Percepções sobre floresta e ambiente local: bases para educação ambiental em escola rural em unidade de conservação

Abstract

Children's drawings are useful and meaningful tools that can be employed to assess knowledge and perceptions about the natural world. In light of this, this research aimed to evaluate the perception of children from a school located in a rural settlement in the surroundings of the Murici Ecological Station (ESEC Murici), regarding the forest and the place where they live, based on drawn representations. The area selected for the study was the Olival Lins de Melo Municipal School, which is located in the Dom Hélder Câmara settlement, offering education at the basic, preschool, and daycare levels. Through coordination with the school's board, students from the 1st to the 5th year of preschool education were selected, totaling 24 participants, aged between 7 to 11 years, with 67% being female and 33% male. For data collection, participants were asked to draw freely based on the questions: “what comes to your mind when you think of the forest”, and “what comes to your mind when you think of the place where you live”. The analyses followed a qualitative and subsequently quantitative approach. In this sense, pre-established categories of analysis related to fauna and flora (occurring in the region or exotic) and manifested feelings (positive or negative) were used to record the occurrence of elements related to them in each drawing (1 = presence; 0 = absence). Based on these data, frequency calculations were made and the chi-square test (χ2) was employed to compare the representations within each category in terms of gender, age, and grade. It was possible to observe that the representations about the forest and the place where they live followed a similar pattern in the distribution of frequencies of elements related to the pre-established categories. A high frequency of elements indicative of positive feelings was found, both in relation to the forest and the place where they live. There was also a higher frequency of elements indicating exotic fauna and negative feelings in the representations of the forest, compared to the representations of the place where they live. There were no significant differences in the representations regarding the gender, age, and grade of the participants. The absence of representations indicating the use of forest resources served as an indication of the participants' distance from the perception of the importance of the forest for subsistence strategies. Therefore, it is recommended to carry out environmental education actions that awaken students' perception of the importance of forest conservation for the community.