Fundamentals of chemistry and environment education - EDUCAZIONE AMBIENTALE (2019/2020)

Learning outcomes

Knowledge and understanding
At the end of the course the student must acquire a personal and professional ethical awareness of nature and the environment. In addition, he will have to acquire the following theoretical contents: the origins of the ecological crisis; the theoretical foundations for a new ecological humanism (the thought of the protoecologists and the meat's phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty); educating to care; the experiential paths of an ecological educational practice.

Applied knowledge and understanding
At the end of the course the student will have to know how to: express and share in a critical way his own idea of nature and his own experience of relationship with the environment; design according to a systemic model environmental education paths with regard to aims, educational objectives, prerequisites, didactic methodologies; adopt practices of evaluation and documentation of educational activities.

The course proposes a philosophical and pedagogical thought centered on the awareness that the human being must abandon a detached and predatory attitude towards nature, to assume instead an ethical responsibility that leads him to redirect his choices and actions in a more ecological sense. The maturation of this ethical reorientation, which passes through education in reflective thinking,
critical and problematic, future teachers and educational institutions are called upon to contribute significantly.
Main topics covered by teaching:
- theoretical perspectives and empirical research on environmental education;
- gestures and thoughts on ecological sensitivity;
- the didactic potential inherent in the enhancement of the natural environment as a "learning environment";
- teaching techniques and methodologies to design, evaluate and document ecological experiences inside and outside the school.
Methodology
frontal lectures with elements of laboratory's interaction; excursions in natural environments; small group discussion workshops; vision and critical analysis of video or paper material; proposals for autobiographical writing.

About the assesment, according to the evolution of events, procedures will be defined to verify the knowledge and skills learned.