Aprendizagem e espiritualidade em Ecovilas : quando “o Universo todo ensina”

Abstract

This research aims to investigate learning processes in ecovillages. Ecovillages are defined as intentional communities that seek a sustainable way of life, turning into spaces where, often, environmental phenomenon and New Age spirituality get together. It is from considering contemporary scenery - characterized by the gap between sacred and profane from secularization processes; the environmental crisis that shows us the limits of consumerism, development at any cost, and instrumental rationality; and by the need of new ethics (or new ethic principles) - that contexts such as ecovillages become relevant because they offer, potentially, elements to rethink the relation human-world, ethics and to develop other sensibilities. From valuing learning as immersion in everyday life, by living together, these experiences turn into fertile context to reflect on educational practices, based on modern tradition, that reaffirm the dualisms body-mind, nature-culture, keeping the onto-epistemological bases that support the crisis (spiritual, environmental and ethical). It is an ethnographic research with a multi-sited approach, from which we followed the “ecovillage phenomenon” through two different sites: one ecovillage in the South of Brazil (Arca Verde) and one ecovillage in the north of Scotland (Findhorn). Arca Verde was chosen because it is an Institute/Community with acknowledged expertise on environmental issues, through Permaculture, in the south of Brazil. Findhorn was chosen because of its lenght, generational shifts, and for being an acknowledged center of environmental education and education for sustainability, alongside Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), UN and other projects at global level. From looking at their abyssal differences: age, size, folk, cultural context etc., we also find similarities in their practices and narratives. Both of them identify with the target “Ecovillage”, sharing the same “definition”. The fieldwork was done, respectively, from September 2013 to September 2014, and from May 2015 to March 2016. Resonating with Ecological Epistemologies and New Materialisms, taking situated learning, communities of practices and education of attention approaches, learning is understood as part of every social practice, which happens when people get together to coparticipate in collective endeavors. Learning is understood as a process from which we become who we are, with no need of teaching and not as an individual achievement, but rather, a process that happens when people are engaged and coparticipating in activities from which subjects and world coemerge, in a recursive correspondence. Results indicate more than rational ways of learning in a more than human world, that include: interaction with the dimension of sacredness in nature (being that human or non-human), revealing a search for transcendence in immanence; practice of rituals with whom one can learn to be “in tune” with oneself or with others, and education of senses and emotions.