Abstract

PADILLA MURCIA, Esperanza  and  FLORES HINOJOS, Irma Alicia. Ownership and Empowerment in Environmental Education for Sustainability. Educ. Educ. [online]. 2022, vol.25, n.1, e2511.  Epub June 03, 2022. ISSN 0123-1294.  https://doi.org/10.5294/edu.2022.25.1.1.

In the current situation, environmental education for sustainability aims to provide a critical understanding of environmental reality, promote respect in people, seek solutions to environmental problems, and take action. Accordingly, this research aims to create educational processes that allow the ownership and empowerment of the socio-environmental context in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in Bogotá, Colombia. Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used as a methodology developed in two phases, involving students, administrators, managers, researchers, and decision-makers of the HEI and local and national government agencies. In the first phase, demand negotiation and the preliminary study of the situation were carried out. We identified and defined the problem, prepared the proposed Institutional Environmental Project, and recognized the actors and their roles through a socio-ecosystem model. In conclusion, the participants took ownership of and became empowered by the HEI’s socio-environmental context during the PAR process. In other words, all the actors approached the socio-environmental situation with determination, recognized the problem, transformed their thinking and behavior towards the subject, and set out to propose, manage, and change the HEI’s socio-environmental reality with time, will, and budget limitations.

Keywords : Environmental education; sustainable development; social research; participatory research.

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