Non-Specialists Perception about Endokarst and Exokarst Scenarios: Visions from High School Students

Abstract

The aim of this work is to recover some methodological aspects of the study about the mind representations of caves in Brazil. The basis of this research consisted of one essay, approaching the social representations of a particular group of high school students on the exokarst and the endokarst. The results showed that the meanings vary only slightly, however, the most interesting result was due to the fact that students, who had already visited caves in some period of their lives, still held “negative” concepts regarding this environment even before visual stimulations. About 640 words associated with the exokarst and the endokarst were mentioned, emphasizing: fear, dark, shadowy, skull, hidden places, fantastic and beauty, which helped identifying relations between the cultural and psychological aspects of the group, mainly general views about the obscure and mysterious aspects of this landscape and its prominence over natural beauties. Analyzed data showed that the development of new research on mind representations of caves is very important, mainly for environmental education programs promoting adequate concepts about caves and extending activities of educational ecotourism in Brazilian caves.