The numerical growth of research in Environmental Education (EE) and the results of processes of consolidation, conservation and subversion of the field (Bourdieu, 1983) have been highlighted by several researchers (Payne, 2009; Stevenson et al., 2013; Carvalho, 2016; Carvalho & Megid Neto, 2024).

As a starting pointing, we have considered research in EE to be a social practice, a scientific field in dispute (Bourdieu, 1983), marked by the dialogical discursive practice (Volochinov, 2021) in the material relationship between language and history. Thus, the discourses constructed by researchers, in addition to an objective account of the EE field, can be seen as actively participating in the construction of meaning about this field (Payne, 2009; Stevenson et al., 2013).

Thus, analysing EE research allows for the necessary distancing from what we are producing, leading us to new questions, critical review and creativity in the construction of meaning about the world, environmental issues, education, and to eventually thinking about the still unthought (Leff, 2002). Such questions, seen as investigative efforts in the state of the art in EE, have been understood as significant and of interest for the field, offering elements that allow us to “[...] consolidate what we know and what we don’t know as a field and demarcate the limits of our (un)certainties” (Stevenson et al., 2013, p. 1).

State-of-the-art research has been carried out, both in Brazil and in other countries (Robotton & Hart, 1993; Hart & Nolan, 1999; Carvalho, 2016; among others), allowing critical analyses in relation to the changes in the last few decades with regard to trends, controversies, silences, weaknesses and achievements by the research field (Stevenson et al., 2013).

Such efforts to analyse the EE field, particularly its knowledge production practices, have pointed to changes of a conceptual, ontological, epistemological and methodological nature, which we have been experiencing in relation to EE since the 1970s. From the objectives of transmitting factual knowledge “about” and often “in” and “for” the environment, we have observed significant changes that begin to consider perspectives “for” politically and socially critical education, fostering social transformations. EE begins to be seen as a path to construct social practices that promote processes of radical transformations in the models for the relationship between society and nature, thus altering the entire material and social structure of life.

Regarding Brazilian experiences, we highlight the results of the interinstitutional and interdisciplinary project entitled “State of the Art of Research in Environmental Education in Brazil: analysis of dissertations and theses (Earte Project)” (Carvalho & Megid Neto, 2024). One of the objectives of that project is to analyse trends in EE research, developed in post-graduation programs, constructing descriptive, panoramic and analytical frameworks of that production.

Thus, as members of that project’s team, we have sought to explore and understand meanings that have been disclosed in EE research and lead us to different aspects of the political dimension of education. Among these, we have focused on those that repeatedly point to pedagogical practices aimed at the education of autonomous, critical, sensitive citizens who are engaged and participate in environmental causes (Carvalho, 2000; Morais, 2024).

In this paper, we aim to present the results of analyses of Brazilian theses and dissertations in EE which were written from 1981 to 2023 and refer to the relationship between EE and the education of subjects who are sensitive to environmental issues. Thus, based on different theoretical references in the field of language, we seek such relationship, taking as reference the ideals of a subject of political action (Pinheiro, 1971), as another possibility for the field of EE.

The previously announced propositions, particularly the objectives proposed for this article, point to the development of investigations in line with the state of the art or the state of the knowledge (Megid Neto & Carvalho, 2018) in the EE field. We, therefore, understand it as plausible and significant to try to explore and understand the possible meanings that are put into circulation in theses and dissertations in this field as regards EE and the processes of education of subjects of political action. Since we are faced with a field of knowledge in which the complexity and multiplicity of positions of an ontological, epistemological and methodological nature, associated with various political and ideological positions, the intention is not, as already mentioned, to search for the construction of consensus to be consolidated. Thus, we understand that in the attempt to analyse and understand meanings that are being disclosed by EE research, different references that provide pathways to analyse the scientific field, on the one hand, and others in the field of language, can offer analytical frameworks that enable us to broaden our understanding of such a process. Such option can help us, as researchers, to come closer to the possible convergences or tensions that are established between the different theoretical-methodological perspectives and political-ideological interests. By considering such perspective, we are fundamentally assuming the proposition that our research reports are not being taken as a portrait of reality, but as the result of discursive interactions, as a link in the verbal communication chain and a response to concrete statements that have already been produced and will probably stimulate other statements. The methodological proposal for analysing meaning-making processes concerning founding concepts for EE - in our objective, the relations between the educational process and the education of the subject of political action – has, as its starting point and reference, the theoretical and methodological perspectives proposed, on the one hand, by Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) and, on the other, by Mikail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975) and Michel Pêcheux (1938 – 1983). The selection of such theoretical and methodological frameworks moves towards considering research texts to be the results of practices in a scientific field and as fundamentally dialogical discursive practices inserted in an argumentative arena, and thus, consequently, crossing and managing the education of subjects in their ways of being and existing in society.

Based on the analysis of the theses and dissertations that constituted the documentary “corpus” of this study, we used the Bakhtinian perspective (Volochinov, 2021) as reference to bring to light the meanings concerning the process of education of the subject of political action. The attempt was not to characterize such a subject as universal and global, but to analyse the different subjects idealized and configured in discourses that circulate in a discursive arena, responding to various political and ideological interests. Our understanding of the education of the subject are also in line with some of the results by Morais (2024), who investigated the enunciation of “subject” in the context of EE. Thus, we observe that in most research reports, there is a predominance of the denomination “ecological subject” as a structuring element of those practices, invoking meanings such as “critical” and “emancipatory”. Considering the different denominations, we begin to try to understand such diversity based on a theory of subjectivity, with the works by Lacan and Freud. Thus, the return of the signifier “subject” functions as a mark that characterizes that missing subject, which is present in the EE discourse, thus implying an endless number of names. As an implication for the EE field and research, our analyses point to something that escapes that denomination, and thus, we ask: Is it reasonable to advocate for a single subject in EE practices? Would this be plausible? What dialogues could we foster when we consider such multiple meanings of subjects of political action? What does it mean, when we pointed out to the construction of a Latin American thought? Or of a decolonized EE, in constant dialogue with those who have, on their horizon, the construction of democratic societies guided by the principles of socio-environmental justice?

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