STORIES THAT MAKE WORLDS AND WORLDS THAT MAKE STORIES:

poetic exercises in environmental education with EJA students

Abstract

What world-making inventions emerge in a Educação de Jovens e Adultos (EJA) class when a workshop involving cinema and environmental education sparks a conversation? What speculative movements are possible in pedagogical experiments triggered by a dialogue-free and narration-free animated film? This text raises questions about research that intertwines environmental education with the Brazilian film 'O menino e o mundo' (2013). In the film, we follow a boy who navigates the world, triggering sensitive displacements as he encounters multiplicities of ways of being and living. The film screening at school was accompanied by an invitation to converse based on the question: 'What movements do you make in the world?' Exercises in writing followed, initially focusing on the film's reverberations and then inventing stories from captured film images. We write about this experience in an attempt to listen to the stories that make worlds and the worlds that make stories, paraphrasing Haraway. By identifying with the boy, weaving conjectures and explanations about how he acts and lives, students partly open worlds (theirs and the boy’s) that meet and reinvent themselves in the classroom.