In search for environmental education sustainability

Abstract

The concepts of identity, community, dialogue, power of acting and happiness are the five pillars which, in the understanding of the Laboratory of Education and Environmental Policy (OCA) of the Superior School of Agriculture “Luiz de Queiróz” of the University of São Paulo (ESALQ/USP), promote the sustainability of educational processes. Such concepts have been reviewed here in the light of transdisciplinary approaches and interwoven by the group of OCA researchers throughout one year of collective studies. The concept of community has been brought about in dialogues with Boaventura de Souza Santos, Manuel Castells, Zygmunt Bauman, Carlos Rodrigues Brandão and Enrique Leff’s texts, among others. The search for the communitarian sense, from Collective Educators’ networks committed to the construction of sustainable societies, is the expression of a radically inclusive democracy, with governance and governability pacts which guarantee the strengthening of collective and individual identities. In face of identities threatened by globalization and many multi-identities and individualisms forged by modernity, Environmental Education searches for, in individual-planet dialectics and in I-Thou dialogue put forth by Martin Buber, to inquiry into mutual perceptions, which allow the flow of meaning and the acknowledgement of our basic presuppositions, as approached by David Bohm. The unfolding exercise outlined by Eda Tassara inserts the subject into the social context as an educational agent, empowered politically to emancipatory social transformations, as dealt with by Paulo Freire. The subject’s power of acting, consequent to this pro cess, arises from their collective participation in the so called “good encounters”, under Espinosa’s eyes, resulting in the so pursued happiness. Happiness, in its turn, is considered as an outcome of the expression of three components: pleasure, originated in engagement, but with a meaning. Here such meaning is comprehended in the knowledge confluence and cultural exchange between West/East, in which the cultivation of values/virtues give rise to the liberating, unifying and transforming silence, as in Krishnamurti’s words. Finally, with Fernando Pessoa’s verses, this conceptual cycle ends where it first started, where love is not-thinking, and whenever we feel in totality is that we will be able to, one day, know happiness. .