Universidade, educação e ambientalização curricular: desafios da Universidade do Estado do Amazonas na tríplice fronteira (Brasil-Colômbia-Peru) para a construção da universidade necessária

Abstract

The world is going through a civilizational environmental crisis that challenges us to reflect and inquire the socio-educational role of the university that legitimizes attitudes and behaviors that are detached from environmental values. The curricular environmentalization is an alternative to rethink the contents, procedures and methods that aim to form a professional and citizen able to exercise any profession and their citizenship in more humanized and sensitive way to socio-environmental issues. Thus, this research aimed to analyze the pedagogical assumptions of Licentiate courses at the Centro de Estudos Superiores de Tabatinga - CESTB/UEA, considering the process of curricular environmentalization in teacher training. We used a qualitative approach, with bibliographic, documentary and field research. Due to the adverse situations determined by the Covid-19 pandemic, we conducted interviews with historical social agents and applied surveys to the faculty and students, from the degree courses in Geography, Biological Sciences, Pedagogy, Letters (Portuguese Language) and Mathematics, through WhatsApp and Google Meet platforms. As a result, we saw that the Geography and Biological Sciences courses are the ones that present more disciplines with environmental characteristics, and where there is a significant concern with the commitment to understand the relationship between the society and nature. The courses in Pedagogy and Letters have worked with a more cultural approach, but they are not yet aimed at reflecting on the socio-environmental issues experienced in the triple Amazonian border. The Mathematics course is the one that has the greatest fragility in terms of forming teachers prepared to deal with the particularities and diversities in the region. We realized that teachers need to receive permanent and continuous training from the institution and, in this way, reflect more and better about the socio-environmental themes, cultural diversity and about the numerous realities existing on the border lines. We also identified the difficulties and contradictions faced by teachers and students in dealing of indigenous students who, in most of the cases, are excluded from the educational context because they do not adapt to current Western and non-indigenous teaching methods, and to the prejudices suffered in the academic environment. The necessary university seeks to question the formation of homo academicus of CESTB and to broaden discussions and understandings about the relevance, pure and applied, of environmental education for the transformation of the quality of life in Alto Solimões region, as well as the sustenance of the living conditions provided by the Amazon rainforest. More than any supposed purpose, this research seeks to reflect on collaboration with CESTB/UEA professors and students. Curriculum environmentalization, in addition to an update of socio-educational praxis, is an alternative to solving part of the civilizational problems of the triple border Brazil, Colombia and Peru.