Social Harmony: Civic and Environmental Education

Posted on Dec 11, 2024 in Social sciences

Item 4: Potpourri Issues

Civic Education

Life in common: Human existence must have meaning, a direction that we define and build together, so we must:

• Reject indoctrination, dogmatism, and fundamentalism.
• This does not mean choosing a vacuum (anything goes).
• Peaceful coexistence must be based on ethics (not morals, as coexistence is impossible without ethics) and be minimal (minimal in order to be accepted by all).
• Ethics → Minimum common denominator of the human

Together. Implications:

The Council of Europe recommends the acquisition of basic skills to live and participate in society (implications):

• Knowledge of democratic institutions and functioning.
• Participation, cooperation, etc. in society. Education must teach values to substantiate citizen coexistence.

Democratic Society and Citizenship

Citizenship: Governance of coexistence, not from a central authority, but as the work of all who participate in it.

Meanings:

• Proper and respectful behavior between insiders and outsiders.
• Public culture of coexistence (V. Camp).

Citizenship as proper and respectful behavior: reference to the procedural aspect, the ways of acting.

Citizenship and public culture of coexistence: reference to ways to proceed with a moral (not just procedural) code. In this context, the rules are expressions of principles, values, beliefs, and attitudes towards others. Civility makes rules that govern situations.

Democracy

Democracy is defined:

• Depending on the type of government: “People’s government for the people.”
• Referring to the style of life: Defense of human rights and of minorities.

At the root of all genuine democracy is the protection of the Rights of Man and, therefore, of minorities, thus overcoming the classical definition of democracy “government of the people for the people.”

Democratic life involves:

• Primacy of common interests over individual ones.
• Respect for the norms (laws, rights of others) of others and ourselves.
• Commitment (active involvement).
• Information.
• Collaboration.
• Decision-making.
• Participation (political parties, NGOs, educational institutions, volunteering).

Democracy cannot establish value-neutrality or unique value relativism. What would be the basis for transmitting civic values in education? The constitution must guarantee certain values that are derived from or based on the universality of human rights.

Citizenship Education

Areas:

• Being: individual dimension.
• Good citizenship: social dimension.

Being a good citizen involves values such as self-esteem, autonomy, solidarity, effort, etc.

Citizenship:

• Means not only acceptance.
• It is not just socializing.
• It’s not like civility or good manners.
• It does not involve taxation, but acceptance and participation.
• Involves living humanely (living well).

Coexistence and Conflict Management in the Classroom

Current Status of “School Violence”

It is a global problem. Reducing school violence to bullying. Methodological differences make comparisons difficult, but there are trends:

• Varying degrees of incidence.
• More frequent events of moderate severity.
• Predominance of the male gender.
• The risk age group is between 12-16 years.
• Recess is usually the place of highest incidence.
• Tendency to conceal.

Current Situation in Spain:

• Types of aggression:
  • There are different classifications.
  • Threats, physical abuse.
  • Stealing, sexual harassment.
  • Different percentages in the studies.
• Reactions:
  • 25% of victims do not communicate.
  • 90% of peers are informed.
  • Half do nothing because it is not their problem (21%) or do not know what to do (32%).
• Teacher’s actions (dialogue, mentoring, guidance, family, director, council).
• Other areas of interest:
  • Continuity during the school year (60%).
  • 16% are tolerant of violence.
  • Aggressors in the same class or higher.
  • Adverse effects in the short and long term.

The picture in Spain does not achieve the rates of other countries, but the deterioration of school life is remarkable, demonstrating the urgent need for comprehensive education focusing on values and the whole person.

What Do We Mean by School Violence?

Violence: a learned act, avoidable, with negative effects, non-negotiable, accidental or intentional.

Myth: a new phenomenon characteristic of the youth of today, exclusive of school, those who attack, apparently with a higher frequency and severity against other schools and whose effects are so devastating that they require urgent, drastic, and, of course, effective measures.

Features: it is learned experientially, avoidable, intentional, improper use of power, cultural (value-negative value), complex (multicausal and masked), and negative.

What Do We Mean by Aggression?

Aggressiveness: natural impulse that gives courage and bravery, guaranteed our survival, it is not a priori negative.

Features: natural drive (not learned), there is positive or negative, constructive or destructive aggression. Aggression = Act of aggression. Hurt = Violence.

What Do We Mean by Discipline?

Indiscipline: attitude and/or learned behavior that breaks the rules of the school, are very common and milder.

Features: acquired. Its main feature is the breaking of rules, it is subjective, but common and potentially harmful. Disruption = school indiscipline. Indiscipline ≠ violence.

What Do We Mean by Bullying?

Bullying: physical and psychological violence among students with particular characteristics: intentionality and continuity.

Characteristics: it is a form of school violence, it could be done by an attacker or multiple assailants on a victim (object of repeated attacks), asymmetric relationship, intentional and continued manifestation of aggression.

What Do We Mean by Conflict?

Conflict: confrontation of ideas or interests, real or apparent, inevitable, is not negative and may be appropriate or inappropriate aggression.

Features: This is a real act, necessary (positive), not always resolvable, subjective, unpredictable, global, a process.

How do we perceive the conflict?

Myths: something negative, something to avoid, isolates and separates people as enemies, synonymous with violence, educational resource, inevitable, defend opposing views, different concepts.

Positive perception: problem-solving, learning values (dialogue, cooperation), higher level of reasoning, to overcome social prejudice, self-knowledge.

Why Do Conflicts Occur?

• Social factors: changing society (detraditionalization of men), excessive individualism, supremacy of instrumental reason vs. ethical-moral criteria, cultural globalization (inequality), culture of the ephemeral and transient (material and personnel), consumption of substances which promote the loss of control, political extremists (terrorism).
• Media: generalization of the media, agents of socialization (family and school) main function is to inform and entertain, loaded with violence (exposure time), negativity of “trash TV” (monitoring and control). Myths: the TV is the cause of violence and the TV has no effect on its receivers.
• Schools:
  • Characteristics of the school system: free and compulsory education, participatory and democratic discipline, non-exclusivity of knowledge, a tendency to blame the school.
  • Organizational aspects: size of the center, lack of stability in the equipment, redeployment of teachers.
  • Aspects of school climate: bureaucratic and regulated facilities, overloaded in content, lack of student social controversy (intolerance), student diversity.
  • Aspects of the teacher: attitudes toward conflict (exogenous or endogenous variables), authoritarian teaching (structural violence), discriminatory treatment, support equipment, and diversification measures.
• Relationships:
  • Positive relationships: personal and social development, building of knowledge, attitudes and values learning, communication skills, building identity, self-concept, and self-esteem.
  • Negative relationships: the influence of violent children, hierarchical relationships, popular vs. rejected, school refusal intentional rejected child = aggressor, victim = rejected child.
• Personal characteristics: need for power, physical characteristics (strength), mental illness (psychoticism), tend to be impulsive, low/high self-esteem, male gender, age (12-16 years), emotional instability.

Where to Act?

Family, school, social environment, peer group.

How to Act? Pedagogical Approaches

Value-enhancing behaviors in students.

• Promote respectful interpersonal relationships.
• Promote a school climate and harmonious family.
• Reflecting on their own behavior and encourage self-control.
• Learning to read the emotions on the other.
• Know how to listen.
• Encourage empathy and compassion for the other.
• Learning to manage conflicts peacefully.

Learning Standards:

• Importance of standards in society.
• Concept of standards.
• Promote democratic processes and inductive establishment of standards.
• Self-control and autonomy in compliance.
• Assembly group.
• The consequences of non-compliance: their own and others.
• Establishment of penalties for non-compliance.
• Participation in the development of standards.

Learning to live together, learn to be disciplined, participatory, engaged, respectful, responsible.

Social skills:

• Communication skills – to promote spaces for dialogue.
• Learn to express feelings and read them.
• Assertiveness.
• Discovery of body language.
• Dialogue: learn to respect others even before speaking.

Education responsibility:

• Nobody is indifferent.
• Respect for people independent of their ideas, beliefs, culture.

Building self-esteem:

• Get to know each other better.
• Positively value what we have to learn to appreciate the positive in others.
• Admitting the possibility of change.

Cooperation between families and schools.

• Shared contexts, it is necessary to interact.
• Integrated educational activities, global (no one is exempt).
• Importance of emotion in the family.
• Agree on educational activities.

Paradigms to Be Considered in Environmental Education

The Difficult Relations Between Human Beings and Nature. Concept of Sustainability.

The relationship between man and nature has always been complicated, but in recent years has increased the difficulty resulting in the so-called “environmental crisis” based on the unlimited destruction of nature.

As a conclusion from this comes the concept of sustainability or sustainable development (compatible with the progressive development while respecting and preserving the environment).

Sustainability Model Focused on Physical and Natural Aspects of the Environment

The sensitivity for environmental problems, mainly due to increased global pollution, begins in the 60s and 70s.

International agreements are reached to prevent marine pollution and become aware of the problem of depletion of natural resources.

They begin to use concepts such as quality of life.

The first “United Nations Conference on Environment” establishes the need for environmental protection worldwide.

The “Stockholm Conference” proposed to develop global environmental education programs.

Conclusion: the idea that economic development is possible based on an unlimited optimistic attitude to the problems in finding that it is in possession of the means to solve them. This marks the birth of a new awareness to the environmental degradation and conservation concern.

Sustainability Model Focusing on the Conservation and Protection of Natural Resources, Fauna and Flora

It starts between 70 and 80.

It is based primarily on:

• Awareness of the need to protect the environment.
• Approach to global environmental problems.
• Protecting the planet.
• Approach close to the idea that economic growth is unlimited.

In consequence to the ideals of this model, there were necessary changes, the most important were reflected in:

• The creation of the Third Community Action Programme for the environment.
• First amendment to the Treaty of Rome through the Single European Act (Title VII “Environment”).
• The development of the Brundtland report “Our Common Future.”
• The development of a resolution on education in the environment, the ministers of the EEC of Education.

In conclusion, this model proposes:

It is necessary to protect the global environment, creating environmental intervention programs, development of a preventive environmental policy, encouraging education on the environment, reduce pollution.

New Ethic of Sustainability. Model of Human Development

“United Nations Conference” (1992) in Rio de Janeiro (Earth Summit) on Environment and Development, agreed on a comprehensive strategy for sustainable development from global cooperation (environment is a right for all humans).

“EU Treaty” (1992) to integrate the concept of sustainable development within the Sector Policy of the European Union. The principles include:

1-Pollution Prevention.

2-Integration into European and national legislation requirements relating to the environment. 3-pollution prevention measures at national and community levels.

It proposes a comprehensive and constructive approach to the integration of environmental requirements, and shared responsibility in the various sectoral policies.

In 1997 is the “Treaty of Amsterdam” strengthen the idea of sustainable development as an obligation on members of the EU.

“Summit of Luxembourg” (1997) in trying to establish a strategy for implementing the requirements of “Treaty of Amsterdam.”

With the “Agenda 2000” to provide the EU’s financial framework or budget to implement the “Kyoto Protocol” to reduce greenhouse gases in the period 2008/12.

In 2002, the EU urges the formation of councils in education, tourism, research, health to develop strategies that integrate environmental considerations into their actions.

Education as an engine for sustainable development. Based on the Resolution (57/254), the UN, aims to improve the quality of education taking into account the importance of sustainable development with emphasis on education is an indispensable element for achieving success in this regard.

The environmental problem is mainly a socio-moral problem.

We must not forget the care of the environment under any circumstances, in recent years man has focused on the maximum exploitation of the land regardless of the consequences it can produce.

Concept of Environmental Education (EE)

During the 60s and 70s

Around the 60s is the starting point for this type of education, resulting in a sensitization to environmental degradation.

In the 70s, a period in which most clearly shows a serious global concern for the environmental conditions in the real world this awareness, a firm, used for the first time the concept of environmental education, with different conceptions (environmentalist, conservationist, naturalist, and green).

They begin to develop projects oriented approaches to ecology and natural sciences, thereby established the basic principles of EA are: “Interaction between society and environment-development.”

During the 80s and 90s

In the 80s EA is formalized in government programs worldwide generalized concern for the environment.

In Spain, the creation of the autonomous state is when there are many of the programs and activities using the label “environmental education”. Following the signing of the Moscow Conference in 1987, when the “boom” naturalist, all public and private actions to strengthen their environmental education.

In the 90s environmental education at its best, accepting the name Education for sustainable development with emphasis on values, changes in attitudes, and implementation of sustainable behaviors.

Year 2000

In 2000, the concept itself goes to encompass:

• The poverty of the population
• Health
• Food Security
• Democracy
• Human Rights
• Peace

Complementing the environment of course, committed to a sustainable society, ethics, and morals, always starting from the culture as fundamental.

What to Do?

Environmental education involves taking into account not only the classic problems related to pollution or discharges, energy conservation, awareness of the value of water, preservation of nature but also the social, cultural, and economic determinants have become. The key is to choose a model of sustainable development.

What should we and can we do?

MORAL-ETHICAL

Awareness among the masses of the importance of caring for our planet is the most complicated and most important thing to do because it depends on everything else.

Learn to respect other living things that inhabit this planet.

SCIENTIFIC-TECHNICAL

Encourage the use of renewable energy, trying to preserve what we know will not last forever and that belongs to everyone.

Avoid the use of energy to be more aggressive to the environment.

Recycle plastics, paper, and packaging classified in order to be renovated and used in other applications.

Educational Proposals

The guidelines we follow to develop an environmental culture are:

• Equip citizens to protect and conserve natural resources, to admire and love all forms of life as a whole.
• Be aware that “concern for others included very first of the care and improvement of the environment in which everyone, now and tomorrow, we are called to live.”
• “Decommodifying” relationships.
• Claiming the culture of gift in consideration of the goods of nature.
• First Commandment: human beings should remain, and with it the nature.

Orientations.

He drives a moral competence in individuals to develop a new environmental culture so that rational competition amounts to moral competence.

We promote a new environmental thinking, where the dialectic and rational relationship bear a common relationship between them.

Finally, we find how the human being becomes a person responsible for maintaining the different conditions of life of all human beings. On this last point are as different definitions of pedagogy:

• Pedagogy with its main research objective is education.
• And the environmental education study aimed at the sustainability of human beings.

Changing lifestyle: at this point, citizens are responsible for their behavior become aware that the “other” and “others” can not be indifferent.

Actions leading to the common good: take the ethical and political commitment of the social and natural environment goes beyond the classroom walls.

Features:

Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity is the quality of interdisciplinary (what is done with the cooperation of various disciplines). Interdisciplinarity implies the existence of a set of disciplines related to each other and with defined relationships, which prevent developing their activities in isolation, dispersed, and fragmented.

• Cause-effect chain
• Global sense.
• Internationalism.
• New ethics.
• Action

Intercultural Education

Situation

Historic moment of great change. Complexity of our present.

Insecurity of where we go.

Perplexity before the crisis.

Awareness of transition, cultural crossroads.

Uncertainty.

From Modernity to Postmodernity. Path

Currency:

• Foundation: Renaissance transition.
• Consolidation: S: XVII. Anthropocentric human.
• Features: reason and myth. Strong reason, sure, infallible.

S: XVII: Age of Reason.

S: XVIII: Enlightenment (Fig. → Society rational / Period of emerging science.)

Statements own enlightened modernity:

• Emancipation of man: self-liberation through reason and self-criticism.
• Idea of progress conviction that humankind is moving towards the best of natural (emancipatory sense of history).
• Rousseau: “The historical development, nor has it been positive, nor is it automatic.” → Ambivalence of man and the historical-cultural reality.

Enlightenment. Achievements:

• Parliamentary democracy.
• Education affordable to all.
• Declaration of human rights within the framework of the French Revolution.
• Self-criticism: critical radicalization of a socio-cultural development based on economic exploitation (Marx), the psychological repression (Freud) and in the dynamic domain-bonded (Nietzsche).

Bankruptcy of the modernist project (S crisis: XX)

Experience irrational barbarism (1st and 2nd World War).

• Enlightenment ideals are traumatically denied (evident in the experience of Nazi barbarism).
• Clashes between blocks
• Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is promoted by:

• Awareness of the paradoxes pointed.
• Crisis of instrumental reason.

Crisis of instrumental reason. Consequences:

• Relativism, skepticism, crisis of values or lack of fundamental values.
• Emergence of fundamentalism.
• Search for magic solutions to problems.

Source: awareness of the serious threat posed model of modern civilization itself.

Features:

• Major changes from the ideology and economics.
• Consumer capitalism (focused on production).
• Changing social structure.
• Paro.
• Ecological crisis.
• Fall of Soviet regimes and the emergence of new post-communist societies (savage capitalism).
• Global threat.
• Cult of the body.
• Advance and retreat mixture of racism and xenophobia.

Attitudes to the Situation of Postmodernity

Postmodernists (Lyotard, Vattimo):

• Modernity with all its symbolic ideas, has failed.
• Failure of reason as a universal guide “has produced monsters”

Subjectivism, SPECIAL, moral relativism (polytheism axiological).

Reillustrated (Apel, Habermas)

• Modernity has failed but not a finished project.
• Defense dialogical reason aware of its limits. As an evaluative moral reason.

MAY APPLY (not shown or warrant), an emancipatory sense HISTORY FROM THE ETHICS.

Before the crisis, intends to revert to the values that promote the humanization against senseless.

Humanistic Key to Intercultural Education

Reaffirmation of the concrete individual in his humanity as a value.

Consideration of democracy as a value and the founding values of democracy.

Values, the key humanistic approach and guidance for education.

Values own “ethos” democratic (Pérez Tapias).

• Disclaimer: reverse side of freedom.
• Dialogical tolerance: to advance the common citizenship.
• Reasonableness: prudent exercise of reason.
• Consistency: Agreement between thought and action.
• Honesty: result of sincerity and honesty.
• Austerity: to address inequities.
• Availability: generosity to compromise.
• Participation: self-implication.
• Esperanza at risk.
• Affirmation of the “sense” trust opposes the anguish of the senseless.

Culture. Concept and Characteristics

Traditional Society: compact and structured

Information Society: hypercommunicative and heterogeneous.

• Globalization and immigration are two global phenomena. Paradoxes
• Multicultural face of pressure homogenizer.
• Hyper-versus isolation, isolation, and exclusion.
• Misunderstanding of social events address a large amount of information.
• Tolerance towards fundamentalism.

Concept of Culture:

There are two current trends in the way of understanding culture:

• Set of goals or productions that human beings have been formed by itself or along your life.
• Set of meanings through which we interpret reality. Are a frame of meanings, symbols that affect us and allow us to understand reality and also are unique to each culture.

Culture: A set of persistent and shared meanings acquired through membership of a particular group who have to interpret environmental stimuli as representations attitudes and behaviors valued by the community. Meanings that tend to project into production and behavior consistent with it. Culture is clearly not only in abstractions or superstructures, but tend to be translated into real life. Some of these meanings are commonly valued.

Features:

• Is to bring the learning gained.
• Active role of the individual.
• Assimilation or accommodation of cultural action in the person.
• Two functions (Bullivant)

Expressive function.

Function instruments.

Importance of human culture:

Becoming human is to become an individual and become individuals guided by cultural patterns for historically created systems of meaning under which form, order, sustain, and direct our lives. And cultural patterns are not general but specific. (Geertz, 1997).

Multiculturalism and Interculturalism

Multiculturalism: “coexistence” permanence of their cultural values, mosaic society.

Interculturalism: integration, renounce the “accidental” and recognize values in others, building a new society.

Violence of culture:

• The cultural diversity is not a problem.
• Cultural homogenization is not an act of violence.
• Paradox: detribalization vs retribalization.
• Symbolic violence

Values, customs, traditions, language, religion.

Refuse to share the welfare situation.

Rejection of person singular.

Cultural racism, defined as fear or danger of social collapse, for others to reduce their own cultural identity.

• The other requires us to recognize their existence and way of life.

Attitude towards cultural diversity:

• Entrocentrismo: when considering one’s own culture as a yardstick for other cultures.
• Cultural relativism, positive recognition of cultural value. Each community or town is entitled to recognition as a cultural value.
• Proactive position open: Focuses on the common to the cultures and not in dispute. Recognizes the existence of a set of core values about life and physical integrity common to all cultures.

Cultural Integration

Integration:

• Implicit declaration of interests to be translated into action and not a politically correct discourse.
• Represents a personal achievement.
• Requires creating a new society, based on common values (Malouf, 1999).
• Appropriating the common political culture without sacrificing the lifestyle of their culture (Habermas, 1999).
• Constant evaluation of one’s own culture to determine what is relevant.

Integration: the response to foreign or immigrant must be an ethical response, otherwise it will be a life full of suffering and exploitation. Therefore, cultural policy and intercultural education, must be based necessarily on human rights.

Intercultural Education

Open-model: integration.

Find the value of each culture.

It means another way of understanding education.

Intercultural education should be based necessarily on values education.

INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION-OTHER: ethical and moral approach = accept others.

The Practice of Intercultural Education. Pedagogical Approaches

→ Proposals teaching:

• The integration of all in the classroom and society demands, above all, a change in attitudes.
• Changing attitudes requires identifying those factors that influence the rejection of different cultures, in the classroom and in society.
• The integration of all in an integrated society is closely linked to a paradigm shift in intercultural education.
• The integration of all in society must be done both at school and in the family.
• The integration of all in society requires an education in responsibility, that is, a moral education.
• The integration of different ethnic and cultural involves the development of dialogue and communication skills.
• The integration of all in society demands a political and social education.