Environmental Education and Biodiversity Concern: Beyond the Ecological Literacy

Abstract

This is a review article on environmental education. The focus of the discussion is the relationship between environmental education and Biodiversity concern and the emergence of the concept of Biodiversity education. The position described here configures as a disagreement of the insertion of these innovative terminology, defending the maintenance of the term environmental education and its general framework, reserving to Biodiversity concern a position of one issue to be coped by environmental education. The general framework for environmental education arises from documents of the main international conferences, such as The Belgrado Charter, resulted from the international workshop on environmental education, the recommendations of the intergovernmental conference on environmental education held in Tbilisi and the treaty on environmental education for sustainable societies and global responsibility, in Rio de Janeiro. The present discussion also reject the criticism that environmental education is not enough socially relevant and interdisciplinary and it brings back those recommendation from the conference of Tbilisi which addressed goals for environmental education. These highlighted goals are relative to the encouragement of those ethical, economic and aesthetic values, the provision of a wide range of practical skills required in the devising and application of effective solutions to environmental problem, by linking educational processes to real life. Ecological literacy is considered limited if analyzed in its isolated form and it is defended that environmental education should go beyond a simple ecological literacy. Some concepts such as empowerment and some theoretical-methodological approach such as dialogical problem-posing can help environmental education to correctly accomplish its goals and principles. A Brazilian experience on production of a didactic material known as Probio-EA for its Ministry of Environment is commented in means of the accomplishment to this theoretical proposition.