RELATION TO KNOWLEDGE AND THE ENVIRONMENT: STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES ON THE DOCE RIVER

Abstract

This article presents partial results of research conducted with students from the 9th grade of Elementary School, enrolled in the Full-Time School of Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, which was affected by the disaster caused by the Fundão's dam failure, located on the municipality of Mariana, Minas Gerais, that affected the Doce river, in November 2015. This study is inserted on the Environmental Education debate, and it uses Bernard Charlot's contributions to try to understand the relations these students establish with the Doce river, as an object of knowledge. For data collection, it was used the “balance of knowledge”, an instrument adapted from the one proposed by Charlot (2009), that consisted on asking the students to create a text in which they were invited to narrate their experiences with Doce river. The balances of knowledge were read as an only text, and we tried to capture the group's regularities regarding the experiences with Doce river, centered on the subjects' experiences with people and the places, between them, the school. The analysis indicates that the students' relation to knowledge intertwines with the relations to people and to the environment, and is marked by the denunciation of the impacts caused by this disaster, by a solidarity posture with people and the environment affected by the process. Conclusions allow us to reflect upon the importance of Environmental Education, making the school practices transversal, towards the strengthening of identity bonds and in a political dimension, in the processes triggered by aggression to the nature and to people, such as what was lived by a great amount of groups and populations who live alongside Doce river.