Abstract
As environmental slogans have been permeating the social imaginary and permeating the conceptual and axiological dimensions of the different educational currents, Environmental Education has been prompted to define its own specific nature in contrast to the supposedly more integrative educational movements. In contrast to the historical or meta-theoretical strategies of specification and foundation of environmental education, we propose the establishment of some principles derived from genuinely ecological and ecocentric environmental philosophies; the ecophilosophies. This work reviews—in a conciliatory framework and with a pedagogical interest in mind—the most significant contributions of land ethics, deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism and the change of paradigm ecologies. The result is a set of facets, key categories and features that offer an integrated and synoptic view of how Ecocentric Environmental Education (EEE) could be based on ecophilosophical principles. In addition, the contrasting features that define those non-ecocentric perspectives of Environmental Education are proposed, and a deconstructive transition of these in alliance with another reconstructive ecophilosophical feature is suggested as the central intention of the Environmental Education methodology. Finally, the value of the theoretical proposal is defended as a foundation and framework for future pedagogical specifications and methodological developments.
Highlights
The debates in the field of Environmental Education (EE) that arose a couple of decades ago around Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) [1] have been revitalized by the proposals of the Global Citizenship Education (GCE) [2]
Can we ensure that these educators operate critically and reflexively from the assumptions of this genuine EE? For our part, we assume the perspective of critical pedagogy [3,4,5], considering that teachers should be given an opportunity to build their own “epistemology” or world-view reflectively and autonomously, because their practices and methodological choices will take on real meaning
The exposition of clearly ecocentric environmental philosophies—which we have considered as true ecophilosophies—has enabled us to elicit some facets, categories and privileged features for a transition towards a genuinely ecological and ecocentric concept of EE
Summary
The debates in the field of Environmental Education (EE) that arose a couple of decades ago around Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) [1] have been revitalized by the proposals of the Global Citizenship Education (GCE) [2]. This article is part of a research project that seeks to explain and develop the connection of EE with an “integral” perspective of ecological thinking [6,7,8,9] within the framework of a post-formal conception of education [10,11] that allows to define a transformative learning model [12,13,14,15] for the training of these environmental educators Within this sequence this paper is focused on epistemologically framing EE in this world-view and not so much in proposing ways of implementation or methodological guidelines, which, they are essential, are out of the scope of this work. Our work, which precisely aims to provide a foundation of EE from the genuine philosophical environmentalism, will focus only on those currents that can be properly called “ecophilosophies” and will try to offer a coherent set of facets, categories and theoretical traits constitutive of an ecocentric EE
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