Avaliação da percepção ambiental de monitores de um projeto de educação ambiental em um empreendimento para turismo rural pedagógico

Abstract

Contemporary society, marked by unbridled consumption and a focus on profit, faces serious socio-environmental problems. Building a more sustainable and just future requires fostering a critical consciousness that integrates the environmental dimension with other spheres of social life, acknowledging the interdependence between social, economic, and political factors that influence environmental issues. To achieve this, one possibility involves developing environmental education practices based on rural pedagogical tourism, characterized by utilizing a non-formal educational space. The research aimed to analyze the environmental perception of monitors regarding environmental education practices in rural pedagogical tourism, a non-formal learning space. This project involved the monitors of a rural enterprise who are developing an environmental education project. Prior to the activities, the monitors participate in a training session led by the project coordinator. The training aimed to instruct them on the necessary norms and behaviors for the excursions, introduce the project's itinerary, and discuss critical environmental education practices. To understand the monitors' environmental perception, data collection was carried out through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews before the training, and a final questionnaire and participant observation during school excursions after the training. The data was analyzed using content analysis from the perspective of critical environmental education. The pre-training assessment instruments, such as questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, revealed that the monitors' environmental perception focused on conservationist practices, with an emphasis on content transmission and environmental awareness raising. After the training and teaching activity with the students, the evaluation of participant observation and questionnaires allowed us to verify that some monitors changed their perception regarding the practices that could be carried out in the environmental education project, towards a possible practice focused on critical environmental education. Based on this research, it is understood that pedagogical rural tourism can be an important tool for environmental education practices and that monitor training is important for them to be able to develop their monitoring activities with an influence on critical environmental education practices.