Intercultural education for the environment and sustainable development (EIEDD)

Intercultural Education for the Environment and Sustainable Development (EIEDD) - Relationships to scientific knowledge and territories and eco-citizen engagement of late high school students in France and Quebec (2017-2020)

Numerous studies on education in science, the environment and sustainable development have identified a form of fatalism and disengagement among young people in the face of the environmental crisis. Yet we know that to mobilize young people at school and as citizens, we need to take their identities and projects into account, and link education more closely to the places they live.

With a view to the sustainable development (SD) of territories, and to take full account of the concerns of young citizens from different cultures who live there, this research in intercultural education for science, the environment and sustainable development (EIEDD) proposes to develop an innovative Franco-Quebec theoretical framework and to test it in order to document how 16-year-olds envisage the SD issues of a river they live alongside. To this end, four case studies will be carried out in parallel, in very different cultural and environmental contexts. Data will be collected by means of questionnaires (N=300) and individual interviews (N=100), in order to draw up "typical portraits" of young people in terms of their relationship to scientific knowledge and territories, and their eco-citizen commitment dispositions and practices with regard to the social, political, economic, ethical or ecological issues they associate with the SD of the river in question.

Two case studies will be conducted in Quebec, and two in France. In each of these contexts, the first will involve young people from a sensitive multicultural neighborhood, while the second will focus on young people from a rural area whose governance is oriented by SD principles, in order to identify common or contrasting cultural elements, more local or more global, in France and Quebec. In France, the territories will border the Seine, and in Quebec, the St. Lawrence, in line with the research of Jean-Marc Lange and Barbara Bader's teams. In a second phase, the young people interviewed will draw up an interdisciplinary representation of the priority issues they associate with the river's SD, and propose citizen actions with the support of science and history-geography teachers, local stakeholders and members of the research team. These interdisciplinary representations and eco-citizen actions will be co-developed and distributed virtually in the four cultural contexts concerned.

[gdlr_divider type="solid " size="50% " ]

Develop an original conceptual and analytical framework that crosses the concepts of "relationship to scientific knowledge", "relationship to territories" and "eco-citizen commitment" among young people at the end of secondary school.

Identify "typical portraits" of young Quebecers and French 16-year-olds with regard to the sustainable development of the St. Lawrence in Quebec and the Seine in France, based on four case studies.

In each region, in France and Quebec, with the young people interviewed and two teachers per school, support the collaborative design of interdisciplinary representations of a sustainable development issue and define the ways in which young people can become eco-citizens, according to their relationship to scientific knowledge and the territorial, identity and cultural dimensions identified.

Research funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC)

EIEDD research presentation