Socio…what? Socioenvironmental problems and its concretion by training teachers

Abstract

21st century’s societies face complex socio-environmental problems, derived from socio-economic models that exploit people and natural resources by the same commercialization logic. Learning throught relevant problems is an essential option of content selection when educating critical, transformative citizenry committed to social and environmental justice. Learing throught socio-environmental problems is key to understand the present and future realities, to face them and to develope tools to act individually and collectively. We focus on the concept socio-environmental problems (SEP) and wonder about the specificities made by training educators (n = 79) about SEP. The objective is to identify the topics associated with them, and to compare them to social problems (SP) and environmental problems (EP) conceptions. Few differences are found between the conceptions of EP and SEP. On the contrary, representations about SP are more exclusive and are mainly related to social inequalities, poverty and gender inequalities. Gender issues are considered above all by women and non-binary people, and people with more environmental training establish more relationships between the social and environmental spheres. The concept of SEP is associated with a greater recognition of the complexities, and the projection of actions and participation, for which we demand the normalization of its use and advocate collaborative work between the didactics of the natural and social sciences to generate analysis models for SEP.