Alexandre Martins de Araújo

Reactivate: places, natures and cultures:

This research project is the subject of an extension project linked to the Center of Environmental History and Interculturality (Núcleo de História Ambiental e Interculturalidade – NUHAI), of the School of History of the Federal University of Goiás. As an extension project, the attention was focused on the following challenges: to recover the traditional knowledge and practices of the use of nature among the community of the Caraíbas disctrict, of Aparecida de Goiânia city; to put them into circulation within the school; and then to make them return to the community as alternative human development strategies, aimed at structuring an integrative model of local environmental management. The experience of the project team, within Caraíbas School, has revealed complex strains between teaching practices and the multifaceted socioeconomic reality of the region. Such strains prevent not only the development of interdisciplinary strategies, but also the perception of their importance in the context of teaching-learning relationship. Given such findings, this project seeks to problematize the teaching practice of environmental education, based on the idea that the fragmented way in which socio-environmental impacts are treated in Brazil not only reinforces dualisms, such as rural/urban, center/periphery and society/Nature, but also prevents other epistemologies, brought by the populations that migrate to the major centers, from assisting in the mitigation of urban socio-environmental impacts, due to the fact that they are arbitrarily classified as inferior, unscientific knowledge.