Rio Largo: urbanização, inundação e o ensino de geografia.

Abstract

The urbanization process of the Brazilian territory intensified in the mid-twentieth century, partly associated with the development of the industrialization process. Note that the Brazilian urbanization occurred in an accelerated and disorderly way, triggering several urban problems, still present in the current panorama. Among the most obvious are irregular occupations in risk areas - such as urban settlements located near river floodplains - which tend to have serious socio-environmental consequences. The theme of floods associated with precarious urbanization is a topic that makes up the Geography curriculum, and it is therefore crucial to analyze and debate it in the academic, school, and social spheres. Thus, this monograph will present the case study of the city of Rio Largo, located in the state of Alagoas, taking into account its precarious urbanization, the flood that occurred in 2010 and the critical scenario after this event, whose sequels are still perceptible today. We argue that the use of case studies in the classroom and, more specifically, in Geography classes, presents itself as a pertinent teaching methodological proposal. Thus, we suggest conducting field work, accompanied by the application of a questionnaire, interviews, and the subsequent elaboration of diversified products, according to the examples and models presented. Through these research procedures, students will be able to develop a critical, creative and autonomous look at the analysis of the problem of flooding in urban risk areas. Therefore, we defined as the central research question: How to develop a teaching methodology, based on the construction of projects, that approaches the issues of precarious urbanization and flooding based on case studies and that can be worked on in Geography classes? The general objective of this monograph is to present a teaching methodology for the Geography curricular component, based on the development of a research project with an analytical and propositional character. From the results obtained, through the contact of primary and secondary sources, as well as the fieldwork scripts developed, we consider that this teaching proposal met the objective of systematizing the themes of urbanization and flooding, bringing subsidies on how to work with the respective phenomena in the classroom, following the steps highlighted in the pedagogical planning, evidenced here. We conclude that our proposal favors the self-construction of the students involved in the development of the research project carried out at school, so that they read and interpret the world based on looks directed to the problems present in the geographic space. Moreover, our proposal helps the teachers' evaluation process, since it makes it possible to include new evaluation instruments in the teachinglearning process, besides the traditional ones.