Decolonialidade e Educação Ambiental no Enpec

Análise de uma Década (2011–2021)

Abstract

This study emerges from the imperative to challenge hegemonic paradigms within the field of Environmental Education, acknowledging coloniality not as a vestige of the past, but as a persistent and structuring force that continues to shape knowledge systems, bodies, and territorialities. Decoloniality is embraced here not merely as a theoretical-methodological framework, but as a political and epistemic orientation—one that calls for engaged dialogues with subaltern knowledges, orally transmitted, ancestrally rooted, and communally embodied. Drawing on the works of Antonio Bispo dos Santos, Malcom Ferdinand, Catherine Walsh, and other thinkers situated in insurgent territories, we argue for the necessity of re-grounding Environmental Education in cosmologies that resist the modern/colonial project of world-making. Rather than incorporating traditional knowledge into Western scientific paradigms, the task is to destabilize the monopoly of Western science as the sole arbiter of legitimate knowledge. Through a cartographic approach, we analyzed the presence (and pronounced absence) of research mobilizing decolonial perspectives within the proceedings of the National Meeting on Research in Science Education (ENPEC) from 2011 to 2021, focusing on the thematic area of “Environmental Education and Science Teaching.” Using descriptors such as environmental education, decoloniality, intersectionality, environmental justice, traditional knowledge/communities, and gender, our mapping identified only eight relevant studies over a ten-year period. This scarcity reveals a significant epistemological and political gap and underscores the silencing of epistemologies that embody alternative modes of existence, resistance, and knowledge production. We call attention to the urgent need to amplify these plural and insurgent epistemologies within Environmental Education as an act of cognitive justice and territorial accountability.