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.

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