Research Collective on Environmental Education in Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean

Our history

FORMATION OF THE COLLECTIVE

The collective was formally consolidated through a bilateral agreement between two universities (the Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero and the Universidad de Tolima), to which the other member universities joined. This is the result of four years of work, which began in 2016, with the initiative of the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and inspired by more than 15 years of work by EArte Brazil (available at: http://earte.net/).

HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

To justify the relevance and importance of the Collective and its objectives, it is necessary to recall some of the history of environmental education. Latin America has over 30 years of experience in environmental education, with numerous reflections, theoretical contributions, and fieldwork at all educational levels throughout the continent. This region was the only one to implement the United Nations' suggestions to create an Environmental Training Network, consolidated in 1982 (Sáenz, 2012). The work done here was fundamental in forming, promoting, and supporting national initiatives in environmental education (Corbetta, 2019; Eschenhagen, 2016; Foladori and González Gaudiano, 2001).

Over these decades, environmental education has consolidated as an important field of knowledge, with universities being a significant space for the production and reproduction of this knowledge. At the same time, for a field of knowledge to strengthen and improve, it requires critical reflections, which cannot occur without a minimum systematization of what has been produced. Thus, exploring the work done by Brazil, which since 2000 has been collecting and systematizing a database of master's and doctoral theses that address the relationship between educational processes and the environment, contributions, and research advances, serves as a perfect example to follow (http://earte.net/). In other words, for Latin America to continue strengthening its environmental education, an indispensable input will be having a specialized database to track the produced knowledge and conduct meta-research.

From that point on, the Brazilian experience inspired the formation of a seminal Latin American group aimed at expanding this already existing database to other countries. Thus, in 2016, within the framework of the Latin American Research Seminar organized by the Pontifical Bolivarian University, with the support of UNEP, committed researchers from various universities in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia and Brazil, were invited to initiate this project.

FIRST STEPS

The first step was the conduction of a international seminar titled "The knowlandge production in the university: methodologies and politics of research" to socialize and present the trajectory of the work already done by Brazil, as well as to thematize and theoretically reflect on what constitutes a state of the art. This exercise was very important to agree upon and clarify a common methodology, already based on Brazil's trajectory and experience, and to design a work route for all the groups from the different universities. The seminar resulted in a research book in which two chapters were published on what is a state of the art (Eschenhagen et al., 2018).

In its early stages – and this is very important to point out – the work done was the product of the interest, initiative, and willingness of all the researchers, in their "free" time, as it was still not formalized in research projects, and much less recognized by the respective universities in their work hours. However, as searches were concretized and research specified and linked to student theses, the need to propose research projects to obtain the necessary support from universities became increasingly evident, which mostly still consist of work time rather than financial support.

Thus, the first results of the thesis search work began to emerge, and the need for a second meeting also became evident. This meeting took place in April 2019 at the University of Tolima (Colombia) and had two main objectives. The first was to share the preliminary results and, in doing so, foster a space for reflection on higher environmental education within the Seminar on Environmental Education in Latin American Universities: challenges, perspectives, and commitments, organized by the Collective. This space was also used to introduce the Collective and present its work, as well as to invite a broader audience to share their research around four axes of reflection identified by the Collective, based on the results, as necessary for strengthening the field of higher environmental education itself. These axes were: (1) challenges in environmental education research; (2) tensions within the field of environmental education; (3) the theoretical foundations of higher environmental education; and (4) the environmentalization of higher education. The second objective was to carry out intensive internal work, in a workshop format, aimed at consolidating the investigative efforts of the entire regional team. From this seminar emerged a book (currently in press) entitled Foundations and Theoretical Reflections for Thinking About and Advancing Higher Environmental Education.

At this stage of the collective research process, the need for formalization—understood as becoming an officially constituted Collective—became imminent. It was in this context that the Network Collective of Researchers in Higher Environmental Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (EArte ALyC) emerged, formalized through the signing of a memorandum of understanding among the different universities.