THE TWO FACES OF THE TEACHING OF ECOLOGICAL LAW

The educational strategy of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), as the largest public institution of higher education, graduate and technology research in Mexico, is based on an educational innovation by integrating the system of competences, constructivist and contents. Regarding strategy the competency-based learning model prevails, although most of the learning units continue to be taught with lots of emphasis on the contents. Recently, the concept of andragogy was introduced for postgraduate units and social variant to competencies was established, as well as a playful learning system providing activities outside the classroom and adding variants to the course’s instructional design, in the new interdisciplinary doctoral programs. Interdisciplinarity has positioned itself as the educational paradigm of the future. There is so much specificity in the different sciences that it is impossible for a teacher or doctoral program to address them with precision and cutting-edge information without having experts in each field. This is the main reason why the IPN now have units for learning social and law sciences, as in the case of environmental and ecological law. Law is a discipline that belongs to the law sciences, while ecology belongs to the biological sciences and environmental sciences to socio-economics.

The challenge is: How to teach ecology to a law student, and how to teach law to a future ecologist, all under a certain socioeconomic system? The training thinking in each of the disciplines is very different. Ecological knowledge is immersed in a world of probabilities that give rise to uncertainties not wanted by society or researchers; only by statistical inference can the induction in science be justified; with the scientific method there is no denial that there is a probability of error in the result obtained, but there is certainty that it serves to make the best decision under certain conditions; its central thinking is heuristic. However, when it comes to the law as a set of rules governing social life in a time and place determined (jurisdiction and enforcement of the law), the prevailing thought is hermeneutical.

After 10 years of experience in teaching law courses to engineers, biologists and chemists, I found that it is best to generate a civic conscience in their thinking, on every choice they should make; significant knowledge was obtained by reviewing case studies on the social and environmental damage produced by certain human acts and misuse of technology. On the other hand, by teaching ecology to sociologists, lawyers and legislators, I understood that their most significant learning is through experience in the fieldwork and reflecting on the fact that we are not the center of the planet but that our actions indeed endanger life as we know it, including our own evolution as a species. Teaching ecological law to a person not expert in law or ecology is an act that should create environmental awareness.