http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3199-5832
Abstract
This Editorial to the current collection provides a brief historical, cultural, regional and contemporary picture of environmental education research in Brazil. Its main purpose is to offer readers a short background and orientation to the collection, and in so doing, illustrate how its contributions relate to some wider tendencies, trends and issues in environmental education, as well as to different locales of research and knowledge generation in the country. Of particular note for environmental education in Brazil are: the effects of social and political backdrops and issues, the unique environments on which environmental education is grounded, and how environmental education research, in turn, may echo or influence particular educational and public policies.
Since the start of planning this collection, we have endeavoured to gather a set of papers on Brazilian environmental education research that provide insights into aspects of the historical, cultural, regional and contemporary picture of environmental education research in Brazil. Our call for papers sought contributions that would illustrate some of the main tendencies, trends and issues in environmental education in Brazil, from different locales of research and knowledge generation in the largest country on the South American continent. With this in mind, in this editorial, we briefly introduce how environmental education in Brazil has been informed by various social and political issues across state and federal levels, as much as by the unique environments on which it is grounded, and how environmental education research, in turn, may influence certain educational and public policies.
In brief, in the last four decades, activists, commentators and critics of the field have seen many signs that enable us to pinpoint a recent consolidation of environmental education in Brazil. The roots of this consolidation can be traced to the Brazilian environmental movement that emerged during a period of military dictatorship in the 1970s. The period was marked by intense resistance actions, largely performed by civil society groups who aimed to reform the direction of mass society in Brazil, through challenges that focused on desires for more democratic freedom and social justice - in other words, for social transformation.
This ‘birthmark’ has been a common thread throughout Brazilian environmental education, from its inception to date. Accompanying this tendency, many states in Brazil have witnessed the rise of a branch of environmental education often called ‘transformative environmental education’, or ‘critical environmental education’, the majority of instances of which became more visible after the 1980s. Transformative and critical forms were promoted most particularly by social movement activists and environmentalists, whose goals of social transformation saw education as one of the chief tools to achieve this. In essence, teaching and learning of a different kind would foster a radical questioning of industrial and consumerist ways of life under capitalism.
The environmental movement also overlapped with students’ movements, especially at universities, and these cross-fertilized with the work of teachers and professors in shaping the teacher education and reform agendas for the 1990s onwards, and that of research priorities and capacities from then until today.
As a result of such wider civil movements toward political openness and democratization, but also accepting the challenges associated with dealing with public policies in a country with nigh-on continental dimensions, we should note there have also been politically driven efforts to institutionalize environmental education in Brazil. Various studies including many referred to in this collection have shed light on the ideological disputes that this has created within the field. These are reflected on the diversity of perspectives involved in the current constellations of environmental education in Brazil, but they also require ever-increasing attention from researchers and educators committed to maintaining a critical and emancipatory view of environmental education, rather than seeing these marginalized. As contributions to this collection show, different authors point to various aspects of a shifting ground and a growing complexity for introducing environmental issues into various social and pedagogical situations.
In broad terms, this can be traced to the loss of some of its initial revolutionary strength. Having emerged as a key strategic component to a raft of social movements, environmental education was gradually taken up by the public administration service and productive sectors. In Brazil, such contexts have favored the promulgation of naïve environmental education initiatives, which are typically presented as ‘magical solutions’ to the degradation of social structures and the natural resources base that supports capitalist production. Unsurprisingly then, the introduction of the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) were met with much resistance in Brazil, given their focus on a more pragmatic approach to education that did not resonate with the commitments and hopes of all the Brazilian environmental education community.
At the same time, returning to the period of military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, we note that many social movements arose and dissolved quickly. Education too was under severe repression in order to avoid the politicization of educational spaces. Thus, many environmental educators and researchers lived under a governmental regime whose priority was to dissociate environmental issues from educational and political themes. Within these conditions, depoliticized - i.e. naïve and naturalistic – discourses predominated in the environmental education projects carried out in schools, communities and other educational contexts. These discourses chimed well with those tendencies in environmental education variously labelled conventional, disciplinary and behaviorist, in Brazil and elsewhere. Such practices, often informed by a purely resource-based approach to the environment or an essentialist view of the world, also tended to be grounded in a reductionist approach, avoiding socio-environmental and political questions. The main foci, if not exclusively, emphasized the protection of fauna, flora and natural resources. It was also often associated with a total faith in science and technology as a means to finding solutions to environmental problems. These approaches were very common in the early years of the field of environmental education in this country.
From the 1980s onwards, dealing with this very complex picture and context – which, on one hand, has to address the legacies of public educational policies under severe repression trying to prevent critical thinking, and on the other, the pressures of counterculture movements, including environmental movements – we can see the first attempts to systematize and comprehend the subtleties and complexities of the field of Brazilian environmental education through academic research. At the same time, we cannot disregard the impact of public policies or documents that resulted from major environmental education conferences and meetings over the last three decades on the trends of environmental education practice and the influence of theoretical/academic production on the process of institutionalizing the environmental education field in Brazil. (From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, notable examples include the UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Programme, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20), NGOs Forums and the UN’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.)
These efforts are often seen to culminate in 1999 with the promulgation of the Brazilian National Policies for Environmental Education (NPEE). The NPEE were proposed as a response to the requirement imposed by Articles 205 and 225 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution (1988), which determined that, as a co-responsibility of each citizen, public authorities and all other social sectors, policies should be formulated and implemented to promote the engagement and responsibility of society in the conservation, recuperation and improvement of the environment.
Since then we have been able to observe an increasing amount of environmental education research too. The interest and involvement of Brazilian researchers with the environmental education research field is readily confirmed by the activities of approximately 350 environmental education research groups registered in the National Research Council (CNPq) and that has motivated the organization of a specific research grouping in environmental education linked to the National Association for Postgraduates and Research in Education since 2003, as well as another linked to the National Association of Postgraduates and Research in the Environment and Society.
Induced by these trends and following such tendencies, a group of researchers affiliated to three universities in São Paulo State (UNESP, UFSCar and USP at Ribeirão Preto) has organized, since 2001, the Biennial Environmental Education Research Meeting (EPEA). The response from the academic community, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and seniors and junior researchers has been surprising, and we are now strongly proceeding to the 10th EPEA to take place in 2019.
A key contribution to this collection, by Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho and colleagues, is a synthesis of the EArteProject, that is, a database of theses and dissertations on environmental education in Brazil. The data and analysis give an idea of how much the field of environmental education research in this country has evolved since 1981, when the first master’s study was concluded. We can observe that the tendency to exponential growth in the number of studies produced is quite evident, mainly in relation to those in academic master’s programs between 1992 and 2016. The database that has been informed by this project currently comprises over four thousand doctoral and master’s studies that have been completed across the country. (A more detailed history of the project, its objectives, the criteria for selection and classification of documents entered in the database of dissertations and theses of EArte, the descriptors used in this process, and other project data can be found on the project website: www.earte.net.)
Based on the Brazilian experiences of this academic research movement, our aim is to share insights into them in a more systematic and focused way via Environmental Education Research. In saying this though, we must also acknowledge that most of the environmental education research published in Brazil is in Portuguese, which restricts access to it among the international research community.
Our aim then is not to provide a conspectus of Brazilian environmental education research but rather to open up opportunities for a more profound dialog with the international research community, trying to evidence an ontology-epistemology-methodology ‘triad’ within Brazilian interpretations and contexts that shows, on one hand, some distinctive geo-cultural-methodological potentials in the Brazilian context and, on the other, some possibilities of common traces, dialogues and exchange with other countries and projects, where experiences resonate and relate to wider instances and patterns of research in the field of environmental education.
From this perspective, some of our key objectives for this special issue can be summarized as follows:
presenting examples that document the process of consolidation of Brazil’s environmental education research community, through a focus on the postgraduate system, research lines, research groups, research associations, specific journals and scientific meetings in which environmental education research is carried out, presented and discussed;
discussing some of the major themes and issues that have been explored by Brazilian researchers in their investigation practices, such as the role of the media, school context and teacher training in environmental education;
illustrating some of the distinctiveness and a specific scope of environmental education tendencies in one Brazilian biome, namely, the Pantanal region.
As already mentioned, these attempts cannot be reduced to a panoramic view of Brazilian environmental education research trends, but they can reveal certain features of the debates, conflicts and internal contradictions that reveal distinctive tendencies in our country and, at the same time, present evidence of certain globalizing influences on the process of knowledge production.
This is partly because Brazil is a country of great dimensions and diversity, but neither is it an entity unto itself. Also, we understand that this collection can only ever provide a selection of recent research, not a comprehensive representation, and thus, it serves to highlight some key features of the field of research in Brazil, like other regional special issues of this journal.
Contributors to this collection were invited to write about their own research, keeping in mind this ambitious proposal. It has been conceived along the same lines as three other issues of Environmental Education Research that presented research from specific regions, namely that published in 2004 (from Southern Africa, Volume 10, Number 3, August 2004), 2006 (from three German-speaking countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria – Volume 12, Number 1, February 2006) and 2010 (from Denmark and Sweden, Volume 16, Number 1, February 2010). The latter was organized and edited around the theme of democracy and values. From the German-speaking countries came an overview of research conducted in the region, which, similar to the Brazilian situation, is not usually published in English and therefore has limited reach in Anglo-speaking countries. While the first brought a snapshot of specific research projects conducted in Southern Africa. This may be the closest to ours organizationally and editorially, but all three share a preoccupation with the effects of language and visibility, and a concern with democratic values and equality locally to globally. To the papers themselves:
In the first article in this collection from Brazil, Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho and colleagues reveal key features of the process of consolidation of Brazil's research community through the postgraduate system, research lines, research groups, research association, specific journals and scientific meetings in which environmental education research is carried out, presented and discussed. The authors analyze and discuss data from the project ‘Environmental Education in Brazil: an analysis of the academic production – theses and dissertations’. Their main contribution is to map key features of graduate research in environmental education across the country, and explore diversity in the data from the viewpoint point of the particular and/or shared work of graduate programs, including in relation to their methodological and epistemological orientations and trends.
In the next paper, Eunice Trein illustrates one such trend through reflecting on the ongoing value of Marxist ontological and epistemological perspectives to environmental education research in Brazil. These perspectives, associated with a critical view of environmental education, have been one of the main theoretical orientations for researchers in Brazil and the wider Latin American region.
In the third article, Carvalho, Farias and Borges review the Brazilian scientific literature on environmental education published between 2001 and 2011, using published papers presented in national environmental education research meetings as their corpus. They analyze the main characteristics of the authors and the constitution of the research field in which knowledge is socially valued, as well as recognize the role of those specialists authorized to speak on behalf of environmental education, namely environmental educators themselves.
The following paper offers a case study of environmental education in Brazilian films and television programs. Written by Leando Guimarães, Lúcia Guido and Mariana Ramos, they illustrate the importance of perspectives from cultural studies to research in Brazil, focusing on the possibilities that analysis of media production brings to formal environmental educational practices. They also highlight the need for critical teaching related to audiovisual language as these are neither transparent nor neutral in ‘cultural pedagogy’.
The fifth article, by Maria do Carmo Galiazzi and collaborators, introduces readers to a series of findings from action research studies in Brazil. In common, the studies focus on educational practices aimed at constructing learning communities among teachers and environmental educators. Their work illustrates the value of critical writing and reading within the practices of teaching and teacher development, so as to problematize the participants’ own educational praxis. Common features include using narrative approaches and textual discourse analysis to analyze the data, but also advocating action research processes more broadly, to challenge traditional social models based on hierarchies and individuality, in being and becoming environmental educators.
Finally, Regina Silva, Michèle Sato and Michelle Jaber present their research from the Pantanal region, in the State of Mato Grosso. This is an area of rich biodiversity, where many different social groups interact – and conflict – as they seek to carve out various ways of living amid competing interests about environmental protection and economic development. The paper advocates a methodology called Social Mapping, which is based on self-narratives by different social groups, to surface and give voice to marginalized groups in such interactions, extending work previously presented to readers of the journal in 2014.
Finally, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks for the support we have received from the publishers and past and present members of the editorial board of this journal, in initiating this project and bringing it to completion. Most recently, this has included assistance with translation and copy editing arranged by Alex Lazzari and conducted (in part) by Nicolas Stahelin, but also those associated with the development of this project at the beginning.
In brief, since his first visit to Brazil in 2009 for the 9th Environmental Education Research Meeting, Phillip Payne enthusiastically encouraged us to report efforts in the field of environmental education within Brazil to an international audience. After further work with the Brazilian Journal of Environmental Education Research, Phil invited us to take part in the 11th international invitational seminar on research development in environmental education, in Queenscliff, Australia, where he offered us a privileged space to present some of our experiences in the field of environmental education research in Brazil. It was from that opportunity that Alan Reid reiterated his support for publishing projects in which regionally-based research collections could be communicated through this journal. As editor, he invited us to propose such a collection from Brazil to the Board, and to cut a long story short, this is the final result. Since then, Phil and Alan have not spared in their efforts to provide support to our endeavours, and we would like to acknowledge and thank them, along with the reviewers and production team, for bringing this work to fruition.
Note
In this collection, all translations are by the authors of the articles, unless otherwise indicated.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Flávia Torreão Thiemann
Flávia Torreão Thiemann works at her own environmental education company, conducting research on the use of technology as a resource in EE practices at zoos, botanical gardens and parks. She holds a PhD in EE from the Ecology and Natural Resources program at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil. She also holds two extension course degrees in Environmental Sciences (Waste Management) from the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA and on Environmental Education from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Her main research interests are biodiversity and Environmental Education, focusing on issues of place and educational possibilities of working with biodiversity through a critical EE perspective. She also has 10 years of experience in the local council, where she participated in developing and overseeing the implementation of public policies in EE at the Municipal Office of Education. Flávia has been a teacher in various EE teaching processes and courses and has worked with Non-Governmental Organizations and networks of environmental educators.
Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho
Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho studied Biological Sciences and holds a Masters in Ecology and Natural Resources, a doctorate degree in Education and a postdoctoral habilitation at the Institute of Education of the University of London. He is currently a professor and researcher at the Post Graduate Course of Education (Environmental Education) at the University of the State of São Paulo, Unesp, Rio Claro. His main interests in research and teaching are Environmental Education, Environmental Education in the school context and Environmental Education Research. He is one of the Editors of the Brazilian Journal of Environmental Education Research (Pesquisa em Educação Ambiental) and has taken part on the Organizational Committee of the Environmental Education Research Meetings carried out in Brazil for the last 12 years. He coordinates the Environmental Themes and Educational Process Research Group and an interinstitutional research on the state of the art of Environmental Education Research in Brazil.
Haydée Torres de Oliveira
Haydée Torres de Oliveira is currently a Professor Senior and has been active in researching and teaching on environmental education in graduate and undergraduate levels. She was a full Professor at the Environmental Sciences Department, at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, from 1995 to 2016. All her academic activities are strongly focused on experiential and social learning, participatory and collective perspectives. She sat on national and international advisory committees on Environmental Education Research and Policy. She is one of the editors of the Brazilian Journal of Environmental Education Research (Pesquisa em Educação Ambiental, published mainly in Portuguese) and is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education (ISSN 1467-6370 - Emerald Library/ULSF) and International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development (ISSN 1474-6778 - Inderscience Publishers). She is a Biologist (1982), has a Master´s in Ecology (1988), PhD in Environmental Engineering (1993) and has a postdoctoral work in Environmental Education (2004) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She has coordinated many extension programmes at her Institution dedicated to forming popular environmental educators. She is also member of many networks of environmental educators in her country, in a national, regional and local level.