Education relative à l’environnement en géographie dans les classes de troisième au lycée général Leclerc de Yaoundé: une enquête sur la transposition didactique pour l’enseignement d’un nouveau regard sur le monde

Abstract

This study is interested in the process of the didactic transposition of the concept of the environment in the teaching of Geography in the third grade at the Government High school Leclerc in Yaoundé. The exploration and reflection of this process are part of the context of the pedagogical renewal in force in Cameroon, where the choice has been made to link environmental education to the carrier disciplines, in this case Geography. This project is based on the assumption that Geography is a fertile ground for environmental education. Thus, it is primarily the task of geography teachers to formally educate about the environment. However, the curriculum is not very clear about the dimensions of the environment to be considered and the nature of the links to be established between geographic content and environmental education. Teachers then have to select, choose and decide which activities to offer to learners. This research raises the question of this linkage in order to explore developing practices in this field. Hence the research question: how is the concept of the environment transposed into practice by Geography teachers in the third grade at the Government High school Leclerc? Our conceptual framework on the practices of geography teachers is an analysis of the constitutive and coherent elements of disciplinary identity, particularly when anchoring environmental education. This framework is based mainly on three axes characterizing teaching practices: 1) the purposes and justifications of teaching-learning EE in Geography; 2) the foundations of EE and the teaching contents that have been planned and introduced in teaching-learning situations; 3) the modalities of implementation of teaching-learning in classroom teaching practices, including teachers' tasks and those of their students. The methodology is based on multiple case studies. It is based on a categorical content analysis of the teachers' discourse on their own practices in EE, using a semi-structured interview. The interview verbatim was analyzed using a mixed categorical grid, with part of the categories emerging from the frame of reference and another part of the categories emerging from the analysis of the corpus of data. The results obtained clarified the three dimensions under study. According to the teachers' statements, the justifications for EE in geography refer to a basic training for all students to help them understand how to take action. The conception of EE is first to teach contents related to environmental protection. Furthermore, it appears that the teaching-learning methods engage students, on the knowledge side, in teacher-guided activities that do not encourage reinvestment and transfer of learning. On the behavioral and life habits side at the end of the course, the teachers state that their practices are characterized by a margin of manoeuvre left to their students. The knowledge taught was applied in situations that allowed for the evaluation of the consequences of risky behaviors and lifestyle habits, the expression of opinions and the justification of positions and actions to be taken by the students.