The Notion ‘Nature’ as Emerging from N Kazantzakis Works and School Books of Life Sciences: A Case Study

Abstract

People struggled to explain the world around them and to build on the achievements of science and technology in order to improve the quality of life. The first questions raised for the properties and the beginnings of the external world, concerning all those perceived by human senses for the Nature. The ancient Greek spirit realized the Nature, organic or inorganic, as living, animated wholeness, as a universe. As Philosophy and Science developed, revealed the greatness of the creation of the world, cultivated the notion of the human superiority, with numerous cases of interpretation of the Nature based on the human creature. The concept of ‘Nature’ is intertwined with social choices and management practices. Environmental Ethics is education of values which allows the development of mechanisms that drive changes to attitudes and values, broaden and deepen the pedagogical dimension of theories of science and sociology. 

In this paper is studied the issue of ‘Nature’ in a didactic research, through the philosophical approach of values of Educational of the Sustainable Development. The notion of Nature has significantly replaced by the term of ‘Environment’ attributing ecological, economic, scientific, aesthetic, existential, spiritual value. The research in this case study, carried out in the literature, with N Kazantzakis works and school books of Biology and Environmental Sciences, in order to clarify terms linked to the scientific and philosophical concept of ‘Nature’ and the ‘nature’ of the things. The educational intervention is a negotiation between literature and issues of the environmental science. This research materialized in the stage of preparing a seminar for science teachers on the teaching issues of ‘Nature’ and ‘nature’ of the things. In order to prepare the trainees, in a peer learning activity of N Kazantzakis works, to extract those fragments are related to the term “Nature’ from their point of view, and at the end, they co-form a theatrical lectern where they read the excerpts, in a structural and theatric way.