Charbel Nino El Hani

1. The project of multispecies justice emerged as a response to conceptions of justice that focus exclusively on human beings (Celermajer et al., 2025). There are various approaches that extend the...

The article investigates the intersections between Museology and educational practices developed at the Escola Municipal Brazilina Eugênia de Oliveira, located in the Estuary of the Itapicuru River, Bahia, Brazil. The study highlights the formation of a Community of Practice (CoP), which acts as a contact and articulation zone between school and local knowledge, with emphasis on those related to artisanal fishing. This inter and transdisciplinary approach, aims to strengthen the dialogue between the communities and the school, promoting spaces of dialogue about local culture, environmental, material and immaterial heritage, encouraging educational practices that integrate perspectives from the community's daily life into the teaching and learning process of students.

This paper reports the results of a systematized review on intercultural education and dialogue between distinct knowledge systems in science teaching in basic education. The goal was to analyze experiences associated with interculturality, critically reflecting upon the potentialities and challenges related to praxis. The corpus of works was obtained through active search in the following bases in the period 2011-2020: SciELO and ERIC, as well as in important Brazilian journals in the area of science education research not indexed in those bases: RBPEC and IENCI. Among the challenges, the works pointed out the frequent lack of consideration for cultural diversity in compulsory school curricula, the overload of science contents to be covered in basic education, the lack of teachers’ access to a diversity of ways of knowing, teachers’ work overload, and the absence of appropriate teaching materials. Among the most cited justifications, we find the facilitation of science learning, the deconstruction of scientism, the promotion of equal rights, and the addressing of environmental issues. Based on the findings of the study, we indicate possibilities of action that provide guidelines for creating proposals for intercultural education that stimulate practices to work with the diversity of knowledge systems in natural sciences classrooms.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce a “partial overlaps” framework with particular attention to the roles of values in transdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration. This framework attends both to overlaps between epistemologies, ontologies, and values included in different knowledge systems and to differences that make those overlaps always partial. While overlaps can work as springboards for reaching common ground and coordinated joint action, their partialities require serious engagement with disagreements and tensions. In transdisciplinary practice, complex landscapes of heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting values need to be navigated, resulting in important challenges that can be faced using partial overlaps. In the chapter, the partial overlaps framework is situated in a wider history of epistemic paternalism, diversity, and decolonization, which involves an entanglement of values and knowledge production. The chapter illustrates partial overlaps between values by considering how they are articulated in different knowledge systems, especially focusing on Indigenous and local practices and knowledge. Finally, it also considers the possibilities of learning from partial overlaps, particularly in the entanglement of values and ontologies. Readers may also be interested in the Handbook chapters by Jacalyn M. Beck et al. and Kyle Whyte and Pasang Yangjee Sherpa.

In the context of the current global socioenvironmental crisis, it is fundamental to reflect on how we build relations with natural systems, the values intertwined with those relations, and the ethics we build based on the latter that may allow us to radically transform human–nature relationships. From this standpoint, academic sciences and religions are key frameworks we may use to ground those reflections. However, more knowledge is needed about how scientific and religious perspectives interact with each other within subjects’ views of nature in particular cultural, professional, and religious contexts. Moreover, the ontological and epistemological positions built by subjects showing different patterns of interaction between those perspectives may provide insight about their stances toward human–nature relationships and the values associated with them. The present study explores how scientific and Christian religious perspectives interact in four Colombian Biology teachers’ views of nature and its relationships with humans, using a qualitative approach and an interpretivist research design. The analysis shows that despite holding diverse religious and spiritual beliefs, all participating teachers showed a shared sense of care toward nature, blending their value systems and epistemological commitments in two distinct human–nature relational models, namely, the Stewardship and Wardship models, according to Muradian and Pascual’s typology of forms of human–nature relationships. We conclude that these teachers ascribe an aesthetic value to nature that is closely related to their ethics with respect to it, which is, in turn, related to their religious or scientific ideas to varying degrees.

This article discusses the possibility of ascribing intrinsic value to ecological systems. One way of talking about the intrinsic value of something is through its inherent characteristics. The concept of closure of constraints, which plays a central role in the organizational theory of ecological functions, allows us to claim ecological systems have inherent characteristics, namely, an intrinsic teleology and normativity. In this sense, ecological systems can be considered as having intrinsic value. However, this type of value is attributed to ecological systems by us, moral agents, as it would not be possible for something to have value exclusively in itself or independently of the relation with a value-ascribing agent. Thus, by asserting ecological systems have intrinsic value, we are regarding these entities as moral patients. Accordingly, we should take them into account and our moral consideration should go far beyond an anthropocentric perspective, opening the doors to an ecocentric ethics.

The concept of regulation is used in biology to explain properties such as stability, robustness, and long-term persistence of biological systems. Regulation claims often focus, however, on the capabilities of these systems, rather than the mechanisms underlying them. In an attempt to produce a full-fledged theoretical account of regulation, a stricter concept has been proposed by Bich and colleagues based on the theory of biological autonomy. According to these authors, regulation is exerted by specialized subsystems that can change the constitutive regime of a system (enabling it to deal with a wider range of perturbations) but whose dynamics are not specified by the latter. In this paper, we present a brief survey on how regulation has been treated in biology and, more specifically, in ecology. We show how the ecological literature attributes regulatory powers either to organismic phenomena or to the propagation of perturbations through the network of relations in ecological systems. We were not able to find any study proposing a specialized subsystem dedicated to regulation in an ecological system. This raises doubts about the feasibility of a regulatory subsystem such as conceived by Bich and colleagues. Nonetheless, we argue that ecological systems may encompass more than just dynamic stability and feedback mechanisms, such that it can be worthy applying their concept to investigate regulation in these systems.