Ecopedagogy against climate change
We live industrialized, technological and virtual times, apparently modern that makes many live their own realities and deny the presence of climate change. As Trump once said, according to El País (2018) “I don’t believe it, with these four words the president of the USA.UU., Donal Trump, Tomb 1.656 pages of a report detailing the devastating effects of climate change in economic, health and the environment ”
This type of thought is justified by positivist rationalism and its vision of the world, which has made believe that the "human being" is a being superior to everything, capable of controlling its surroundings. And education has been used to indoctrinate and validate these paradigms, becoming instruments of colonization. Faced with climate change, these paradigms are losing credibility and Ecopedagogy is born according. It is in this regard, that the purpose of this article is to explain the importance of ecopegagogy in the face of climate change, for this, it will be discussed about ecopedagogy as an educational paradigm, as a pedagogical movement and as a curricular approach.
Doing this work allows us to conclude in the importance of ecopedagogy to develop a planetary ethical awareness from education over all lives of lives and limit extractivism to preserve the planet and our existence.
Ecopedagogy as an educational paradigm.
We are in the middle of a crisis that we do not want to see. For Ferraz (2012) ”School and academic education, are understood as mere employability lever, economic profitability and adjustment of labor markets, with immeasurable capacity to escape the critical dimension and the universal moral values of students” (P.7)
The socio-political-environmental context leads to questioning the educational and life paradigms of humanity, the positivist rationalist paradigm has only managed to put "humanity" as a work mass and as a superior being, which loots nature, causes deaths, suffering and destruction in the name of development for many centuries. The result of his actions we see it materialized in the "climate change", which impacts all the living beings of this planet: the latest disaster scenarios since the 2000s decade, have been increasingly scary, forest fires of the forest fires of the 2019 -2020 in Bolivia, Brazil and Australia demonstrates this.
According to Espósito and Zandvliet (2013):
The presence of multiple global crises indicates the term of a capitalist cycle: the food crisis, energy crisis, economic and financial crisis, which are encompassed by the climatic crisis, and is forcing industrialized countries to assume responsibility for the adjustment of climate change While his economic career is the cause of all this (p.40).
Ecologist criticism since the twentieth century to the denial of nature in current societies, becomes more incidents and this led to the realization of several conferences and academic meetings. For Sarmiento, the environmental theme is a latent problem:
In 1972, in Stockholm, interrelation and conflict between the environment and development is recognized, but the problem was only of a technical nature. That same year the studies on the Rome Club "The limits to growth" that warns, to continue the trends of population growth, industrialization, pollution, food production and the depletion of natural resources, in just 100 years the planet’s growth would be reached. For 1975, human ethical and educational responsibility is recognized in the Belgrade Charter, where he points out the objectives of world environmental education. Pedagogical efforts on the subject, led to the Rio de Janeiro Summit in 1992, recognize social, political, economic implications in environmental deterioration and development, and highlighted the “global warming” (2013, pp. 4-5)
After an intercultural dialogue that was carried out during a worldwide around a common objectives, the land of the Earth. In 2000, the document was concluded and publicly announced as a letter from the peoples and as an ethical document that raises humanity to choose its future towards the transition to a sustainable global society and indicates, ”we are a single family human, a single terrestrial community with a common destiny ”(Letter from Earth, 2020).
The Letter of the Earth raises a new paradigm of life under other frameworks of coexistence, it is in these spaces of dialogue that, ecopedagogy is consolidated as an educational commitment, such as Gadotti (2003) says:
What we call Ecopedagogy, initially was called "Pedagogy of Sustainable Development", and is being developed as a pedagogical movement or as a curricular approach. It acquires meaning as a global alternative project because concern is not only the preservation of nature (natural ecology) or the human impact on the environment (social ecology), but is a new model of sustainable civilization (integral ecology) while implies a Change of economic, social and cultural structures: therefore, it is linked to a utopian project: change human, social and environmental relations. (pp. 7-8)
Ecopedagogy is considered as a new educational paradigm, a global alternative a new sustainable civilization model.
Ecopedagogy as a pedagogical movement
From the SXX, the environmental movement has strongly criticized the capitalist and neoliberal system, and responsible for planetary devastation. In the same way he has strongly criticized education and his indoctrinating role that is the service of the powerful. Chomsky (2014) says that:
From the time of the Bible the intellectuals who were later called (false protests), worked for the interests of the powerful. And likewise, it is known that there were dissident intellectuals with an alternative conception of the world, which were later called (prophets), and that these were tortured or forced to exile, things are not very different in our day. On the other hand, he says that it is essential. (pp. 14-15)
Big were the efforts for ecopedagogy to be conceived as an alternative proposal to dominant education, especially since it raises structural changes in schools, society and the conception of development. The risk that runs, and that has already been done, is to be assumed by the system as an ecological proposal nullifying the critical and political transformative content, and is becoming individual initiatives that does not go from sowing orchards or collecting garbage from the streets from the streets , and for this it is required of active citizenship as Gadotti (2003) would say:
The answer seems to come from the strengthening of citizen control against the State, the market and civil society. The strengthened citizen has the capacity to govern and control development. Here is the role of education, form for "active citizenship". In order for a sustainable community that lives in harmony, it not only depends on an ecological, but ethical-political commitment that is fed by a pedagogy "Science of Education and a defined social practice". Being ecopedagogy inserts in the socio-historical movement, form citizens capable of choosing their future, only this would be a new and democratic pedagogy. (pp. 12-13)
Humberto cited by López (2017) says that:
From the perspective of ecopedagogy, the responsibility of education in the construction of a new and different model of the world is highlighted, where the capital importance of the resignification of the sense of educational training aimed at the formation of a “coexistence citizen is established "That you think as a inhabitant of a planetary community, which perceives the planet as a unique totality and identifies other human beings that inhabit it as their peers; Therefore, differences will disappear for geographical, cultural, race, economic and social reasons.(p.10)
It is in this sense that ecopegagogy as a pedagogical movement, is seen as a transforming proposal of reality, which in a holistic way the rights of human beings, living beings in general and those of Earth.
Ecopedagogy as a curricular approach.
It is impossible to maintain this world, its social relationships, and bad relationships between us and the planet, in the face of it there is a need for new educational paradigms, the generation of learning from new scenarios.
According to Gadotti (2003), the formation is linked to space/time and is carried out in the relations between the human being and nature, and is at the level of sub -consciousness, so an ecoformation is necessary to make them conscious and the ecoformation needs a Ecopedagogy. (p.8)
It is in this regard, so that Ecopedagogy leads to a planetary consciousness, first as Freire (1992) would say
Educators and educators have to be consistent with their democratic dream, respect students, and that is why they never manipulate them. Hence the vigilant caution with which they must act, with which their educational practice must live intensely; Hence, his eyes must always be open, his ears too, his entire body open to the traps of the ‘hidden curriculum’. (p.98)
For Giroux (2004) the hidden curriculum “are those rules, beliefs and values not declared, implanted and transmitted to students, through underlying rules, which structure routines and social relations in school and in life in classrooms ". (p.73)
So can you take advantage of the curriculum as an instrument to articulate the Ecopedagogíca proposal? April (2003) says yes and that it is part of the methodical rigor that Freire demands. In addition, it indicates that the "the curriculum cannot be a mold that varies according to the geographical situation and the ages of the students or current educational systems, it must have as a starting point that" there is no teaching without discort "(P.8)
“We have said that the school determines the course of life, in Latin curriculum. What is a curriculum? It is the way and way in which a life is passed. Who should be authorized to determine how we spend our life? For what types of life are there authorization and what others are not there? Who gives such a permission? If we admit that we are not authorized to determine our lives, why should others determine it?… ”(Roman cited by April, 2003, P.9).
The curriculum should be assumed from the liberating practice, making a recount of Paul What the curriculum would have:
First, the curriculum would have a reorientation to incorporate the principles of ecopedagogy, to generate the "planetary consciousness". And such a conception should be oriented in the elaboration of the contents and the didactic books, it must have a meaning from the daily life for the students and for the planet.
Second, educate for freedom, capable and intelligent human beings aware of their existence and with critical thinking that freely chooses its destiny.
Third, the generation of links. Starting from everyday life, he walks with a critical sense and the look and heart re -educate. New planetary citizens are generated that articulates ethics, citizenship, multiculturalism, mother earth, gender, peace. As Edgar Morin said by Gadotti (2003) ”it is necessary to ecologize everything for the discovery of planetarization”
Fourth, an ecopedagogy as education for planetary citizenship, is not limited to students, educators, is linked to the inhabitants of the Earth, insertion of the individual into the local-global community that interacts and generates commitment, it is a paradigm that covers the Natural ecology, social ecology and integral ecology.
Fifth, Ecopedagogy generating a social movement, by moving from real needs, critically analyzes transformative individual and collective action.
Finally it is concluded that if a sustainable planet was expected where climate change is just a call for attention. Education has to leave the indoctrinating mandate and assume the Ecopedagogíca proposal, without disconnecting it from the formation of critical thinking, individual and collectively developed from everyday life. It has to be holistic, generate solidarity, knowledge must be transformed into opportunities and have to develop a planetary ethical awareness over all diversities of lives and limit extractivism to preserve the planet and our existence.
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