Teachers’ Ideas and Educational Experiences Regarding Urban Environmental Sustainability in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

Teachers’ actions in sustainable development are guided by a way of conceiving the environment. This study sought to account for the ideas and experiences of teachers in education for sustainable development in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. Based on a qualitative study with an interpretive approach through an open questionnaire, the aim was to investigate educational proposals developed in institutions on urban environmental sustainability that allow the articulation of SDGs 4 and 11. The results intersect with the proposal of sustainability typologies from the epistemological, axiological, and ontological components. The findings showed that environmental training involves both the understanding of relationships and problems and the proposal of alternatives that allow us to offer new horizons as a possibility to build and promote other ways of being and developing, individually and collectively, in the places we inhabit and that we contribute to the world. This requires rethinking education, strengthening pedagogical proposals, and developing other alternatives to educate ourselves socio-environmentally, to train responsible citizens, and to achieve sustainable societies. Understanding the perceptions and practices of teachers in regard to sustainability can contribute to defining priority lines of research, proposing educational guidelines for teacher training, and guiding the development of public policies for curricular greening from a critical perspective. This makes it possible to promote educational actions to consolidate citizen training.