Animais peçonhentos e educação ambiental como medida preventiva dos acidentes

Abstract

Accidents involving venomous animals still represent a problem on Brazilian public health. Due to the seriousness of the matter and the great number of affected people, the knowledge about accidents’ responsible agents is imperative to both avoid them and correctly treat diseased. Efficient treatments have been developed along years, however, a more widespread and exploited prevention on the subject since childhood is lacking. In this sense, this graduate final paper describes a research carried out with pedagogues mainly aiming at elaborating a lesson plan in order to assist them on teaching and learning about venomous animals. This lesson plan is supposed to become a tool in environmental education that provides information about venomous animals’ ecological importance, identification, ways of prevention and appropriate procedures in case of accidents. In addition, the lesson plan is intended to lead teachers to promote classroom discussions on the subject. As a way to evaluate the created tool, an investigative questionnaire on venomous animals has been applied to 62 students from the pedagogy major, who were attending the Sciences and Education course during the first semester of 2013. After the analysis of the questions, it was observed that venomous animals are not approached at any moment along the pedagogy major; however, future pedagogues demonstrate interest in developing activities related to the subject in their classes. So, the creation of didactic materials is fundamental in order to assist them. Results show that the approach of the subject “venomous animals” along the undergraduate pedagogy major and the creation of didactic materials on the subject can assist pedagogues to sensitize children. Thus, these measures, besides personal care, will be able to become information multipliers to families and other people around them, leading to a decrease in the number of accidents and comprehension about the venomous animals’ ecological importance in their natural habitat.