Research-experience in environmental education: (eco)logical exercises for waste management

Abstract

The present text shares the result of a research-experience about possible (eco)logical exercises of environmental self-education, for human waste management. Focusing on the transformation of the researcher and its relationship with waste management, was based on three steps: systematic observations in an avenue of the city of Porto Alegre and in a private university; search for information on waste management on the internet (Google platform) and in a university library; immersion of the researcher in a garbage separation association and an interview with the person in charge of the place. Inspired by poststructuralist knowledge production, the notion of research-experience emerges as a possibility of groping elements and fabricating objects for thought, in this case, as a way of self-transformation of the researcher in its relationship with waste management. As a result, it was possible to articulate the experience of the experiment with the research on the environment, reflecting on the educational-environmental paradigms and the ideologies of consumption and individualism that permeate human daily life. Through emerging elements in the field of research, environmental education was analyzed as a way of transforming everyday (eco)logics, some of its impasses, such as the subjective or structural aspects that involve environmental self-education.