Educação ambiental nas escolas municipais de Uberaba: percepções, práticas e impacto do projeto Agentes do Meio Ambiente
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Abstract
Environmental Education aims to broaden the understanding of the economic, political, social, and ecological interdependence of society, fostering the appropriation of knowledge, the development of sensitivity, and the adoption of new attitudes that result in new individual and collective behaviors aimed at improving quality of life. It is developed through three main theoretical-practical approaches: conservationist, pragmatic, and critical. This research aimed to analyze the actions of the Agentes do Meio Ambiente (Environmental Agents) program, in Uberaba (MG), within the context of promoting Environmental Education, sustainability, and local development. To this end, a qualitative, descriptive case study was carried out in two stages. First, a documentary research was conducted, analyzing 28 action plans prepared by the program’s supervising teachers, the activity scripts of the project for the years 2023 and 2025, the documents containing the general guidelines for leadership groups in 2024, the implementation of the Sustainable Schools proposal in the Municipal Education Network, the Ten-Year Education Plan, and the Curriculum of the Municipal Education Network. The second stage consisted of ten semi-structured interviews, analyzed using the IRaMuTeQ software. From the documentary analysis, it was found that the guidelines and intentions are aligned with the concept of Critical Environmental Education, but the actions proposed in their content do not correspond to these intentions, being limited to pragmatic and conservationist activities. It was also verified that the analyzed documents lack theoretical grounding in Environmental Education, except for the 2025 activity script, which showed progress in this regard compared to that of 2023. The analysis of the action plans highlighted a lack of interdisciplinarity, while the interviews emphasized the teachers’ interest in valuing local potential. However, they also revealed that the program’s Environmental Education practices tend to adopt an approach centered on environmental preservation and waste management, often without incorporating a critical perspective capable of problematizing the social, political, and economic interactions related to environmental issues. The findings also indicated a gap in educators’ knowledge of current environmental legislation, which undermines the effectiveness of pedagogical practices and reinforces the need to invest in teacher training, promoting a broader and more critical understanding of Environmental Education, based on the articulation between local knowledge, interdisciplinarity, and social transformation. To contributeto advancing these needs, a Technical-Technological Product is presented, characterized by a short-term training course designed to support the role of the supervising teachers of the Agentes do Meio Ambiente Project as mediators of Critical Environmental Education. Thus, this research contributed to reflecting on the practice of Environmental Education in municipal schools, pointing out pathways for strengthening educational practices committed to building a more sustainable society.
