José Manuel Pérez-Martín

The environmental crisis makes it necessary to reconsider the practices of environmental education (EE) and guide them towards a transformative perspective to promote critical reflection and the ability to make decisions in the face of complex problems, including a perspective of justice. Using the PRISMA systematic review protocol, this article analysed 49 classroom intervention published on international journals to identify the limitations when working on EE in early childhood education, primary education, and pre-service teacher training classrooms from an environmental justice (EJ) perspective. Considering the variables “contents”, “depth of the interventions”, “actions required of students”, and “resources”, the results show a predominance of interventions that promote content knowledge from an ecological perspective and demand actions far removed from reflection and participation, using self-made materials. By not encouraging students to reflect on environmental issues in a holistic way to change their behaviour, it was confirmed that they move away from systems thinking, critical literacy, and action competence. Therefore, there is a lack of integration of the EJ perspective in classroom practices. To achieve educational success in terms of social change for environmental protection, it is necessary to promote research work focused on the didactics of EE including a social justice perspective.

Schooling should equip citizens with the scientific knowledge necessary to make informed decisions about health problems arising from the current environmental crisis. Given the scarcity of educational proposals that integrate evidence-based argumentation, One Health education and complexity-based solution proposals, this study aims to introduce a scenario linking the use of pesticides in agriculture to infertility, and to analyse the extent to which it promotes students to apply these three approaches. The activity requires 10th graders to rank 6 cities from most to least polluted, using evidence on the reproductive problems of different organisms in the ecosystem (humans, harlequin flies). Moreover, students have to propose solutions to avoid the toxic risk caused by pesticides. Group discussions are analysed to determine learners’ performance in using evidence and formulating causal explanations to justify their rankings, as well as in proposing reasoned solutions, considering different perspectives. The results show that most groups rank cities as expected. Although they do not use all available evidence, the design of the activity encourages students to establish frequent causal relationships between human, animal, and environmental health data (argumentation integrating the One Health approach). Moreover, most solutions are palliative rather than preventive, respond to an anthropocentric interest, and their consequences are rarely assessed. In doing so, students only foresee their environmental or economic impact, but not their ethical or political consequences. Educational implications are discussed.