Environmental education has sought to overcome the dominant paradigms in society, from
which conservative and pre-established practices derive from a predominantly naturalistic
teaching with a biological dimension, in contexts that are often displaced from the participants
of the educational process. Based on this premise, this investigation proposes a
phenomenological approach, focusing on the perception of the teachers of the Beatriz
Rodrigues da Silva School about the environmental problems of the northwest area of Palmas
(TO), also known as ARNOs. The purpose is to contribute with subsidies for a critical and
emancipatory environmental education, duly grounded in the lived world by the school
community itself, especially its experiences. The research was carried out through the collection
of verbal descriptions, in the sense of listening to the participants (16 teachers from the
aforementioned school), of procedures forreducing and identifying essences, under the focus of
a variant of the phenomenological method. This is the so-called listening approach, through
which participants express themselves freely without interference from the researcher.
Additionally, two more complementary methodological approaches were carried out with the
research participants to deepen the essences revealed to their consciences, forming a kind of
methodological triangle, namely: asking questions and observing. Such approaches were
covered by the application of structured and unstructured interview techniques and the indirect
observation technique, respectively. Among the main results, it was found that the teachers'
perception of the focused area is characterized by a plurality of meanings, transcends the limits
of the natural dimensionand incorporates other aspects, such as locational, affective, urbanistic,
landscape, historical, social, land tenure elements, among others. In addition, the participants
perceive the environment and environmental problems mainly through the effects of the
behavior ofhuman beings in their conflicting relationship with the urban environment, that is,
under the aspects and problems experienced by the participants in their socio-environmental
practices inthe context of the ARNOs. However, the environmental education practiced at the
school in question still fails to reflect such complexity, which leads to the pointing of possible
ways to face this mismatch.
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