Methodological and thematic diversity in the main Brazilian environmental education periodics between 2015 to 2019

The growing academic production in the field of Environmental Education in Brazil brings the necessity to analyse this production to map important characteristics and aspects. The present work aims to contribute in this sense from the analysis of scientific articles from the main Brazilian journals in Environmental Education. Our bibliographic review consists of identifying the main methodologies and thematic present in this field, as well the use of Critical, Pragmatic and Conservative strands in Environmental Education, in the period 2015-2019. We seek to provide a spatial view of these data, relating them to Brazilian states. The selection of journals followed three inclusion criteria: 1) be published in Brazil; 2) be classified in the Qualis Periodicals of CAPES 2020, minimum classification in stratum C; and 3) meet the keyword "Educacao Ambiental". From thise criteria, four journals were elected, being: Revista Brasileira de Educacao Ambiental (A3), Revista Eletronica do Mestrado em Educacao Ambiental (A4), Pesquisa em Educacao Ambiental (B1) e Revista Sergipana de Educacao Ambiental (B2). After selecting the journals, a total of 695 articles were surveyed. Special editions and annals of congresses and events were not included in our research. Each work was accessed individually for textual analysis. Our work made it possible to identify the frequency of use of different methodologies in each Brazilian state. Bibliographic review, theoretical study and case study, provided 48.05% of the methodologies found. The methodologies of perception analysis, experience report and document analysis represented 22.15% of the analysed articles. Exploratory research, questionnaire, and action research accounted for 9.49% of the methodologies found. Regarding the themes, the term sustainability conferred 10.35% of the themes found, followed by the term socio-environmentalism (8.48%), training of educators (6.76%), Conservation/Biodiversity (6.18%). Themes on philosophy, solid waste, and public policies, together accounted for 15% of the themes. Two other themes, which together conferred 5% of the themes, were studies on revisions in Environmental Education, and on human formation (5%). We identified the frequency of use of the three strands in the works, with Critical Environmental Education being the most used (83.16%), followed by Pragmatic Environmental Education (13.81%) and Conservative Environmental Education (3.02%). Our results demonstrate that there is a great methodological and thematic diversity in Environmental Education, but this diversity is in the South-Southeast axis of Brazil. We also observed a tendency to associate the themes with specific areas, such as Humanities and Natural Sciences.