Scientific Education and Environmental Education: Towards an Ecoscientific Education

Abstract

Current theoretical reflection and practices on the links between scientific education and environmental education take place in the context of the evolution of these two educational fields. On one hand, scientific education often adopts a science-technology-environment perspective and is progressively integrating a new culture of science that takes into account the complexity and contextual nature of reality, the limits of uncertainty and the issues of risk, the diversity of epistemological posture and the social dimensions of scientific activity. On the other hand, the field of environmental education has been enriched over the last decades with a diversity of currents (different ways of envisioning and carrying out environment education) ; some of them have a longer history (such as the naturalist or conservationist currents), while others correspond to more recent and are based on a socio-ecological vision of environmental realities (like the bioregionalism or the socially critical currents). Each of these currents may call in some way for a scientific approach to environmental realities, thus scientific education and environmental education can be intertwined in various complementary ways. The first part of this paper explores some of these contrasting possibilities for the development of what could be called "ecoscientific education". Then a case study focusing on the agro-food system illustrates some issues raised in/by such an education, in particular concerning the relationship between knowledge, ethics and politics.