ACTIO: Docência em Ciências (Apr 2020)

Ecological mandala: analysis of the systemic conception of the environment by a group of students

  • Cadidja Coutinho,
  • Raquel Ruppenthal,
  • Vanessa dos Anjos Baptista,
  • Martha Bohrer Adaime

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3895/actio.v5n1.9573
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 1
pp. 1 – 19

Abstract

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In this article, we investigate ideas that are found when thinking about the environment in a systemic and dialogical way for sustainability. For this, the present work proposes a didactic tool, the ecological mandala, to identify the conceptions that some elementary school students have about the environment. To compose the data, a group of 104 elementary school students from a public school in the northwest of Rio Grande do Sul was invited to answer questions related to the definition of the environment and its composition in the form of drawing in a limited space. For the analysis of ecological mandalas, we sought to identify the existing relationships between the different elements, the systemic conception of the environment (natural, anthropic and / or mixed) that defined the observed situations, and the representation of the environment as nature, territory and / or problem. In addition, the data were subjected to statistical analysis to establish correlations between the variables (age, sex, form of organization, systemic conception and representation of the environment), to verify the dispersion value between the variables and to consider the degree of existing association among them.With the results obtained, it was found that most students understood the proposal of drawing drawings according to the mandala pattern; employed diverse elements, mainly those that refer to natural issues. Likewise, it presented a predominantly mixed systemic conception, and the representation of the environment as nature. It was possible to observe that gender (female and / or male) did not influence any of the responses. The age of the participants, on the other hand, showed a significant correspondence for determining the systemic conception of the environment. Ecological mandalas can represent a didactic approach to environmental education, combining social reality with the ecological dimension. This strategy for assessing the environmental profile can assist in the construction of committed citizens, individually and collectively, as it allows to know the weaknesses and then act to remedy them.

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