PLANTS IN THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT: A STUDY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF AESTHETIC-ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES UNDER THE COMPLEXITY PARADIGM
Environmental Education; Aesthetic Education; Religion of Knowledge; School Plants.
Environmental education can be developed in many ways. Based on scientific content, for example, teachers can politicize the reality in which the subject is inserted, proposing to transform their actions in order to emancipate them. However, in this context, there is often no room for observation/reflection on the aesthetics of the school environment, a place that allows for various questions such as: who we are, where we are, what we do and why we do it. Questions strictly related to understanding humanity's attitudes towards environmental destruction or conservation. In this context, Aesthetic Education values the senses in the understanding that they provoke the emergence of experiences that are fundamental to the emancipation of the subject. Thus, by combining Environmental Education with Aesthetic Education, Aesthetic-Environmental Education emerges, enabling the development of reflection-action teaching that respects subjectivity and breaks with a fragmented view of the world. This process is similar to Edgar Morin's Complexity Paradigm, which understands the importance of reconnecting knowledge and subjects in their multiple aspects. Given this, the plants present in the school are excellent spaces for experimenting and building knowledge. That said, this project seeks to answer: What meanings and senses emerge from practicing with plants in the school space from the perspective of Aesthetic-Environmental Education and the construction of environmental knowledge based on the Complexity Paradigm? To this end, the research aims to analyze the perceptions, meanings, knowledge and actions of teachers and students, from two high school classes in a school in Arapiraca-AL, based on their relationships with plants in the school environment, with a focus on Aesthetic-Environmental Education and Complexity. When they visited the school's green areas, the participants reflected on their perceptions and meanings of these spaces and expressed, through art and languages, in Experience Reports, the way they relate to themselves, to others and to the environment.