O QUE VOCÊ SABE SOBRE OS RECIFES DE CORAL? UM ESTUDO PSICOPEDAGÓGICO COM TEMA AMBIENTAL

The urgency to promote awareness about caring for the environment, especially of coral reefs, motivated the present study, which was based on socioenvironmental and psychopedagogical principles and followed an interdisciplinary approach focusing on the health of the reefs as these have unique functions for ecological balance and human wellbeing while being increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of tourism. This led to the question, what do tourism agents know about coral reefs? Aiming to develop interventions on environmental education, starting from this group’s previous knowledge, the main aim of this study was to analyse tourism agents’ knowledge about coral reefs. The study followed a qualitative design, with 22 tourism agents from João Pessoa-PB, their ages ranged from 18 to 68 years (M=37.5; DP=14.34), most were men (77,3%). The participants answered a questionnaire to evaluate Natural Semantic Networks (NSN) and demographic questions. Results of the NSN analysis indicated knowledge semantically structured by contents of positive psychological meaning, suggesting that agents’ previous shared knowledge is adequate to the concept of sustainability. The discussion considered the findings reliable for environmental proposals. The final considerations highlighted the contributions of this study, its limitations, and future studies.