Sustainability, emotions and environment. A Designed-Based Research in Science classes

MARTINENCO, REBECA MARIEL; MARTIN, ROCÍO BELÉN; GARCIA ROMANO, LETICIA; MANAVELLA, AGUSTINA MARÍA

Cross-cultural Comparison of Science Education

IGI Global

Año: 2025;

In the face of current environmental problems, the key to a sustainable approach lies ineducation (Šulc et al., 2020); emotionally sensitive pedagogies are needed to identifyresponsibilities, develop coping potential, and improve future expectations (Dunlop & Rushton,2022). It is necessary that Scientific Education promotes joint construction of environmentalskills expanded to the entire population so that people are actively involved in solutionsdevelopment (Reis, 2021). This environmental knowledge should prepare students to participate civically in socio-scientific issues because they are controversial aspects in the cultural, political, or moral sphere, affecting communities on a personal, regional or global level (Herman et al., 2020). In this context, Design-Based Research (DBR) was conducted which enabled new ways to think about 21st-century Scientific Education in Argentina, where social networks have relevance in students’ daily life and emotional and affective issues were taken into consideration in educational proposals.This idea of learning centered on a variety of environments and on a lifelong basis holds in an ecological perspective (Espósito et al., 2015). Learning ecologies are taken as an axis; they are understood as a set of contexts that give learning opportunities from the construction of knowledge through interaction (Barron, 2006). Here we present the analysis of a DBR study that was conducted in 2022 with Secondary Education students, who were studying the subject Environment, Development, and Society in a town in the province of Cordoba, Argentina, immersed in an area of intensive agriculture. The goal was to generate Environmental Education proposals that transcend traditional models of knowledge transmission, recognizing learning ecologies constructed by students and identifying emerging emotions in the process. In this sense, the importance of thinking about education for sustainability from sociocultural approaches is highlighted, due to the fact that sustainability is a cultural process that depends on daily human actions (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 2007, in Sabir Onat, 2022). Jadallah and Ballard (2021) and Stevenson (2022) explain that sociocultural approaches constitute new and valuable perspectives that enable education for sustainability to be addressed in a situated manner, attending to the local social, cultural and historical context as constitutive components of practices, experiences and socially constructed learning in environmental matters. This allows for collaboration among allmembers of a given community to solve problems based on local cultural knowledge and thecharacteristics of that culture.We worked from a DBR perspective, understood as an educational intervention that comes from a new academic tasks sequence that addresses new curricular areas, moderntechnologies or other interaction ways. The intention is to provide new knowledge to improve learning practices and to build theory to guide decision making and achieve better learning (Confrey, 2006, Anderson and Shattuck, 2012). According to these guidelines, a didactic sequence was created that joined together different contexts (social networks, traditional media, specialized publications, plant nurseries, general community) where students learn about the environment and environmental problems.In accordance with the Agenda for Sustainable Development which establishes 17 goals for people and the planet, such as ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns, halting biodiversity loss, and taking urgent actions to combat climate change and its effects, among others, important environmental problems for the region -where the institution is located- and for students’ life were worked: fast-fashion pollution, excessive use of plastics, wildfires and, agro-industrial waste (present in the region as peanut shell).We proposed a reflective task about this topic based on publications on social networks suchas Instagram and TikTok, which were used as triggers to motivate classroom discussion. Inthis way, learning constructed in formal and informal contexts, where students built knowledge,acted and thought as community members, is enabled (Kim and Dopico, 2016). ISBN en trámite. https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/7402