Some Features of Environmental Education in Spain

Abstract

During the 1970s, intense educational revival movements (MRPs) were started in Spain. Summer schools attracted tens of thousands of teachers around a core of modernising teaching, a revival of educational trends which at the start of the century had been oriented towards 'new schooling and in Spain had such notable outcomes as the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza (Free Teaching Institute). The context of the MRPs was social involvement, a search for freedom and cooperative effort in the working class as well as among intellectuals and journalists. Teachers developed educational, methodological and didactic principles and strategies aimed to create the new Spain that was fervently desired after the death of Franco. The renewed encounter between the school and its environment was generally an appropriate basis for the acceptance of the principles agreed at the UN/Unesco conference in Tbilisi, which soon took shape in a wealth of experiments in environmental education (EE). The First National Environmental Education Conference held at Sitges, Barcelona (DGMA, 1983) facilitated an initial reflection on spontaneous EE initiatives, which were more common in the school sector than any other. The teacher retraining process involved multidisciplinary programmes, the use of the environment as an educational resource, methods of exploration and research, and new models for teacher-student and inter-student relationships. The panorama outlined by the Conference included: spontaneous initiatives by individual persons and groups, a wide range of interpretations of the Tbilisi principles and their application, a lack of an original theoretical basis, a perception of the need for further knowledge of the concept of EE and the means of including it in the education system. The orientation of education was primarily influenced by two tendencies: educational updating in itself and the influence of environmentalist trends. Although the proportion of teachers involved was small, it was a highly active sector with an enormous capacity for change. Public administration