Environmental education and sustainability: an analysis of the relationship between pedagogy and nature in national and international documents

In a general sense, environmental education can be understood as a process that leads to a better understanding of the relationship between man and the natural environment, and sustainability as the possibility for those who come after us to be able to do the same things we can do today. Environmental education and sustainability as such imply collaboration between all social actors in the prevention and resolution of environmental problems. Direct contact with nature in education implies the assumption of a holistic approach, which sees in the relationship between economics, politics, society and ecology a useful tool for educating the new generations, as already widely noted by prominent early 20th century pedagogues such as Giuseppina Pizzigoni. Environmental education is therefore a type of holistic and lifelong education, including education "about, for and through" the environment, the importance of which has grown over time, partly as result of increasingly frequent environmental disasters. These have been followed by various measures, such as the Tbilisi Declaration, the Declaration of the Rights of Nature, the Brundtland Report, the Kyoto Protocol, the Aahrrus Convention, Agenda 2021, Agenda 2030 and so on, in which environmental education and sustainability have been strongly linked to educational processes, so much so that, in Italy, they have been treated in an interdisciplinary key and borrowed in the National Indications (MIUR, 2012) and the National Indications and New Scenarios (MIUR, 2018), as well as in the 2014 Environmental Education Guidelines for Sustainable Development. The contribution, starting from data considerations, focuses on the construction of attitudes, behaviours and conducts in school contexts related to care and protection, as well as environmental awareness, which are combined with those of protection and teaching capable of reading and preserving the environment from the perspective of sustainability.