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Conceptions of Brazilian Undergraduates About the Environment and Environmental Education



Author(s)

Sônia Maria Marchiorato Carneiro, Tania Stoltz, Carla Luciane Blum Vestena, Valdir Nogueira, Thiciane Pieczarka, Roberta Rafaela Sotero Costa, Marlene Schüssler D’Aroz, Fernanda Hellen Ribeiro Piske

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DOI:10.17265/2161-6248/2015.02.002

The purpose of this study is to assess what final year Geography undergraduates from Brazil at two public and one private universities think about the environment and environmental education, using Piaget as an epistemological basis, given his interactionist and constructivist perspective in understanding cognitive development. Analysis was made of the conceptions of 30 final year Geography course graduation students at two public and one private universities. The results show that the concepts of the students analysed regarding the environment and environmental education are related to the second and the beginning of the third level of conceptual understanding. The view that half of the students analysed have about the environment is from a perspective relating society to nature, whereas the remainder have a generic and fragmented view. That is to say, those who showed the second level of understanding made references to the environment which sometimes considered nature and sometimes considered people, but with one excluding the other; the ability to describe is evoked from facts associated through their shared meaning. On the other hand, those who showed themselves to be at the beginning of the third level of understanding exhibited integration of different sets of information within a cognitive and affective system, conflicts were taken into account in their explanation of reality, and reality was considered regardless of their wishes and as being in a continuous process of transformation. A similar fact occurred regarding environmental education. The majority of the students related their concepts to the development of environmental awareness-raising (i.e., the beginning of the third level of understanding) and the remainder of the students as the transmission of information and norms (i.e., the second level of understanding). The conclusion is reached that with regard to the training of Geography undergraduates and also with regard to environmental education, a curricular perspective is needed that places value on interdisciplinarity and educational practice as a problematization of geographical spatiality in socio-environmental interrelations.

Geography, environmental education, construction concepts, Piaget