Schools as Agents of Social Transformation in the Socio-Environmental Disasters Prevention in Brazil

Education plays a fundamental role in creating a culture of prevention and reduction of socio-environmental disaster risks, especially in a continental country like Brazil, which faces a diversity of disasters. This chapter presents the first Brazilian diagnosis of how schools address disasters in their educational spaces. The analysis was based on school practices registered in the four annual editions (from 2016 to 2019) of the #LearnToPrevent Campaign, promoted by Cemaden. Hundreds of public schools from all regions of the country developed several educational activities. Rain gauges emerged as one of the most common practices, offering pathways for the adoption of more active and contextualized perspectives through multiple didactic approaches. However, there are gaps to be overcome to make these practices more critical and emancipatory, promoting questioning of the root causes of disaster risk scenarios and the co-creation of measures to transform the economic and political systems that perpetuate social asymmetries in the country. Despite the absence of formalization of disaster risk reduction in the national curriculum, schools have played a crucial role as agents of social transformation, breaking certain barriers and establishing bridges, especially with Civil Defense, in the process of co-constructing knowledge and pioneering school practices for disaster prevention based on their socio-environmental reality.