Social representations about environment that students of an educational institution of Imués – Nariño

Abstract

This article is created from the results of the investigation “Social representations about environment that students of an educational institution of Imués – Nariño” have developed in the Master of Environmental Pedagogy for the Sustainable Development of Universidad Popular del Cesár – Colombia. So, the investigation was worked with a population of forty-eight (48) students of the tenth and eleventh grades of the educational institution María Luz, in the municipality of Imués – Nariño, which is located in a rural context framed in the agricultural development of this region, the objective of this study was to achieve analyse the social representations about environment that the students previously mentioned have, answering the question: what are the social representations about environment that students of tenth and eleventh grade of Institución Educativa María Luz in the municipality of Imués – Nariño have? Taking into account the context and the population studied.

Approaching a cualitative methodology with a socio-critical paradigm and the implementation of Action Research, besides the application of information gathering techniques such as: documentary analysis, focus group workshop, and semi-structured interview on focus group; Likewise, a review of documents related to this topic was carried out, taking into account graduate theses and articles with a thematic axis established in the social representations on the environment in some Latin American countries, and the classification of social representations on the environment proposed by Reigota (1995), Andrade and Brochier (2004) and Sauvé (2001) was also consulted.

With the above, the presence of environmental social representations of a naturalistic type, as a problem, globalizing and utilitarian anthropocentric, was evidenced in the institution and in the students. Therefore, it is considered that the study of social representations about the environment in educational establishments allows us to differentiate the concepts about the environment that students present at each educational level. With this we can broaden the concepts they have about the environment, so that they can establish the importance of the environment for themselves, the educational institution and their surroundings, and also establish activities within the environmental education project and the institutional education project that allow broadening the conceptions of the environment for the entire educational community.