The Relevance of Geosciences at Rural Schools in Brazil: Connecting Sciences with Local Communities Demands

English Abstract:

<span">Brazilian economy is based on agricultural activities, and 20% of its population lives at rural areas. Strategies for reaching high quality education on those areas have been made extensively since 1998, when social movements from rural workers have demanded national policies specific to rural education. At the core of its definition, rural education is a movement that articulates public policies, education and rural demands.

<span">This concept also achieved higher education. University of Brasilia offered on 2007 a new interdisciplinary course called Natural Sciences for Rural Education, with the goal of graduating high school teachers from family farming properties who could understand specific rural demands. To make possible for a rural worker to go to university without losing his or her incomes, it was adopted a system first used by Familiar Rural Houses in France, at 30’s decade, called alternance pedagogy. The main idea of this pedagogy is to adjust the scholar calendar with agricultural seasons. Thus students have an intensive period of classes in town during drought season, and come back to their original communities on harvest, when students and professors identify new local demands.

<span">Although alternance pedagogy presents serious challenges on higher education levels, we would like to share how our experience have shown that the approach may lead research to topics demanded by rural communities, thus ensuring the social function of University. We also would like to discuss the relevance of geosciences on an interdisciplinary sciences curriculum, representing a chain linking physics, chemistry and biology. Geology often answer questions brought by locals, such as relationship between the quality of water and high incidence of kidney stones on population, or relationship between vegetation, landscape and quality of soil.