AGROECOSYSTEMS TO CONTEXTUALIZE AND DEVELOP INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

Environmental education has been defined as the process of recognizing values and clarifying concepts in order to develop skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate the relations among men, his culture and his biophysical surroundings. Environmental Education also entails practice in decision-making and self-formulation of a code of behavior about issues concerning environmental quality. In order to support environmental education we are particularly interested in pedagogical issues concerning how to enhance learning and the acquisition of skills and attitudes. Inquiry based learning has been shown as a useful method to increase students' motivation, facilitate conceptual understanding and promote the development of competences at school. The term ecosystem is a key and broad concept linked to conceptual model, which can be used to explain dynamic relationships between living beings and their physical environment, involving a flow of matter and energy. It therefore embeds bridging concepts and knowledge from different disciplines offering a rich and powerful framework to understand many environmental issues. Among ecosystems, agroecosystems are a specific type of ecosystems, which are modified and controlled by man and respond in a very sensitive and intensely way to the human activity and to changes in natural conditions. Considering the previous ideas, the main objective of this work is to analyze and discuss the pedagogical potential of agro-ecosystem to promote contextualized learning in environmental education, as well as to review previous experiences in the specialized literature, in order to look for inquiry-based learning patterns.