Schooling and environment in Latin America in the third millennium

Abstract

This article develops an historical and contemporary Latin‐American perspective on the issues raised by Stevenson’s 1987 article, ‘Schooling and Environmental Education: Contradictions in Purpose and Practice’. It shows that since its inception as a pedagogical field in the 1970s, environmental education has faced many challenges and resistances in the educational systems of Latin America. An analysis of the competing and contradictory discourses of environmental education in developed and developing countries suggests that among other things, system inadequacies and malfunctions, social inequalities, the agendas of modernity and globalisation, and the hybridisation of the field (e.g. with Education for Sustainable Development, adult education, emancipatory educational and political traditions) continue to fissure the discursive identity and configurations of the field in Latin America. The article explores how this affects curricular reform and teacher professional preparation and development, in the context of a depleted conventional school curriculum and its growing inability to respond to the complex challenges of the present. Such a situation can be contrasted with deliberations on the potential articulations of environmental education with the everyday life of the community, a source of opportunity and more positive note on which the article ends.

The difference between being and having …

is between a society centered around persons

and one centered around things.

(Erik Fromm, 1976)

Notes

1. The notion of discourse used in this article is not just of a particular sum of words, but of meaningful linguistic and non‐linguistic constructions of society; it is a ‘totality’, never complete or sutured, whose signified and signifiers are constituted in diverse relations with other discourses.

2. Configuration is a notion used by several prominent writers (Bourdieu, Laclau, Ricouer, Foucault, Derrida, among others) with many different senses. By discursive configuration I am meaning a structural arrangement that shows the open, precarious, relational and dynamic nature that underlies any discourse.

3. In Latin American and Spanish politics, this term refers to the rule of local chiefs or bosses (caciques).

4. In Latin America and the Caribbean, popular and adult education are complex movements that were not often interrelated, and which were additionally characterised by a wide variety of traits, strategies and objectives. An essay collection compiled by Gadotti & Torres (1993) achieves an admirable synthesis of the successes and failures of popular and adult education during the second half of the twentieth century in the region. Environmental concerns were included later than these movements, and had a significant effect on them.

5. According to Moscovici, social representation is a systems of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function: first, to establish an order which enables individuals to orientate themselves in their material and social world and to master it; second, to enable communication to take place amongst members of a community by providing its members with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying the various aspects of their world, as well as their individual and group history (Moscovici, 1984).

6. ‘Depleted’ curriculum is meant in the sense of its unusual backlog in reference to technological advancement, and the explosion of knowledge in a world that is steadily globalised and segmented into different social classes. The curriculum has not responded to racial and gender differences, nor to regional markets that, each day, are farther from the dynamics of globalisation, making the curriculum literally foreign to the circuits of production, circulation and consumption of the world system. This has educational, social, economic and political repercussions: a wider educational gap, growth of poverty, unemployment, handicaps for international commerce, increase of social and family violence, and so on. Ours is basically a decadent curricular model of positivistic inspiration that has outlasted its historical and heuristic possibilities.