Caminhada na natureza: prática alternativa de educação física escolar para fins de educação ambiental

Environmental education seeks a communion with the fundamental principles of participation, citizenship, autonomy and sustainability, aiming for education that, in its epistemological and methodological principles, gives priority to shaping people who are qualified to face the social-environmental challenges which, in many cases, are a product of their own action. There are several ways of promoting environmental education within society, and it is no different at school. According to curricular parameters, environmental education should permeate the curriculum of all school subjects; therefore Physical Education also has the duty of looking into this topic. In order to achieve that purpose, this work sought to teach environmental education within physical education by promoting nature walks. The work endeavored to identify the specificities carried out in environmental education and the way that physical education is seen, mentioning the possibilities of this particular school subject that aid in the learning of certain contents: in this specific case environmental education and its possible relationship with physical education as a manner of complementing one other by means of nature walks. Within this perspective, this work investigates the effectiveness of this activity and its possible benefits. In order to conduct this research two class groups were chosen from different schools, one of which carried out the nature walk activity whereas the other did not. Both groups were given a questionnaire with topics related to the environment, and a comparison was made of the perception of environmental questions between the two. It was possible to infer that nature walks are an effective method of teaching environmental education: despite observing that, as far as environmental awareness is concerned, students from both groups had similar views, in the behavioral question regarding environment, the class that undertook the proposed activity presented more significant results.