Resumo:
Brazilian legislation recommends the inclusion of Environmental Issues at different
levels of schooling, including higher education. More specifically, a portion of
normative instruments emphasize that Environmental Issues must be incorporated
into the initial training of teachers, regardless of the area of knowledge or level of
education in which future educators are bound to work. In addition, the field of
education, in general, recognizes and recommends that different aspects of the
political dimension of the environmental matter are present in the initial training of
future teachers. In this context, in agreement with those who defend the presence of
environmental issues in initial teacher training, an investigative study was developed,
focused on teaching courses at a public University located in the south of the state of
Minas Gerais. The question that guided the investigation was elaborated in this wise:
what aspects of the political dimension of the environmental matter are emphasized
in the training of undergraduate students in Biology, Physics, Mathematics and
Chemistry at a public University in the state of Minas Gerais? It was possible to
obtain research data from the contact with the Pedagogical Projects of the courses
and from interviews that were conducted with the coordinators of the referred
courses. The data analysis was inspired by the procedures proposed by content
analysis. The results indicate that: a) the courses address the environmental issue in
projects and extension work, but the disciplines in fact constitute a privileged position
for the treatment of the environmental issue; b) there are little situations offered by
courses that focus on the perspective of the political dimension of environmental
issues; c) aspects of the environmental theme and its political dimension are little
evidenced in the curriculum of certain disciplines and also in the reasoning of the
coordinators who participated in this investigation. However, even though limitations
were encountered, the efforts and initiatives of the degree courses to address
environmental issues in the teacher training process were recognized. It is
considered that the incorporation of the environmental issue and its political
dimension in teacher training courses requires the construction of new meanings for
what we call teacher training.
