Education and Sustainability: A Pedagogical Experience for the Interaction with the Brazilian Semiariad Region

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to present the results and discussions of an action research developed by teachers and high school students in a public school in the Sobral-CE municipality, Brazil’s semi-arid region, where they elaborated and developed an interdisciplinary project aiming to seek the development of new sustainable methods and technologies for the treatment and reuse of domestic effluents and also to avoid wasting drip-treated water on school taps, drinking fountains, sinks and air-conditioning units. The starting point for the project was the group’s concern about the wastefulness observed in the school environment and the awareness of issues related to the limitations of access to water by humanity in recent times. Thus, the main purpose of this project was the development of a practical environmental education capable of contributing effectively to the living conditions improvement in the semi-arid environment, based on the case study, having the school space as a research laboratory, proposing new educational challenges for teachers and learners in the another posture constitution of the same in relation to nature and its resources; based on the study of concrete cases of the daily life of said actors, thus fostering students’ interest in scientific research. To do so, it started with TGS as the main methodological resource, whose course followed the steps of a quantitative research, whose results ratified the project initial hypotheses, showing that itwas possible to develop an interdisciplinary environmental education in a practical and attractive way for students from simple ideas and to insert the student in the universe of scientific research still in basic education.