Leaving the classroom: a didactic framework for education in environmental sciences

In Continuous Education curricula in Spain, the programs on sciences of the environment are aimed toward understandings of sustainability. Teaching practice rarely leaves the classroom for outdoor field studies. At the same time, teaching practice is generally focused on examples of how human activities are harmful for ecosystems. From a pedagogic point of view, it is less effective to teach environmental science with negative examples such as catastrophe, tragedy, and crisis. Rather, teaching environmental sciences and sustainable development might be focused on positive human-environment relationships, which is both important for the further development of students and educators. Within rural settings, there are many such examples of positive relationships that can be emphasized and integrated into the curriculum. In this article, we propose teaching environmental sciences through immersion in rural cultural life. We discuss how fieldwork serves as a learning methodology. When students are engaged through research with traditional cultural practices of environmental management, which is a part of the real and traditional culture of a region, they better understand how positive pedagogy instead of pedagogy structured around how not-to-do examples, can be used to stimulate the interactions between humans and the environment with their students. In this way, cultural goods serve as teaching resources in science and environmental education. What we present is authentic cases where adults involved in a course of Continuous Education explore ‘environmentally-friendly’ practices of traditional agriculture in Asturias (north of Spain), employing methodologies of cultural studies.