Agenda 21 and the continuing education of teachers: moments of experiences to learn and socialize social and environmental actions

Abstract

The debate on the environment is one of the most heated in the world today, due to the environmental events that affect the lives of citizens. Socio-environmental conflicts are the challenge of understanding them and facing them with clear and comprehensive actions, and these “concerns” are poorly articulated with school content. Agenda 21 proposes to transform the concept of sustainable development into concrete actions through methodological purposes, for different levels of government. In Ijuí, RS, the local Agenda 21 started in 2007 with the challenge of integrating initiatives from different entities and the community in general. For a better interaction between the collective of schools, a Continuing Education Cycle in Environmental Education and Agenda 21 was proposed, which took place throughout 2014, with the participation of teachers of basic education in the municipality, to resume and develop a set of actions of socio-environmental education, as an instrument of humanistic training, responsibility and environmental sustainability. This paper reports this process taking national and local Agenda 21 as a theoretical and methodological framework, in line with the environmental policies of the different spheres of government. The workshops worked were: “Experiences with Nature”, Step by Step of Agenda 21, Educommunication, Leveling and conceptual deepening, “Little UN”, Earth Charter and School Agenda 21. These activities provided teachers with the understanding that pedagogical practice is human and, for this reason, it makes sense to privilege a humanizing dimension, enabling the construction of an education with socio-environmental relevance, collectively. In this sense, Environmental Education reflects two meanings: the (re) construction of the sense of humanization as a collective and interdependent process and (re) education for a new moment for humanity in its relationship with nature.