Talking about Rural Environments, Education and Sustainability: Motives Positions and Practice of Grassroots Organizations

Abstract

The ecosocial crisis we are involved in for the last decades demands an urgent change in the way human being deals with nature. Arguably, the hegemonic economic system cannot continue the same for long, since it entails a kind o colonialism that exploits land, communities, and natural resources beyond the possibilities of restoration. It is also arguable that western positivist science has contributed to this system, both justifying productivity over sustainability and creating a symbolic distance with colonized Peoples all around the globe, justifying therefore the exploitation of the land. It has been defended the need for an epistemological dialogue with agents that directly manage the territory, as those of the countryside. This work starts a common path that is purposed for grassroots organizations from rural environments and higher educators based on service-learning. We aim to analyze the motives, positions, and cultural practices of those grassroots organizations. We have performed two focus groups on videoconference, with 15 participants from 14 organizations. Topics on the relationship between education, sustainability, and the rural environment where discussed and recorded to inductive-deductive content analysis. The study was open to the participation of people from the organizations in the whole research process. In the discussion, we can see a critic to an educational system at the service of the hegemonic economic system, as well as a purpose for the naturalization, humanization, and diversification of both the economic and educational systems. The rural environment appears as a field of opportunity to develop practices of interdependence and ecodependence.