Community, Science and Education: An interdisciplinary perspective for facing ecological crises in Mexico and South America

在墨西哥和南美地区，有必要在教育工作者、科学家、教师、社区领袖和决策者之间分享知识，以构建使教育接近边缘化社区的关切和需求的方法。我们将与面临与贫困、获得保健、供水和气候变化等全球挑战相关压力的社区合作。我们的重点是GCRF在教育方面的战略挑战，特别是在使初等和中等教育与墨西哥和南美洲社区面临的社会科学问题相关方面分享专业知识。我们最初将在墨西哥开展工作，重点关注所需的教育对策，以支持社区准备和预防与缺水和水污染带来的环境和健康压力有关的危机。在墨西哥和南美洲，这些问题很复杂，与贫穷和获得服务的机会有关。我们的方法是汇集跨学科的专业知识，目的是提出与当地和这些社区和学校的具体条件相关的教育对策。我们的原则信念是，规范地分享“最佳实践”或“有效的方法”（也许仍然是主要的方法）将不可避免地无法满足在不同背景下面临不同挑战的社区的特定需求。我们的网络将从特定社区的特定问题开始，并以模块化的方式发展，纳入其他群体和其他挑战，并分享使教育接近生活问题所需的多样化方法。该网络将作为技能和专门知识的储存库，我们将密切关注社区关注的问题，与那些在有关社区有经验和联系的学者和非学者一起学习。我们将通过一个以西班牙语和英语建立和维护的网站记录我们正在进行的工作。我们最初将集中在两个领域：特拉斯卡拉州的农村社区；以及墨西哥城的城市社区。自2005年以来，我们的团队成员一直与特拉斯卡拉州的农村社区合作，从事生态研究，旨在确定环境污染对居住在墨西哥污染第三严重的河流阿托亚克河附近的儿童和人民健康的不利影响。该团队还与墨西哥城Xochimilco和Iztapalapa地区的社区建立了联系，那里的居民面临着严重的环境和水问题。在每个地区与两个社区建立了网络之后，我们将与墨西哥的另外六个社区建立合作关系，再次在这些社区参与浸入式会议，在全体会议上收集我们的新知识，并通过向教师举办讲习班和与决策者合作进行传播。我们将从个别转向一般，分享如何使教育贴近社会关注的知识。我们将在国际上传播我们的学习成果，并利用我们的国际联系，以便逐步纳入来自智利、阿根廷、巴西和其他边缘化社区面临环境危机的南美国家的同事。我们期望能够分享在我们工作的每个社区中产生的故事和资源，并阐明我们在跨学科团队中工作的过程和影响教育变革的学习。在影响教育政策、支持学校关注社区关切、以及争取资金以在拨款后延续网络的生命方面，这两种学习方式都将具有重要意义。

In Mexico and the South American region there is a need to share knowledge across educators, scientists, teachers, community leaders and policy makers in constructing ways to bring education close to the concerns and needs of marginalised communities. We will be working with communities facing pressures related to global challenges of poverty, health access, water supply and climate change. Our focus is on the strategic GCRF challenge of education and, specifically, sharing expertise in making primary and secondary education relevant to the socioscientific issues faced by communities in Mexico and South America.Initially we will convene work in Mexico and focus on the educational responses required to support communities in preparing for and preventing crises related to environmental and health pressures brought about by water shortage and water contamination. In Mexico and South America such issues are complex and related to poverty and access to services. Our approach is to bring together interdisciplinary expertise with the aim of proposing an educational response relevant to the local and specific conditions of those communities and schools. Our principled belief is that a normative sharing of "best practice" or "what works" (perhaps still the predominant approach) will inevitably fail to meet the specific needs of communities facing different challenges in different contexts. Our Network will begin with particular issues in identified communities and grow in a modular manner, incorporating other groups and other challenges and sharing the diversity of approaches needed to bring education close to lived issues. The Network will act as a repository for skills and expertise in which we stay close to community concerns, learning with and through those academics and non-academics who have experience and connections in the communities involved. We will be documenting our on-going work via a website, established and maintained in Spanish and English.We will concentrate initially on two areas: rural communities from the Tlaxcala state; and, urban communities from Mexico City. Members of our team have been working with rural communities from Tlaxcala state since 2005, engaging in ecological research aimed at determining the adverse effects of environmental pollution on the health of children and people living near to the Atoyac River, the third most polluted river in Mexico. The team also has existing links to communities in the Xochimilco and Iztapalapa areas of Mexico City, where inhabitants face severe environmental and water issues. Having established networks with two communities in each region, we will then build to work with six further communities in Mexico, again engaging in immersion meetings in those communities, collecting our new knowledge at plenary conferences and disseminating via workshops to teachers and via work with policy-makers. We will move from the particular to the general, sharing knowledge about how to bring education close to community concerns. We will disseminate our learning internationally and exploit our international links in order to progressively include colleagues from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and other South America countries in which marginalized communities face environmental crisis. We anticipate being able to share the stories and resources generated in each of the communities with whom we work, and also articulating our learning about the process of working in inter-disciplinary teams and effecting educational change. Both sets of learning will be significant in terms of putting the case to influence educational policy, to support schools in paying attention to community concerns, and in terms of bidding for funds to continue the life of the Network beyond this grant.