Critical environmental education and project pedagogy

Tamar Project experience

Abstract

The rupture of the Fundão dam, owned by the mining company
Samarco, in Mariana / MG, in November 2015, launched millions of m³ of ore
tailings in the Doce River basin, which reached the mouth of the river, Regência,
where river and sea are interdicted. One of the bases of the Tamar Project is also
located there, which, among other activities, serves the basic education schools with
scripts and pedagogical proposals. The aim of this work was to identify if
environmental crime has changed the flow of visitation of schools, as well as if there
is presence of the critical aspect of environmental education in school projects. We
selected 05 schools that are developing projects on science teaching, environmental
education and health, using technical visits based on the Tamar de Regência/ES
Project. Visits in the six months prior to and six months after the environmental
crime from March 2016 onward were studied. We interviewed the project guiding
teachers with open questions, looking in the narratives for categories that relate to
critical environmental education, “interdisciplinarity”, “project pedagogy” and “sociopolitical dimension”. As a result, we concluded that the crime did not interfere
with visitation volume. Furthermore, in school projects, according to the teachers'
narratives, it was not possible to identify the presence of critical environmental
education in them.