Critical Environmental Education based on the Practices and Perceptions of Early Childhood Educators in Portugal

Critical Environmental Education as a counter-hegemonic current is based on the promotion and construction of transformative and emancipatory knowledge, through politicized and contextualized approaches. In Portugal, studies point to the need to train early childhood educators to develop innovative educational practices on socio-environmental issues. This article presents the results of an exploratory study aimed at identifying the perceptions and practices of kindergarten teachers in Environmental Education in Portugal, and discussing the results based on the theoretical foundation of Critical Environmental Education in Pre-School Education. Seventy-five early childhood educators took part in the study, using an online questionnaire made up of open and closed questions. The answers to the open questions in the questionnaire were subjected to content analysis based on the three macro-trends of Environmental Education defined by Layrargues and Lima (2014) - conservationist, pragmatic and critical. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data. According to the results, both perceptions and practices emphasized the conservationist and pragmatic aspects