NARRATIVES OF PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE OF TEACHERS WITH A FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECTS: AUTONOMY IN SCHOOL EVERYDAY
Environmental Education. Autonomy. Professional experience. Narrative. Projects
In order to understand how Environmental Education is experienced in a public school, based on the execution of works with environmental programs and projects, the experiences of teachers revealed to us about the mobilization of knowledge and practices experienced in professional practice, from the perspective to implement environmental education in the school context, we were urged to understand and identify the tactics and ways of doing used by teachers to circumvent the curriculum prescription, in order to (re) invent Environmental Education projects. The study is based on qualitative research in the form of narratives, which considers professional experiences about the environment. The teachers selected to participate in the research work at a state school of Vitória da Conquista, in the state of Bahia. The methodological route used to produce the data was the narrative method, in which we used a questionnaire to outline the profile of the studied group and narrative interviews to obtain the information. We also held discussions on some school environmental education projects in editions of the Electronic Journal of Environmental Education (REMEA) and the Environmental Education Research Journal (RPEA). As a theoretical and methodological basis, we conducted a dialogue, mainly with Paulo Freire, Michel de Certeau and José Contreras. The narratives reveal the teachers' experiences with environmental projects, how they deal with the environmental education proposals that arrive at the school and their (re) inventions. Thus, our focus is on how teachers carry out, modify, create, and reinvent projects developed at school as a form of resistance to make them contextualized. In this way, the analysis of the narratives indicates that the teachers had contact with the environmental themes through the contents approached in the classroom, in the undergraduation and in the life experience. Since, the training to develop the projects took place in the initial training, in the continuing education courses and in service. We identified the humanist, conservationist/recursive and moral/ethical conceptions in the teachers' understandings about the environment, and it extends to the environmental education present in the developed projects. The students got involved with the projects, acting as multipliers of good habits and customs in the family. There are two ways in which teachers deal with EE: (a) with autonomy, proposing to do differently to what was proposed and/or (b) with subordination to external evaluations. However, the professional trajectory, the practice with the projects, and the reflection in the action, allowed the teachers to develop the environmental knowledge to dare and create “tactics” to make the proposals of the projects closer to reality. It is important to consider the strength of the autonomous teacher capable of making choices, committed to the transformations of everyday reality, since the teacher, as a curriculum materializer in his school contexts, has in critical environmental education, an instrument of surveillance, resistance and freedom.