RISULTATI RICERCA

It is necessary to provide an environmental dimension to all educational practices if we really want to make progress towards education for sustainability. The curricula should be reoriented based on the principles and focus of education for sustainability. This paper presents a research process carried out by a working group formed by teachers from the Catalan Green School Programme, by representatives from the Department of the Environment and Housing and the Department of Education, the Catalan Society for Environmental Education and the GRECA (Research Group of Scientific and Environmental Education, University of Girona) as a coordinator. The objectives of the research were to: (i) define the concept of curriculum greening within compulsory education; (ii) characterize curriculum greening at the early, primary and secondary education levels. (iii) Identify strategies for curriculum greening in schools. The research is situated within the theoretical-critical educational research paradigm and follows a process of participatory action research. The analysis is fundamentally qualitative. The definition and the characterization of the curriculum greening are presented, as well as a proposal of strategies for greening the curriculum in compulsory education.

In the last issue of Culture della sostenibilità an article appeared L’educazione ambientale nelle università italiane: attori, modelli, contenuti, ricerche (Bertolino, Messina, Perazzone, Salomone, 2007), that offered an overview of educational offerings within Environmental Education in Italian Universities. This article re-addresses and deepens the analysis of the results of research conducted between University lectures in Environmental Education that involved them directly through telephone interviews. The analysis of the closed response questions within the questionnaire and the spoken interviews paints a clearer picture of the different approaches to teaching, the net of relations within the territory and the scientific community, research interests followed and expectations for the future. In this field the academic panorama is in continuous evolution and the continuous comparison between teachers both within the discipline and with those in others is fundamental.

The dualism between Natural and Human Sciences is still persisting. The reason of it consists in the underestimation of the linguistic issues: expressions like fight against pollution, environmental protection, preservation of ecosystems and similar ones do not have unambiguous meanings. For example there is a frontal ecology which assumes some descriptive- explanatory notions which can be summarised through the word environment, and there is a relational ecology which adopts the ecosystemic explanatory principle both in the description of the observed systems and in the description of the relationship between observed and observing systems. From this point of view, the term ecology designates primarily (even though not only that) a general epistemology of living processes with an evolutionistic character. Or, if we prefer, an epistemology of complexity. With regards to social sciences a notion of ecology so meant, detached from the objectivistic-frontal concepts of the environment and the ecosystem, entails the task to contribute to the same definition of what can be meant through terms like environment and ecosystems, that is, to construct new explanatory principles. In other words the ecological issue is a question of communication, first of all, between human beings conceived ab origine as living beings, as entirely bio-socio-cultural animals, embedded in pragmatic, linguistic, communicative and living ecosystems which are larger than them. No Chernobyl could be understood apart from the understanding of Auschwitz. No ecology of the interaction between us and the environment could arise without a dialogue between a naturalistic knowledge and socioanthropological ones able to question and permanently connect their respective languages.

We live in risk society. Homo sapiens became a global ecological player and humankind has, for the first time in history, the capacity to destroy itself. We live in the ecological risk «enormous awareness» era: we know the effect of our action on the environment (and on ourself). It takes so a crucial value who and how rules ecological and technological questions. The expert model doesn’t work. The best is the «democratic model»: all citizens experts and no experts participate to the decisions.

It is about forty years that scholars debate and reflect upon the negative characteristics of quantitative growth of economy. As a consequence a difference has been made between growth and development. In 1987 Brundtland’s Commission have proposed a new approach based on the idea of Sustainable Development. Today some scholars among economists and sociologists are increasingly proposing the role of De-growth as a possible solution to Heart’s degradation.

The article underlines the evident link between the present consumption model and environmental degradation, and invites us to work towards sustainable consumption. This means re enforcing all of the practices orientated towards the substitution or minimisation of consumption of goods that are deemed critical from the environmental point of view, and encourage a different rational to spread a consumption model that considers the quality of the product and the conditions of its production distinguishing necessity from desire. A consumption model that contributes to the promotion of greater social equality and less environmental stress, through educational processes that stimulate critical thought at the moment of choice between various options, avoiding choosing those that are promoted as status symbols. Environmental education for sustainable consumption must also take into consideration products offered from companies or countries that promote superfluous or extravagant consumption, that use child labour and slaves, that do not adopt measures for environmental protection through emissions and waste control, that are not eco-efficient, that do not protect their workers from risks at work, that pay poor salaries or receive tax exemptions, special subsidies or preferential treatment that creates an unfair advantage over other countries. In the same way, education for sustainable consumption must raise attention to publicity campaigns, in a context in which the target population is seen as a passive client and vehicle to globalise the material ways of life of the North Western countries. School on its own however cannot reach the results that are urgently needed: it is necessary to fight on a broader front, that involves key social actors and to be aware that we are fighting a long battle.

The risks and relational potentialities in the profession of physiotherapist. A different point of view, focused on feeling rather than on doing, on a one of the most emotionally involving roles in the health care system. From Rogers’ intuitions on the nature of help-relationships and Lowen’s intuitions on the language of the body, to the use of body mediated counseling abilities, in an occupation that has a great social and relational impact and that is greatly at the risk of burn out.

This article introduces the focusing method, that was developed by the austrianamerican phylosopher and psychotherapist Eugen Gendlin. focusing comes from the assumption according to which our bodily sensations contain a knowledge, the so called felt sense, and proposes a method for starting a dialogue between body perception and symbolic language, meant to get to know the meaning of the body experience. Listening to the felt sense means grounding thought into concrete living body experience.

The article introduces Allan Schore’s work, focusing on three central elements of his theory: the psychotherapy as verbal and non-verbal communicative experience, the body aspects of the projective identification and dissociation mechanisms, and, finally, the intersection between self-regulation and interactive co-regulation. These three elements are particularly important for the analytic-bioenergetic reader because, maybe for the first time in psychoanalytic clinic, these elements are addressed underlining the fundamental role of the bodily experience lived in first person.

Mentioning the contribution offered by infant research thanks to the observation of the mother and child relationship, the author goes through the bioenergetic analytic process that has its core in the process in which therapist and patient go breathing together and surrender to the body. The setting that is used in bioenergetic analysis is particularly useful in making these processes possible. The analyst and the person in analysis are face to face and one can resonate one in the other, first determining and then amplifying the effects of their encounter. The implicit and non verbal level is the core of the process, but it’s completed only when it becomes conscious, with a conscious sharing of the results, that can therefore be made explicit also verbally.