Abstract
Considering the exacerbation of present ecological crisis and the urgent need to restore natural balance, present paper proposes a new approach for environmental education. Reviewing concepts as “cultures of nature”, “cultural ecology”, “environmental literacy” and “environmental culture”, we recreate the strategies and goals of environmental education and propose a new conceptual framework to establish environmental educating communities and promote environmental culture. This framework builds on the community itself and is structured in three different sequential stages: driving forces; sociocultural transformation process; and environmental sustainability. Each stage feeds from its previous, being the first one both an initial trigger but also the permanent driving forces that feed the all cycle. Driving forces from the first stage are taken from political and social will, which would create mechanism to promote environmental education and best practices. Second stage is a process of sociocultural transformation of the community contexts based on the implementation of environmental best practices and environmental education programs, which should modulate and be modulated the/by community and its models of organization. Finally, our conceptual framework advocates that this process will be able to reach the third stage, the environmental sustainability, supported by an environmental educating community that drives environmental culture, which should also boost the driving forces from the first stage, closing the loop. We conclude that, since this is a theoretical approach, it needs now to be validated through its implementation and evaluation in a real scenario.
Highlights
Modern man (Homo sapiens) appeared more than 300 thousand years ago (Hublin et al, 2017) and throughout much of that time, namely its long prehistory, lived like any other animal, depending directly on the natural resources and its balances
As so and considering the huge challenge humankind is facing with present ecological crisis, we need to refresh the purpose of environmental education, centering it on the environmental culture, that could enhance the social, political and economic transformations that are required
Restoring environmental balances implies a profound cultural change in the way we relate and interact with the world, both in its human and non-human dimensions. It implies the development of an environmental culture that makes human societies less anthropocentric and more biocentric, with, among others, norms, values, lifestyles and models of organization compatible with the environmental sustainability
Summary
Modern man (Homo sapiens) appeared more than 300 thousand years ago (Hublin et al, 2017) and throughout much of that time, namely its long prehistory, lived like any other animal, depending directly on the natural resources and its balances. As a result of its mental capacity and social organization, humanity has been developing and accumulating knowledge and technology, and, with this, culturally rooted the idea of being superior to other living beings and to nature itself. Along the following sections, analyses the cultural relationship between humans and nature, unravelling the pathway along which humanity has placed itself outside the natural context and started to be the source of a serious global ecological crisis Besides this analysis, crucial to understand the dimension of the challenge that present environmental imbalances poses to modern societies, we question the effectiveness of the environmental education practices that have been followed. A redesigned conceptual framework to promote environmental education effectiveness is proposed, based in real sociocultural contexts and in the light of the Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Learning
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