The sustainability paradigm (original) (raw)

Building sustainable societies depend on sensitive and complex changes in different spheres, from the personal (including perceptions, values, attitudes, behaviors and relationships) to the planetary (considering the interactions between political, cultural, environmental, social, economic components, among others). The so-­called "local to global" movement has accounted for only a part of the necessary changes on an increasingly globalized planet. It is no longer acceptable (in fact, it is not just now) that the burden of sustainability falls only on individuals in isolated and non-­political demands, such as selective disposal, shorter baths and less opening the refrigerator on hot days. In addition, and without taking away the importance of individual changes and actions, these demands have echoed positively for a small portion of societies, considering that most of them are still fighting for the basic subsistence components-­ mentioning the hierarchy of needs for Maslow (1943)-­, and a small portion lives a status quo based on unlimited consumption and disposal. The sustainability paradigm depends, more and more urgently, on the establishment of paths that provide training for individuals who understand reality in a more systemic, integrated, inter and transdisciplinary way, facilitating us to make choices that are increasingly founded on a greater good. At this point that we believe that sustainability meets education, since all formal, informal and non-­formal spaces are, at some level, educators. In order to fulfill its formative role-­ considering, for example, the panorama outlined by the World Economic Forum (2015) about the skills required for the 21st century-­ almost all educational spaces demand structural, technological and methodological adjustments and reorientations to fulfill their function of educating towards the generation of greater competent autonomy in reading, interpreting and understanding the world. Despite the urgency of these adjustments, formal education (considering all levels) is still the one that most resists changes and, therefore, it takes time to adjust to the new urgencies linked to socioenvironmental challenges. Therefore, we run after a future that is moving more and more rapidly away from everyone. At the university level, one of the possible paths for the reframing of teaching-­learning relationships with regard to sustainability is linked to the environmentalization of spaces and curricula, considering that the socio-­environmental theme is inherently transversal and can be worked on by different courses of different faculties, a point already addressed by the National Curriculum Parameters in the 1990s for Basic Education.