ANÁLISE DAS REPRESENTAÇÕES DE ESTUDANTES SOBRE A RELAÇÃO ENTRE CONFLITOS SOCIOAMBIENTAIS E DIREITOS HUMANOS POR MEIO DE MAPAS MENTAIS

Abstract

As the school conditions reflect the challenges of today's society, one of the obstacles to achieving socio-environmental awareness of high school students is the overlooking of values with which they perceive and act on environmental issues that involve violation of human rights. In this way, it’s interesting to investigate values such as freedom, solidarity and justice, which may contribute to form the representations constituted by these students, at the symbolic level, about such issues. More specifically, the current issues in the Brazilian context that involve socio-environmental conflicts, in which the degradation of the environment is linked to conflicts of interest regarding the use of natural resources between different social groups. The objective of this research work was to analyze the content of the dialogue and representations of students in the 2nd year of high school, in an urban context, when asked about socio-environmental conflicts. Therefore, the research uses Emancipatory Environmental Education as an epistemological theory and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy as a didactic reference. The methodological references include Bardin's Categorical Content Analysis, for the investigation of dialogues collected in focus group dynamics, and the interpretation of mental maps using the Kozel Methodology. The field research happened in a municipal high school in Contagem, Minas Gerais. The intervention in the school included the proposal to build mental maps before and after a focus group dynamics, which theme was Brazilian socio-environmental conflicts. Both the analysis of the mental maps and the oral discourse pointed to a relatively small number of students capable of integrating different aspects to build a complex representation of the causes and consequences of socio-environmental conflicts. In addition, it was possible to infer the values that support the students' discourse on the subject and the values they attribute to other social groups. Although the group of research participants represents a specific context, it is argued that the investigation about human values and the perception of others, that students bring to the educational environment, is a strategy for the interchange between Education in Human Rights and the Environmental Education.