Developing a socio-environmental pedagogy: research and action associated with dams

Abstract

This article is a result of the collective path of the Research and Action Group on Conflicts, Risks and Impacts Associated with Dams (CRIAB), in particular of its Thematic Group on Education and Society. For this paper, our main goal is to present the development process of a socio-environmental pedagogy that aims at communities affected by mining and water dams. Such pedagogy seeks to collaborate for a greater articulation between society and university towards the construction of ways to re-exist in these territories, from the understanding that education is a practice that can affect the material conditions of existence of social groups. We thus locate socio-environmental education as a critical pedagogical conception that targets the formation of subjects committed to socio-environmental justice and to the construction of another possible world. This work is based on Freirean pedagogy – here developed from the pedagogy of sustainability – and on historical materialism. The present proposal, composed of five articulated thematic axes (geological, geographical, sociological, environmental and political), will unfold in the structuring of a pedagogical plan that will take place collaboratively with those involved in the project and with local population. In view of the above, we present the principles of this non-formal extensionist education, as well as its method and forms of approach, focusing initially on theoretical-methodological explanations.