Environment as a cosmopolitan value: a comparative socio-historical analysis of the school biology curriculum

Abstract

This work presents an analysis proposal based on theorizations regarding comparative systems of reason, cosmopolitanism and the history of school disciplines, seeking to understand how certain objects become subject to reflection and action in the school curriculum from an international perspective. Comparing historical aspects of the teaching of biology in Brazil and Germany, the article presents a discussion of how the environment has increasingly been constituted as a cosmopolitan value in the biology school curriculum. In theoretical and methodological terms, curricular documents and textbooks are treated as historical sources and an analysis of them is articulated with results of a literature review, evidencing how different cultural organizations are combined to make this object intelligible in the present. The analyses indicate a transnational process of hegemonizing the value of the environment as a pragmatic macro-trend related to the concept of education for sustainable development. This trend is overlapped by curricular traditions of teaching in diverse forms, and also by local issues in each country linked to the history of this school subject. In Germany, the hybridizations refer above all to the pragmatic macro-trend, punctuated by critical elements. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the transnational macro-trends are hybridized with local characteristics, mainly through academic development in the field of environmental education and its different currents, in addition to growing closer to social and environmental movements. The work demonstrates that this proposal for analysis broadens the potentials of articulation between curricular subjects and comparative education, principally in the sense of questioning international consensuses that are considered universal and transcendental concerning education.