Abstract:

The focus of this communication is based on the report of the cooperation path between the School of Education, Communication and Sports and the Town Hall of Guarda, in the context of “Initiation to Professional Practice” course of the Basic Education degree. This cooperation aims to promote the educational potential of non-formal spaces in science education, with a focus in environmental citizenship. Science Education has a fundamental role in creating future active, enlightened, intervening, responsible and mobilized necessary citizens, to involve in problems related to protection, preservation and enhancement of the environment / nature. Education in science oriented towards the development of values, attitudes and environmental ethics constitutes an educational challenge, in which didactic policies assume particularity. Understanding the importance of this dimension of science education requires pedagogical training directed to action. It is with prominence in promoting science education with intentionality in favor of the environment that this institutional cooperation has been framed and has been developed for some years. Framed in the action-research methodology and given particular emphasis to the didactic-pedagogical training of our students, namely in the construction of diverse didactic resources, it seeks the development of skills for the implementation of approaches to science in non-formal contexts - the “nature laboratory”. Sensitizing the valorization of the enrichment of the pedagogical action, carried out in the classroom context, through the exploration of didactic situations in the non-formal contexts, preferably close to children. This collaboration with Guarda’s City Hall has allowed our students to be actively involved in the celebration of the environment day with the municipality's educational community, through the planning of activities and its operation on the campus of the Higher Education Institution. In these activities, on average and annually, two hundred children from the municipality's educational institutions were involved. It is expected that this collaboration between these two institutions will promote Education for Development, both for future technicians in education and for the children that participated.

Keywords:

Environmental citizenship, cooperation; non-formal science education; pedagogical training.