EED2601 Environmental Education

Summary:

This assignment focuses on the importance of Environmental Education (EE) in building a fair, participative, and diverse society. EE aims to promote critical reflection and challenge dominant economic and homogenizing rationality. It encourages communities to legitimize their knowledge, produce and share knowledge, and participate in decision-making. The objective is to create a new social rationality that is environmentally conscious.

Environmental education emphasizes the responsibility of individuals and communities in understanding and caring for the natural and human-made environment. It aligns with Law 99 of 1993, establishing the Ministry of the Environment and the National System of the Environment. It incorporates environmental education into teaching plans and programs at all levels of education. The goal is to foster sustainable ways of life by exploring, exploiting, utilizing, and managing natural resources appropriately.

One of the key objectives of EE is to help individuals and communities comprehend the complexity of the environment, considering biological, physical, chemical, social, economic, political, and cultural factors. By acquiring knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and abilities, individuals can participate responsibly and ethically in addressing climate change and ensuring environmental conservation.

To achieve these objectives, environmental education requires a multidimensional approach. It involves permanent educational actions that connect students with their communities, fostering values and attitudes that promote transformative behaviour. It also emphasizes intersectoral and inter-institutional coordination to engage various sectors and civil society organizations working on environmental issues.

Excerpt:

EED2601 Environmental Education

MODULE CODE: EED2601
ASSIGNMENT NUMBER: 02
UNIQUE NUMBER: 308798

1.1. Environmental Education is constituted in a fundamental process oriented to the search for alternative ways
to construct a different, fair, participative and diverse society. Regarding the emphasis on behaviour, we assume that Environmental Education must promote processes to build new social rationality. Processes of critical reflection, of questions of the dominant economic and homogenizing rationality that enable the various communities to legitimize their knowledge vis-à-vis the hegemonic, pool it, produce and appropriate knowledge to participate, self-manage and decide autonomously. Today we have the opportunity and the challenge of thinking about future, possible and constructible scenarios, to manage accordingly and based on collective participation in decision-making processes.