Abstract:

In the last decades, scholars seemed to have acquired an intangible need to get out of the classrooms physically or virtually. So, teachers have been challenged to find a way of accomplishing their obligations with the school programs at the same time as they try to turn their classes more intriguing, engaging, and involving. Concerning Biology, considered a matter of mechanical memorization of concepts and scientific names, scholars living in the Amazon region face another problem: didactic books with poor or no mention of scenarios and living beings that they know or have heard about through family or local friends. The present work faced the challenge of inviting teenagers to learn about sustainability and many topics while constructing a sensory garden. This work aimed to develop different transdisciplinary workshops on environmental education and improving health and life quality using project-based learning (PBL). High school students were invited to participate in the project by sending a letter of intention supporting their candidatures. After a short period, twenty-two scholars were selected. The letters mainly mentioned how they worry about the planet's future and how the contact with plants and gardening reminded them of recently deceased family members.

Five workshops were elaborated as follows:
1. Art and Environmental Education,
2. Constructing my sensory garden,
3. Unraveling the chemistry of medicinal plants,
4. Discovering my garden's microbiota, and
5. Sowing knowledge in the 4.0 world.

Between workshops 3 and 4, a strategic Pitstop of Knowledge was proposed to organize the main ideas on the topics learned so that they could explore new software for presentation and exercise their speaking skills for the whole group. Another activity between the workshops was hands-on with the soil, plants, and gardening techniques. Each workshop proposed a pivotal question to be answered, and the process, as well as the results (artifacts), were evaluated using specific rubrics designed for this purpose. So far, the sensory garden is composed of sixteen plant beds, organized by the human senses: smell (with edible and medicinal aromatic specimens), taste (edible, mostly Amazonian plants), touch (popular regional plants with different textures), and vision (variegate specimens and flowering plants). The hearing sense is stimulated by the sound of a little cascade, the wind on the leaves, and little birds from time to time. Other materials were brought to compose the garden and stimulate the sustainability perception: old tires, PET bottles, and similar items. Each item was painted and adapted by the students to be incorporated into the garden. The participants recognized the project's relevance to improving their abilities of collaborative work, reducing anxiety with an improvement of life quality, and learning topics even above their school level due to how they are getting in contact with them. Some reported being very excited about publicly presenting what they knew rather than being anxious or afraid.

Keywords:

Sustainability, meaningful learning, PBL, life quality.