Interdisciplinarity in Environmental Education
In our activities and end-of-year trips The term “Environmental Education” was proposed by Thomas Pritchard in 1948, during the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Conference in Paris. Since then, its history has undergone defining moments, evolving from a dimension of knowledge to a critical necessity for achieving sustainability.
In many of the international events celebrated in the seventies, environmental education was recognized as a dimension of knowledge, given the complexity of the environment, which contains physical, social, cultural, and economic aspects.
At the World Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972), environmental education was established as an educational necessity aimed at all age groups as a response to the state of the environment.
The Rio Summit (nineteen ninety-two) had a fundamental significance for the development of environmental education by guiding it towards a change in mentality, ways of doing and being in order to achieve levels of sustainability and survival of human society.
Agenda 21, a document drafted at the meeting, states:
“Education is critically important for fostering sustainable development and increasing the capacity of populations to address environmental and development issues…”
In this sense, most of the definitions consulted on the term environmental education consider it a process of a primarily knowledge-generating nature, oriented towards developing environmental values and skills and fostering meritorious attitudes and skills in society regarding the environment.
This is reflected in Law 81 on the Environment, Article 8, where it is accepted as a:
“A progressive and permanent process that forms a dimension of the integral education of each and every citizen, aimed at ensuring that in the acquisition of knowledge, development of habits, skills, abilities and attitudes and in the training of values, the relationships between humans, and between them and the rest of society and nature, are harmonized, in order to promote the orientation of economic, social and cultural processes towards sustainable development”
Development
In the training of this professional, it is essential to link theoretical knowledge with practice due to the particular characteristics of the area of knowledge in which they are trained, which demands the integration of aspects of nature and society into the pedagogical process as an effective way to achieve the comprehensive training of the student.
In order to develop these elements in the different educational settings, educational excursions are presented as an effective form of organization in this work. These are defined as a form of organization and a means of evaluating the teaching and learning process of Biology, which takes place outside the classroom, under the direction of the teacher, with the purpose of relating the students to objects and phenomena in their natural or artificially created environment.
In this sense, this teaching activity has the following potential:
- They promote learning experiences that motivate the acquisition of scientific knowledge.
- They help to encourage a passion for studying Natural Sciences.
- They allow us to recognize the environment as the place to enjoy the beauty, diversity, and harmony of its components.
- They help schoolchildren to set and solve problems.
- They prepare schoolchildren for their participation in explorer camps.
- They contribute to the development of general and specific skills that they can add to their future life.
- They contribute to the development of inventiveness, collectivism, respect for different beliefs, and the appreciation of teamwork.
- They contribute to the expansion and deepening of the knowledge previously assimilated by the students.
- Aesthetic concepts and feelings are strengthened and systematized, along with love and interest in the knowledge of nature and the need to protect it.
It is essential to take into consideration that this is a form of organization relevant to other subjects as well as Geography, which provides essential elements of the content for its proper development.
This work aims to share the teaching experience that resulted from the development of the excursion with an interdisciplinary approach, with a view to developing educational skills in students training to become future Biology teachers, in order to develop environmental education in General Secondary Education.
“From living contemplation to abstract thought and from there to practice” has been one of the assertions made by Lenin that still survives with the greatest force in many educators, and precisely in the teaching excursions the aim is to contemplate what one wants to learn in order to make analyses, syntheses, inferences, meditations, interpretations and generalizations that allow one to reach an abstraction that gives rise to a term and later apply what has been learned in our daily work.
There are many teaching resources available to teachers in Cuban schools and universities today, from the traditional and always appropriate blackboard, books, the press in any of its forms, charts, photographs, diagrams, graphs, statistical tables, drawings, paintings, models, maps, spheres, samples of natural objects, computers, videos, TV, radio, recordings, and so on.
All are timely and accurate as long as the educator uses them correctly, in a timely manner, and achieves meaningful and developmental learning in his pupils, but in the teaching excursion the experience of what is learned is achieved, whatever the forms in which these excursions are carried out, that is, in a field practice or in nature, in a teaching journey or in a directed visit or other type.
Regarding the definition of interdisciplinarity in environmental education, the one expressed by Dr. Jorge Fiallo Rodríguez was taken as a reference, in which he addresses it as a process, a way of meditating and proceeding, which, by knowing the objective reality, allows one to solve any of the complex problems that it proposes.
Another aspect discussed revolves around the conditions for making interdisciplinarity possible, also taken from the same author, who proposes that these conditions are based on the competence that each teacher must have and the interest and motivation to carry out interdisciplinarity, the effective methodological work that the corporation must develop, where the management and technical bodies play a predominant role, which is in charge of the direction of the methodological work under the impact of community factors, coupled with the methodological preparation that universities must attend to in both Undergraduate and Postgraduate studies with the goal of developing in the teachers the interdisciplinary approach as a philosophy of work.
