Abstract

AGUILAR-CUCURACHI, María del Socorro; MERCON, Juliana  and  SILVA RIVERA, Evodia. Children's perceptions for the conservation of Mexican primates. Soc. ambient. [online]. 2016, n.12, pp.99-118. ISSN 2007-6576.

Understanding how human groups give meaning to nature, and how their relationships with the environment are, is the main concern in the study of environmental perceptions. Knowing the perceptions can favor educational efforts for the conservation of species and ecosystems. In order to analyze perceptions on primates, we asked students from three rural elementary schools in Tabasco, México, to draw how monkeys live, what they eat and the type of problems monkeys face in their communities in order to survive. We analyzed the content of 197 children's drawings, 110 made by girls and 87 by boys of 5-12 years old. We assign categories of analysis related to the perception of primate species, their environment and the threats they face. We applied two-way ANOVA to compare perceptions between communities and the G-test to compare gender. The results indicate that the perceptions are constructed from the contexts of the communities, and these offer elements to understand socioecological processes. In the educational context, we consider that this study allows articulating at least three dimensions: cognitive, cultural and political, in which the ecological dimension has a transversal role.

Keywords : perceptions; drawings; primates; communities; education.