Educations

Edu - ISSN 2632-590X - © ISTE Ltd

Journal issues

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Recent articles

Prospects for education in the probable Anthropocene time: for a didactics of sustainability, a new tool for scientific socialization

At a time when media debates about schools are oscillating between a race to reform, a return to radicalism or even a fantasised former republican school, and when didactics - the fields of research and practice that aim to build a ’bridge’ between the sciences with explanatory aims and the appropriation of their results by a variety of audiences - are too often locked in technical debates and excesses, there is an urgent need to think about the expected changes from the point of view of content too, with a view to containing the endemic crisis of contemporary schools faced with a loss of meaning and clear aims. The science of sustainability, as an emerging academic trend, is therefore challenging the didactics of existing school subjects in terms of their content and methods, in a necessary updating in line with these academic developments. It offers these disciplines and their didactics an opportunity for renewal.

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Education in the Anthropocene era: continuities, disruptions, and specificities of research in the face of ecological and climate crises

We examine the specific contributions of education for the Anthropocene in the face of ecological and climatic crises in the context of environmental education on the one hand, and educational research on the other. The emergence of the current trend in education for the Anthropocene is positioned between education for, which is the result of political orders to the world’s education systems, and socially topical issues, which correspond to a current of research focused on renewing the relationship between science and society in education. Between permanence, rupture and continuity, education in the time of the Anthropocene questions the school form, taking into account contexts and territories and curricular legitimacies.

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Curricular developments in European higher education: a legal point of view on the “so-called” process of democratization

In a knowledge-based economy, the field of higher education is in high demand. This is to ensure a strong production capacity for globally competitive innovations. This geo-economic context upsets educational issues by requiring citizens to raise their level of skills and knowledge in a logic of performance. This study tends to show how the European Union relies on curricula to transform the democratization of higher education into a process of selection of human capital. It tends to show that curricular fragmentation is a strategy that draws its legitimacy from the meritocratic fiction, favoring in the background a massification of qualified human resources in a soft power perspective of the European model of the knowledge society.

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Political stakes of the internationalization of higher education curricula. Perspectives about the Erasmus + program for biosphere reserves

In a context of globalization, education and training are vectors for the dissemination of standardized academic knowledge, aimed at making nations and institutions adhere to the same values and curricular design. This article brings out the political issues of the internationalization of curricula via the ERASMUS programs aimed at third countries, here marroco and Lebanon. We will understand this questioning through a case study, the EduBiomed program, which is interested in the university training of actors in Mediterranean biosphere reserves. We will analyze the European Union’s internationalization strategies, the managerial challenges of training and research via projects, those of pluriculturalism in training, and those of the curricular fragmentation processes.

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Environmental education in rural areas: what role for farmers?

This article questions the role that farmers can play in environmental education aiming an ecological transition. Considering that farmers are key actors of environmental controversies, the article postulates that the study of the pedagogical practices they develop can contribute to renewing perspectives on environmental education and its implementation. Based on an inductive and exploratory approach, it describes and seeks to understand these pedagogical practices. In order to do so understanding the farming production system is essential. Through this dual description of agricultural and educational practices, this article highlights the important role of farmers promoting an environmentally friendly system in the territorial ecological transition. In conclusion, he highlights the limitations of these practices which have few collective dimensions and remain focused on the modification of individual behaviours and on a tourist audience.

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Editorial

Le numéro de la revue Educations a pour objectif d’aborder la question de l’éducation au développement durable dans un contexte international qui interroge le devenir de notre planète et de l’humanité (Dupuy,2004 ; Morin,2020). L’école se propose à plusieurs égards, de se saisir de cette thématique en premier lieu dans les curricula, à travers les " éducations à ", et en particulier celle relative au développement durable.

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Guidelines for Climate Change Education from an International Literature Review

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is currently preparing its sixth assessment report, which will be published in 2022, but previous reports have highlighted the very significant impact of anthropogenic climate change on the entire planet in the 21st century. In this context, recent studies are conceptualizing climate change education. This article presents the first French synthesis of these works. It highlights the importance of teaching that integrates personal, action and knowledge dimensions, and it proposes possible guidelines for thinking about climate change education in a school context.

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Historical insights: influence of ESD on the life and earth science (LES) curriculum: perspectives for teacher education in ESD

In what ways has education for sustainable development (ESD), as a new curricular context, influenced a school discipline, life and earth science (LES)? Our study is based on a diachronic analysis of the second year LES curricula from the 1990s to the present day (thematic, lexicometric analysis and analysis of didactic transposition times). The whole shows a regression of ecological knowledge in favour of the integration of hybrid knowledge linked to sustainable development (SD), a growing anthropocentrism and the opening of the discipline to social legitimacy. From this, we have drawn up guidelines for teacher training, in particular the importance of questioning the content of teaching, the relationship to knowledge, and of making the hidden curriculum explicit.

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Thinking about complexity to build the position of a sustainable development problem. Analysis of pupils work

If education for sustainable development, introduced in French programs since 2004, seems necessary to consider the complexity of the environmental, social and economic challenges of the twenty-first century at school, the form which would consist in inculcating behaviors in younger generations is questionable. From an emancipatory perspective, work on complex, fuzzy problems linked to sustainable development seems an interesting voice for students to engage in critical reflection and build collective solutions. How, then, to work with this type of problem? Can we educate in complexity without taking charge of the problems for the students?

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Is it possible to reconcile students’ commitment to the climate with their access to emancipatory knowledge and under what conditions?

Climate change is a major societal concern. By taking it into consideration, the official instructions subject the school to a double challenge: to make the students understand scientifically the reasons for it and to engage them in the fight to stop it. Is it possible, and under what conditions, to reconcile these objectives? Our contribution studies these questions by focusing on the greenhouse effect, which is studied at different levels of education and regularly mobilized by the media. Based on a media support and on extracts from textbooks, we show on the one hand that what is proposed tends to get rid of scientific explanations in order to go as fast as possible to prescription and action; on the other hand, that the reasoned commitment of students for the climate necessarily passes by the development of critical ways of thinking and thus to their access to emancipating knowledge.