Resumo:
The Thematic Approach (TA) is presented as a curricular perspective for addressing Environmental Education (EE) in the school context. Therefore, it becomes fundamental to understand how the EE research field has been appropriating the foundations of the TA to support reflections related to the development of Environmental Education in Basic Education schools. Thus, this work aimed to investigate the theoretical-methodological foundations of the Thematic Approach that theses and dissertations in EE present as support for the treatment of socio-environmental themes in the school context. For this purpose, a qualitative research of the State of the Art type was developed, whose documentary corpus, consisting of six master's dissertations and two doctoral theses, was constructed from the Fracalanza Platform database and submitted to a qualitative analysis (Yin, 2016). The results indicate that the research was produced between 2018 and 2023, with the majority concentrated in the South and Southeast regions, originating from federal Higher Education Institutions and linked to the basic area of Science and Mathematics Teaching. Furthermore, the research showed that the generative themes used in the EE actions described in these works vary according to the school context, being frequently addressed in High School and Middle School (Ensino Fundamental II) through an interdisciplinary perspective. In turn, the analysis of these works allowed for the construction of categories that reveal that the TA values the interdisciplinary characteristic of EE, enables the addressing of socio-environmental issues linked to the students' socio-cultural context, promotes the integration of the community with the school, and values students as active subjects in the learning process, contributing to a critical and emancipatory formation. The analysis also revealed institutional and cultural challenges, such as curricular rigidity and teacher training, which impact the use of the TA as a theoretical-methodological premise for the development of EE in the school context. From this, it is possible to conceive that the TA, grounded in Freirean premises, offers relevant contributions to a critical and emancipatory EE, highlights the importance of dialogue between school and community, and points to the need to expand teacher training and make pedagogical practices more flexible.
