One decade of environmental education research in Brazil: trajectories and trends in three national scientific conferences (ANPEd, ANPPAS and EPEA)

Abstract

This article discusses the scientific research work on environmental education presented during the last decade in three Brazilian conferences: the meetings of the National Association of Graduate Research on Education (Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação, ANPEd), the National Association of Graduate Research on Environment and Society (Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ambiente e Sociedade, ANPPAS), and the Environmental Education Research Meetings (Encontros de Pesquisa em Educação Ambiental, EPEA). It analyzes the authors, institutions, and regions whence the studies came from, as well as their main research subjects. Our findings indicate the prevalence of women in all academic degree segments; of PhD holders and candidates; of professors in public higher education institutions located in the Brazilian Southwest and South regions; and of environmental education in formal teaching as the main subject in all three conferences. Based on these results, we discuss how this body of research relates to the development of Brazilian academic and educational policies, and indicate some of the challenges involved in building a research tradition in this field, in close dialogue with the arduous political and pedagogical path of environmental education in Brazilian schools.

Keywords:

• Environmental education research
• scientific production on environmental education
• environmental education and scientific conferences

Notes

1. For the non-scientific works there are events and journals that seek to mobilize environmental teachers, and promote the socialization of EE experiences and practices. These include the Iberian-American meetings of environmental teachers, and meetings and journals linked to EE networks. The legitimacy of EE in these spaces is manifested in the visibility and demonstration of its social force, capable of providing an entry point to new environmental teachers and inducing policy-making in the field.

2. The first education graduate program in Brazil started in 1965 at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC/RJ). Between 1971 and 1972, ten majors were created, and in 1975 there were already sixteen. It was also in that moment that many researchers who had left the country to do their graduate studies abroad returned to Brazil to join the universities’ faculty (Moreira 2009).

3. There have been six PNPGs thus far:1st. PNPG (1975–1979); 2nd. PNPG (1982–1985); 3rd. PNPG (1986–1989); 4th. PNPG; 5th. PNPG (2005–2010); and the 6th, ongoing PNPG (2011–2020). (Brasil 2010).

4. The first Brazilian PhD dissertation in environmental education, titled A Temática Ambiental e a Escola de 1° Grau, was defended in 1989 by L.M. Carvalho, supervised by Dr. Myriam Krasilchik at the University of São Paulo.

5. The areas of research identified as the most frequent were: education policy and management (41); teacher training and skills (39); history of education (27); didactics and teaching processes (22); learning and development (21) and curriculum (20). A second set includes subjects such as teaching of math and sciences (17), social movements (13), language (12), special education (12), education and culture (12), education/school and society (11), education and work (10), philosophy of education (9), education and technology (8), and environmental education (8) (Macedo and Sousa 2010, 17, 18).

6. ANPED’s 2012 General Assembly decided that it would become a biannual event. In 2013, it held its last annual conference, and the next will be in 2015. This change does not however affect the time span of this study.

7. Available at: http://www.anppas.org.br/encontro6/index.php?p=gruposanais#gt6. Last accessed on 18 October 2013.

8. The Lattes Platform is available at http://lattes.cnpq.br/

9. There are multiple analytical possibilities for delimiting subject categories, as reflected in the broad range of categories that have been proposed in other studies dedicated to systematizing EE. It can even be said that these reflexive classificatory efforts make up a short ‘history’ of EE categories (Sorrentino 1998; Mello 2000; Layrargues 2004; Loureiro 2004; Sauvé 2005; Tozoni-Reis 2007). In the context of meta-research or state-of-the-art reviews about the scientific production on EE, the subject categories constructed during the past decade have been numerous and diverse (Kawasaki, Matos, and Motokane 2006; Cavalari, Santana, and Carvalho 2006; Loureiro 2006; Saito, Bastos, and Abegg 2006; Ramos, Guerra, and Gazzoni 2005).

10. Participation in the labor market is defined according to the position occupied by the worker. To have an employment card signed by an employer, for instance, provides access to social rights that are denied to those who do not have it, therefore engendering unequal conditions. The analysis of data on occupation positions reveals important elements for addressing the question of gender and women’s unprivileged condition. An example of this kind of inequality concerns the category of work in production for one’s own consumption, and construction for one’s own use – that is, activities that transform goods for domestic consumption and improve the household. The first kind of work is common in rural areas, and is conventionally considered to be ‘typically female’. In spite of the physical effort and amount of time involved in performing it, these activities are not paid for, and have little social value. The 2008 data confirms this evidence. The ratio of women in these positions in the labor market in general is of 6.4%, while that of men is of 3.2% (IBGE 2009).

11. The category ‘other institutions’ includes government agencies, research institutes, non-governmental organizations, as well as basic education and technical schools.

12. In this sense, financial resources from scholarships to grants are valued according to this economy of prestige, more than due to its financial worth. An example of this is the distribution of funds within the ANPEd. ANPEd’s GT22 became eligible to apply for the Association’s funds – which are financially modest, but indicate prestige and belonging – only after it was approved in the Assembly, thus emerging from its previous status as a Study Group (GE), when it did not have a right to apply for financial recourses (Carvalho 2009).

13. Epistemic communities are networks of professional experts considered legitimate in a certain domain of knowledge, and who act as such in the field of public policy, both globally and nationally. According to Lopes (2006, 41), a student of curriculum framework policies, ‘epistemic communities are made up of groups of experts who share conceptions, values and truth regimes, and who act in policy according to their stance towards knowledge, as part of knowledge-power relations’. These communities articulate discourses that circulate and integrate policies in their various contexts of production.