The environment and the construction of meanings in elementary education

Abstract

Reflecting about the possibility of multiple meanings (the polisemy), parallel to the practices that bring the mecanism of repetition (paraphrase), we investigated which meanings students in school can understand under the framework of environment. Also, we analyzed how reading and writing may contribute for the construction of these different possibilities of meanings about environment. We adopted the French Discourse Analysis (DA) as a methodological and theoretical frame of work. In addition, under the influence of Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, with a objective of a broader, more critical and reflexive approach for the concept of environment. Through of an education proposal, with the central theme of the environment, we developed, from the influence of media materials in the school context, activities that are related to the presence of an opening for polysemy in the classroom. We find that the paraphrase has become common in many activities, a sense of movement affiliation, in which, sometimes, the students have joined an environment with mainly natural features, sometimes with a social environment. Thus, the background provided by STS concomitantly with the arguments based in our teaching objectives, were able to disrupt this discourses dynamics throughout the course of these activities