Weaving the threads of environmental education: the subjective and the collective, the thought and the lived

Abstract

The assumption behind this essay is that, throughout its history, environmental education constituted a narrative of its own. Some conceptually polysemic words such as nature, participation, solidarity, cooperation, autonomy, interdisciplinarity, and, more recently, sustainability, transdisciplinarity, and transversality are fundamental to Environmental Education, and are part of its lexicon or semantic network. The objective is to analyze the fields of meaning produced by some of these terms and the fabric of interrelations between the subjects and their discursive practices, refusing the doctrine of the unity of reason and of a unitary subject aiming at the goal of perfect coherence. Since language is shaped inside a culture, it traverses the individual and the collective, the subjective and the cultural; in the case of Environmental Education, it is teeming with senses and meanings from an emergent paradigm, from new modes of sensibility between utopists and utopias. It is a goal here to understand if, in fact, Environmental Education, in the name of emancipation, opposes the liberal project of an "educating reason", of a knowledge-regulation, of a universal education based on universal methods, analyzing in a complex way the social function of generalist and/or denouncing narratives. Both the positive potential and the analytic and strategic limits of the narratives that manifest themselves in a self-referential way were considered. The central and conclusive concern is: can the daily practices that demand initiatives and follow-up make sense and create fields of interface to the exercise of an Environmental Education?