Ambientalização curricular nos cursos de Pedagogia da Universidade Federal da Paraíba

Abstract

Environmental education plays a role in fostering ongoing dialogue in society and, at the same time, demonstrating that humans are part of nature and therefore need to be aligned with awareness-raising practices regarding the environmental consequences of human actions on nature, from a critical perspective (Loureiro, 2006). Therefore, environmental education should be part of the learning experiences of students and future education professionals, from their initial formative base, with everyone involved in different educational spaces, especially schools, having an emancipatory vision of the application of environmental education. The study considered education as a pillar for the moral, civic, ethical, environmental, and inclusive formation of society as a whole. In this regard, this research was based on the methodological analysis of the curricula of the Pedagogy courses at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), following the recommendations of Bardin (1977). The general objective of the study was to understand how the curricular environmentalization of the Pedagogy courses at UFPB is made explicit. The method employed for the theoretical construction of this work was documentary research, in which the curricular proposals of five Pedagogy undergraduate courses at UFPB were considered as sources, namely, the Pedagogical Course Projects (PPC) of Campus I - João Pessoa (face-to-face, Distance Learning, and Rural Pedagogy), II - Bananeiras (face-to-face), and IV - Mamanguape and Rio Tinto. For the analysis of the collected data, content analysis was used, through the systematization of the data, defined by Bardin (1977) as indispensable for understanding the intentional context of written productions. In this case, the explicit and implicit presence of the environmental theme in the evaluated curricular documents was observed, in order to interpret how the inclusion of this theme can impact the basis of teacher education. Additionally, a questionnaire was applied to 8 teachers from the pedagogy courses at UPFB, four from Campus I, one from Campus III, and three from Campus IV. The data revealed through the analysis of the content of the PPCs and the questionnaires that there is a possibility of interdisciplinary and cross-cutting work from the perspective of environmental education. It is assessed that although there is much to be done regarding the environmentalization of the pedagogy curriculum, undergraduate studies provide teacher training, from a critical environmental perspective, when granting teaching autonomy to address these themes and adapt pedagogical work based on each local reality. It is concluded by presenting a critique of the often unequal access to Environmental Education, caused by the lack of clear documentation of the curriculum in the PPCs, resulting in different experiences within the same curricular component, requiring an expansion of dialogues among teachers from different areas of knowledge within the course, as well as the implementation of a more democratic curriculum modification system, considering the advances of science and the target audience of higher education.