A criança e a natureza: experiências educativas nas áreas verdes como caminhos humanizadores

Abstract

This research starts by assuming that children, as natural and cultural beings, need to interact and live with the natural world. This is one of the children’s unquestionable rights and it is a condition for their fully development. Children’s separation from nature is one of the features of contemporary childhood. It is a result of a long historical process that started with modernity which instrumentalized nature for merchandizing ends and withdrew human beings from its conviviality. The consequences of this vision for infant schooling are the increase of an education distant from life, performed in self-contained spaces that imprison the body which gives no regard to the specifics of children cultures, thus, it blocks up children’s potentialities for development. This research had the goal to systematize meanings and senses expressed by children when in presence and in action in green areas in order to discuss the way these senses contribute to his/her construction as multi-dimensional beings. Our research (of qualitative approach) took place at the Apito Children School, located in the municipality of Camaçari, State of Bahia, Brazil, where we promoted participant observation in a five year old children class and facilitated a focal group with four educators and five trainees. Among its approaches, it included: first childhood environmental education; organization of learning environment; children as culture producers; sensibility development as a necessary condition for the growth of new ways of life. Data revealed that green areas are the ones most preferable by the children, in which they play, interact, imagine and create - places where their bodies move freely in accordance with their own desires and interests. Furthermore, through planting and care for animals spontaneous experiences, children learn about the natural world and practice a loving attention for other forms of life. Thus, conviviality with other beings and elements of nature is one of the most primal means in our humanization process. Composed by rational, bodily, spiritual and emotional dimensions, our humanity enhances and enlarges itself in interaction with the natural world, which we are part, resulting in ways of being regulated mostly by sensibility.