The development of Environmental Educators must ideally be a continuous study process, reviewing of the state-of-the-art and with attention to the educators' experience. The goal of the present work was to investigate Social Representations about the environment, by Basic Education teachers from the City of Porto Rico, State of Paraná, Brazil, to indicate ways for the continuing education of these Educators. We used the Free Evocation of Words technique and personal interviews in order to identify the possible elements constituting the Social Representations. We identified that the representations of the analyzed group are based on a naturalist point of view of the environment. It was also verified that, concerning the local environment, the teachers´ understanding is not well-founded. These findings support the need for courses devoted to the introduction and discussion of regional environment knowledge. Such studies can, subsequently, lead teachers to comprehend that they are also constituents of the environment.
Environmental education; Representation of the environment; Teacher training; Training of environmental educator
