ENVIRONMENTAL WEAVES IN THE SCHOOL BORDERS FOR INSURGENT SCIENCE EDUCATION
Anthropophagic interculturality. Environmental education. Latin America. Science education. Urban peripheries.
The author-actor, through an anthropological strategy, dives into fieldwork in public schools on the outskirts of Salvador Bahia. Through a public call in which he offers himself as an assistant professor, gets in touch with several natural and exact science teachers, managing to approach some school practices and processes with different levels of depth and relational density. The anthropological report was constructed in a fictional way and fed from his memories, notes from the field diary, audiovisual records and the reviews and comments of the actresses/actors involved. In it, are highlighted episodes and scenes experienced by the author-actor in schools where he obtained approximations with sufficient frequency, duration and relational density to carry out participant observation and attempts at partnership and intervention. In this way, he describes, interprets and analyzes how the environmental dimension is present in the senses and meanings that several teachers of natural and exact sciences offer to their practices in the school everyday of the suburbs of Salvador. This methodological strategy was inspired by field considerations and on the construction of the ethnographic report of Clifford Geertz, as a paradigm of polyphony expounded by James Clifford. In the same way, the proposals of the everyday’s sociology defended by Michel de Certeau are presented; and, the challenges that are expressed, in the field experience and in the anthropological contact, in the level of subjectivities and affections, exposed in the Technologies of the Self of Jorge Larrosa and in the Sentimental Cartographies of Virginia Kastrup and Suelly Rolnik. For the analysis of his experiences, the author-actor built a theoretical framework weaving culture-environment-science interfaces. From the interpretive perspective of the concept of culture (Clifford Geertz), and the different post-colonial developments of cultural analysis, he generates discussions about the scope, limitations and challenges of these developments to understand school processes in urban peripheries in Latin America. In these discussions, the author-actor emphasizes Hommi Bhabha's ideas of cultural translation, Stuart Hall's critical interculturality, Garcia-Canclini's cultural hybridism and Michel de Certeau's arts of doing. Finally, he projects the concept of Anthropophagic Interculturality as a cultural dynamic that would allow the judicious and critical appropriation of hegemonic knowledge and epistemologies, while valuing other knowledge, communal, ancestral and popular, placing them in dialogue and contact according to desires, and needs of the oppressed populations of the Global South. The following highlights some of the characteristics of the expanded representations of the environment expressed by Félix Guattari through the Ecosophy’s concept. This expanded representation of the environment, articulates the ecological, sociological and psychological aspects of the contemporary challenges that humanity faces. Allowing him to establish dialogues with the colorful and complex weaves around the concept of environment made from the political practice of Social Movements in Latin America and, from theorists like Marcos Reigota, from whom the appropriations of the concept of anthropophagy for the field of environmental education are taken; and, Enrique Leff, from whom the concept of environmental rationality is taken, which would establish an axiological horizon for intercultural education practices and processes. This ethical horizon expressed in environmental rationality and which is projected in values of social justice, ecological and economic sustainability, cultural diversity and democratic participation in opposition to the values of technological progress, the market and capitalist accumulation, structures counter-hegemonic or post-normal conceptions of science developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Hugh Lacey. These counter-hegemonic conceptions of science linked to decolonial, inSURgent or intersectional pedagogies by Catherine Walsh, Peter Mclaren and bell hooks, make possible to propose the framework or the substance of an InSURgente Science Education ISE, which escapes any type of teleology or biologicist, ecologicist or economist dogma. The author-actor, applying the theoretical framework described above for the analysis of the anthropological report, perceives and describes the immense potential of Environmental Education for transversalization and curricular integration. As well as some structural and micropolitical limitations for the development of processes and practices of InSURgent Scientific Education ISE in two public schools on the outskirts of Salvador-Bahia, taking as examples the narration and analysis of the contexts of the School Science Fairs that took place in these institutions in 2017 and 2018.