Educação ambiental e interdisciplinaridade: Uma experiência pedagógica por meio das ilhas interdisciplinares de racionalidade

Abstract

Environmental Education (EE) is a regular subject in political, social, business and pedagogical discourses. Their discourses became a very relevant question for society because negative impacts are originating from environmental problems. The school is a formal education local that involves many people and it became important for the dissemination of sustainable practices and the construction of values and skills that are fundamental to reduce the impacts on the environment. Considering this relevant social function of the school, it is necessary to reflect on the operability of EE in its political pedagogical project through the work made by the teachers with the students. For this, the research tries to analyze the interdisciplinary approach of the teachers to sciences area (biology, chemistry, and physics) in the teaching of Environmental Education in the 3rd grade of High School used as a methodological proposal the Interdisciplinary Islands of Rationality (IIR) by Gerard Fourez. The Arabê River is an important watercourse and its problems were the starting point for a pedagogical intervention through the IIR with students and teachers in São Benedito, where the students live. The research methodology is qualitative through action research. As data collection instruments were used questionnaires with objective and subjective questions for teachers and students, reflective field logbook, documentary analysis, and participant observation to know the previous conceptions about interdisciplinary and the environment, to list the formative course of the students and evaluating the IIR's methodological work proposal. From the data, it was confirmed that the purpose of achieving an interdisciplinary practice in EE was fulfilled. It was observed that there was a substantial increase in students' knowledge about the river's environmental problems and the development of criticalness to the environment in general. For the teachers, it was possible to perceive the link between the subject of the area in which they work and others, broadening the understanding of interdisciplinarity in its epistemological and methodological aspects. Also, the knowledge acquired through IIR culminated in the construction of a didactic-methodological guide on how to work EE interdisciplinarily.