Problemas Socio ¿qué? Los problemas socioambientales y su concreción por el profesorado en formación

Abstract

21st century's societies face complex socio-environmental problems, derived from socioeconomic models that exploit people and natural resources by the same commercialization logic. Learning throught relevant problems is an essential option of content selection when educating critical, transformative citizenry committed to social and environmental justice. Learing throught socio-environmental problems is key to understand the present and future realities, to face them and to develope tools to act individually and collectively. We focus on the concept socio-environmental problems (SEP) and wonder about the specificities made by training educators (n = 79) about SEP. The objective is to identify the topics associated with them, and to compare them to social problems (SP) and environmental problems (EP) conceptions. Few differences are found between the conceptions of EP and SEP. On the contrary, representations about SP are more exclusive and are mainly related to social inequalities, poverty and gender inequalities. Gender issues are considered above all by women and non-binary people, and people with more environmental training establish more relationships between the social and environmental spheres. The concept of SEP is associated with a greater recognition of the complexities, and the projection of actions and participation, for which we demand the normalization of its use and advocate collaborative work between the didactics of the natural and social sciences to generate analysis models for SEP.

Trainee Teachers’ Perceptions of Socio-Environmental Problems for Curriculum Development

“…The autonomous or active teaching model gives greater prominence to pupils and their relationship with the environment, with procedural proposals predominating. Finally, the critical model introduces relevant social problems, thinking about the future and promoting social change (Canals and González-Monfort 2011;Cebrián et al 2021;Massip et al 2021) to foster "the formation of reflective, critical and creative thinking, the analysis of values and social practices, and learning about decision making and problem solving" (Canals and González-Monfort 2011, p. 53).…”

“…However, the success of the new curriculum framework will be determined by the issues raised during teacher training, since initial training is essential to generate competent teachers for curricular development that includes environmental problems also from a social perspective (Moya and Zubillaga del Río 2020;López 2021;López-Fernández and Oller 2019), as is proposed for the training of students from other fields of knowledge (Boca and Saraçlı 2019). Therefore, it is important to start from the perceptions of trainee primary and secondary school teachers regarding the SDGs in a broad sense, and particularly with regard to the environment and climate change that we are experiencing on a global scale, as well as the role of environmental education (Tahsin 2003;Boon 2010;Fuster et al 2021; Ministerio de Educación 2022; Massip et al 2021;Medina and Castro 2021;Mosothwane 2002).…”