Geography educational proposals in Independence Park in the city of São Paulo

Botanical Garden and Paulista Museum gardens

Abstract

The objective of this work is to present and reflect on educational proposals in the outdoor spaces of the Paulista Museum of the University of São Paulo from the perspective of geography. Outdoor spaces are understood to be everything that surrounds the museum's monument building, including the Botanical Garden (now a forest), the gardens, and other areas of Independence Park in the city of São Paulo. The study adopts theoretical and methodological references from Cultural Geography, Urban Geography, and the São Paulo City Geography Curriculum to construct a set of proposals based on experiences in the context of municipal public schools located on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo. The text seeks to recognize the potential of these educational proposals, together with the initiatives of the museum's educational team, as a counterpoint to the São Paulo and bandeirante ideology. It concludes that providing peripheral youth with access to public spaces such as the museum means insisting on different uses of the city, in the struggle for the right to territory and for a civic education that allows them to unravel the symbols and meanings expressed spatially in the city, supporting the construction of counter-narratives that meet and conflict with those exhibited in the internal spaces of the Museu Paulista.