Abstract
This paper results of an ethnography on materiality, education and learning carried out in the context of a local network of active environmental educators in public elementary schools in the North of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Our aim was to follow the lines that make up the role of juçara palm, Euterpe edulis, botanical species popularly known as açaí of the Atlantic Forest. We were aware of its uses in food and environmental education practices developed by the educators of the Teia (Teia de Educação Ambiental da Mata Atlântica). From our perspective, juçara is an other non-human who participate in a intertwining of social and material relations, linking people, things and institutions and is at the center of a bundle of individual, social and environmental learning processes. We dialogue with a notion of learning in a way by which educational experiences are lived under a fine tuning and co-belonging ties with non-human dimension of the environment, establishing productive ties with other humans and non-humans. In this sense, we describe the interaction between the teachers and the juçara as an opportunity to understand forms of school and non-school learning in a rural community in Rio Grande do Sul that, like any other, is constituted by a more-than-human world.
Keywords
agroecology; Atlantic Forest; environmental education; learning