The school and the earth: religious life and geography teaching

Abstract

This text aims to continue the exploration of imagery developed during doctoral research, picking up the thread upon re-engaging with the reality of Sobral through teaching in the municipal basic education system. Upon joining the public teaching staff in Sobral in 2024, we were once again drawn to the perceptions and understandings that permeate the students' religious lives. This return constituted an experience of existential reconnection with ways of life, in which the school emerges as a space for encounter, the sharing of meanings, and the manifestation of multiple forms of connection to the land. Methodologically inspired by the Durandian phenomenological concept of "Gulliverization" — which generates meaning through proximity, miniaturization, and spatial intimacy (Durand, 1989; Bachelard, 1988) — the text outlines aspects of the crisis facing the educational model centered on results and performativity, as well as its impact on geography education. At the same time, it seeks a poetic approach to the school experience, aiming to draw closer to lived realities and to embrace those aspects of existence that elude metrics and institutional frameworks.