Education and sustainability: Learning in an urban garden

Abstract

The paper analyzes an experience of an urban garden, located in the city of Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul / Brazil, to understand, in the light of an ethnographically situated situation, the vicissitudes of learning sustainability and environmental citizenship. The question that we are interested in discussing is: how to face the ethical problem of living and dying responsibly on a damaged Earth, on an infected planet, in a time of climatic disasters, pandemics and other socio-environmental cataclysms. To think about education for sustainability at this critical moment, we use an ecological learning approach, based on the notion of participation in a practice shared with other humans and non-humans. This perspective is about learning how to learn to be, how to live, and how to acquire skills, while building bonds of belonging to an environmentally situated place and to a community of practice.