmentally responsible values, attitudes and behaviors of individuals in a Federal Public Institution of Education (FPIE)? Accordingly, this paper seeks to examine the relationship between those psychological constructs and the Environmental Education of students and civil servants of an FPIE through an electronic questionnaire applied to students and workers of the institution. The data analysis was done by using descriptive statistics, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling technique, t tests for independent samples, variance analysis, and regression trees. The survey results point to a meaningful correlation between the perception of Environmental Education and most dimensions of the constructs of environmentally responsible values, attitudes, and behaviors. The same results also show consistency between the factor analyses, presenting engagement between the literature and what is intend to be discussed. Those results contribute to understand the behavior considered as environmentally responsible of individuals from a Federal Public Institution of Education, before their perception regarding Environmental Education. In this study, significant relationships among values, attitudes, and behaviors have also been found. Based on the results presented in this survey, one can devise strategies for academics, research, outreaching, empowerment, and awareness of future technicians, graduates, and technologists as well as other stakeholders involved with environmental issues. Thus, this study contributes to the surveyed institution in the sense that, based on it, goals and strategies towards the empowerment in education and environmental management can be traced, highlighting themes that address waste management, sustainable biddings, labor life quality, raise of students’ awareness, empowerment of the civil servants, and rational use of resources. The study helps to identify what the environmentally responsible values, attitudes, and behaviors are in an academic environment, serving as a starting point for developing tools that enable the understanding of those constructs in the context of other institutions. Among the factors that influence the ecological behavior of individuals, gender is the most important variable as a predictor of a general ecological behavior.