O museu como estratégia de educação ambiental: um estudo do Instituto Ricardo Brennand

Abstract

Environmental education is supported by a complex network of political, economic, cultural, and scientific factors for raising awareness. Environmental Education as a discipline that is governed by both formal and non-formal education and based on continuous and permanent processes of action in the environment, cannot be conceived only as a school content. Thus, museums are possible spaces for teaching and learning experiences in environmental education, going beyond the mere complementarity of school education. It is a fact that the school space and the museum have specificities that are often not aligned in the pedagogical perspective but allow the realization of concrete experiences of environmental education in a creative and innovative way by different segments of the population and levels of education. The objective of this work is to analyze the potential of Instituto RB, a reference in the state of Pernambuco as the Museum of Arts as a non-formal space for education for environmental debate, capable of promoting a leisure and cultural space focusing on practices related to Environmental Education and aiming investigate the knowledge related to EE that can be present from the available collection, teaching didactics and the strategies of Instituto RB in this perspective. The methodology for achieving the defined objectives includes a brief literature review on environmental education in museums, a technical visit for qualitative research on Frans Post's works in the collection, as an element to evoke the environmental debate and on the museum's performance in this perspective. This unraveling of themes, however, will require more acumen from the teacher to keep the focus on the environmental issue, since it is very rare that the observation of objects of art and culture turn to themes that are transversal to the resplendent ones, such as history, anthropology, and sociology. It can be seen, then, that with a sharper look, it is possible to debate vegetation, fauna, use of water, soil, agricultural models, in different ways and details capable of being suitable for each audience or series of students. It is important that the pedagogical dimension regarding the environment is incorporated into the projects from the planning of activities, so that this institutional interest encourages professors to deal with this issue in the museum space. In addition to the programmatic content, as mentioned in the EE law, it fulfills the social function of dialoguing about the environment in the most diverse spaces. Thus, partnerships between museums and schools, for example, should be based on the perspective of knowing these pedagogical specificities, in addition to recognizing the importance of the collection they have, as it is especially in the perspective of expanding culture that museums can help in environmental literacy of citizens. According to table 2 of visits data from visits to the Museum, we can observe the number of visits to the Museum of 160.442 to the Museum from January to December in the year 2019. In this sense, the interest of the academic public in acquiring knowledge and freedom of expression is clear.