ABSTRACT
The aim of this work is to historicize the way in which the Itatiaia National Park (PNI) has signified knowledge of Environmental Education (EE) and, simultaneously, constituted subjects that “must” educate and be environmentally educated. It was produced by the Curriculum History Study Group, a research collective at the Nucleus of Curriculum Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NEC/UFRJ), articulating investigations interested in operating with Curriculum History as History of the Present. The PNI was selected because it was the first space that was designated as a National Park in Brazil, creating a visitation “model” that articulates, through alchemical processes, the EE knowledge that is to be taught and the different subjects for whom this knowledge is intended. In dialogue with Michel Foucault and Thomas Popkewitz, we focus on the historical constitution of the visiting subjects for whom the park’s formative actions were taken. We then show how the EE knowledge produced through these actions came to be alchemically transformed in the midst of a logic that has historically constituted what we call “school”, in close dialogue with the processes of disciplinarization that have organized the time and space of this institution. In this process, we highlight how the boundaries between the two institutions have been “blurred”, allowing us to establish an in-between place of subjects/visitors/students amid disciplined EE knowledge.
Keywords:
Curriculum History; Environmental Education; History of the Present; Itatiaia National Park; discursive approach