SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems. Places of Diversity and Biodiversity.
Based on NATURE and ARCHITECTURE, SCHOOLYARDS project, drived by TREES_Ecosistemas, accompanies RENATURALIZATION processes through Participative Projects of Innovation and Pedagogical Transformation to RECONNECT with NATURE.
Developed in collaboration with the entire educational community, PUPILS become the main ACTORS of the whole process.
Projects to promote DIVERSITY and BIODIVERSITY in Educational Centers with an eye on the SDGs, thus turning them into true LEARNING ECOSYSTEMS
National
Spain
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual
First name: Mar Last name: Penela Gender: Female Nationality: Spain Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Lugar do Moucho n 10 Vilar Town: Crecente Postal code: 36429 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 609 00 76 47 E-mail:trees.ecosistemas@gmail.com Website:http://treesecosistemas.com/
URL:https://www.facebook.com/TREES.ECOSISTEMAS Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): @treesecosistemas #treesecosistemas #renaturalizarlaescuela #transformandoespacios #creandocomunidad #educacionenlanaturaleza #descubriendoecosistemasdeaprendizaje #igualdad #aprenderhaciendo #formacionprofesorado #ecosistemasdeaprendizaje
URL:https://www.instagram.com/trees_ecosistemas/?hl=es Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): @treesecosistemas #treesecosistemas #renaturalizarlaescuela #transformandoespacios #creandocomunidad #educacionenlanaturaleza #descubriendoecosistemasdeaprendizaje #igualdad #aprenderhaciendo #formacionprofesorado #ecosistemasdeaprendizaje
School playgrounds are very sensitive spaces with enormous pedagogical potential.
Nowadays, children and adolescents spend less and less time outdoors, in nature, and most of them, in the case they do, it is mostly in the schoolyards.
They are places for play and physical activity, areas of coexistence and relationship that can become valuable learning ecosystems from which to promote reconnection with nature.
If we understand the space, surroundings, as part of an ecosystem (the beings that inhabit an environment, the physical environment itself, and the biotic and abiotic interaction established between them), the beings that inhabit the ecosystem must necessarily participate actively in its transformation.
SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems, directed and coordinated by T R E E S _ Ecosystems, proposes to change the way we look at them and discover their enormous value. Diversify and re-naturalize the spaces, accompanying the entire educational community that inhabit the schools; teachers, families and students in the participatory processes of design and decision making, being the pupils the main actors in the whole process.
This transformation process becomes an educational project of the school that goes beyond,due to starting in the physical environment, the re-naturalization extends to pedagogies, times and relationships.
In this way we are regenerating the ecosystem by making it more resilience and sustainable both, through the transformation of the space itself and of the people through a deep reconnection with nature in relation to the natural environment as well as by reconnecting with our own nature.
Likewise, the participatory process guarantees the inclusion of all the people in the community, addressing their vital needs.
Transforming and Re-naturalizing the educational environments, in a participatory design and decision-making process, led by the students, is key to empower them and reconnect them with nature to move towards the SDGs.
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
RENATURALIZATION
TRANSFORMATION
PARTICIPATION
ECOSYSTEMS
Understanding the spaces as the physical environment of an ecosystem and proposing from there its transformation and re-naturalization necessarily implies enhacing diversity and biodiversity.
Every single project in an environment must born, grow and flourish interacting with the beings whom will inhabit the areas to intervene.
Each transformation should be accompanied by a participatory and learning process, and especially considering that the action is developed in the educational field. Likewise, since the very first steps, and through the participation and the knowledge acquired during the process, we enrich the ecosystem in such a way that, the beings that inhabit it engage with it and have adquire the competences and the interest to look after it and improve it
Objectives
- To facilitate the reconnection with nature for children and adolescents by renaturalizing the schoolyards.
- To provide the system with competences for its self-management and self-regulation.
- To approach the knowledge of ecopedagogy favoring a critical and systemic understanding of the world.
- Use and value diversity.
- Evaluate the sustainability impact of the configuration of spaces.
- Encourage the implementation of green areas that mitigate the effects of climate change in schools and their surroundings.
- Strengthen educational communities as key agents of change in economical, social, cultural and environmental sustainability, towards the ecological transition.
- Enhance and create networks and linkages with public and private entities.
- To discover the personal and material resources, both their own and nearby.
- Be aware of the available energy resources, capture them and store them for their use.
- To train students with knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable them to develop their lives in a more sustainable way.
The educational space should be an aesthetic environment of beauty and life beyond a functional space.
How the space is shaped conveys messages to us. We are able to read them consciously and unconsciously and perceive the symbolic dimension. There is a hidden curriculum behind its configuration.
Space should be considered a pedagogical tool and, in particular, a very powerful tool for aesthetic education. As such, make use of it by creating a culture of aesthetics to improve the well-being of the people who inhabit the educational centers.
In a learning ecosystem where harmony, serenity, luminosity, joy and beauty reigns, improve the learning potential and the quality of the relationships.
The project SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems works from and to nature. By observing its beauty, discovering its patterns and proportions, enjoying and considering its constant change.
Objectives
- Educating the look to perceive the wisdom and beauty of nature.
- To imitate Nature’s patterns in the design process.
- To learn the tools of architecture.
- Acquire new artistic languages from architecture, painting, sculpture, ... to enhance creativity.
- To become aware of our creative capacity through different work methodologies.
- To integrate the concepts of well-being, beauty and reconnection with nature.
- To approach the knowledge of environmental psychology and its research related to the influence of the aesthetic quality of spaces and our well-being.
- To design learning situations in the artistic-natural context.
- To allow children and adolescents to discover and enhance their ability to transform the reality around them.
- To train teachers to transform and take advantage of the playground as an educational space in which to carry out learning situations, especially those related to nature.
- To turn the playground into an aesthetic space prepared to carry out outdoor education, in and of nature in all educational centers.
Childhood and adolescence are constituted by full citizens and, therefore, citizens who must participate in decision-making as reflected in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Therefore, they are the absolute protagonists of the project in which families and teaching staff also participate under horizontal models.
Inclusion also in terms of universal accessibility so that environments, instruments, processes, tools and devices are understandable, usable and practicable for all people in the most autonomous and natural way possible.
By applying the principles of Universal Design for Learning to the methodology of the project, we accommodate all types of intelligences and learnings
Objectives
- To achieve compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child especially in terms of their participation.
- To create strong communities linked to shared use spaces by providing them with knowledge and governance systems.
- To bring the Dragon Dreaming methodology to educational communities.
- Promote citizen participation to regenerate the natural or built environments which require collective care and attention.
- Strengthen the linkages with the spaces that surround us thus reinforcing the feeling of belonging.
- To guarantee children and adolescents the benefits of nature both, in terms of physical and mental health.
- Address diversity by configuring environments and learning through participation processes and following the criteria of Universal Design for Learning.
- Adapt educational spaces to needs of new educational communities and new pedagogies achieving quality education.
- Activate the educational own resources.
- To achieve an accessible space adapted to all types of diversities.
- To turn the playgrounds into spaces of equality and coeducation.
Inclusion is a cross-cutting objective of the entire project that is worked right from the beginning during planning, development and in the result of the transformation.
Participation is inherent to the project.
The project is always initiated at the request of a member of the educational community, in some cases the families and in others the teaching team.
A driving group is constituted. It should be composed of representatives of students, families and teachers. Its mission is to be the promoters and coordinators of the transformation.
The training begins with the teaching team. Meetings are established in which the competences and knowledge necessary to carry out the project and, also, its relation with the curriculum in order to incorporate them with the students.
These sessions are carried out during each of the stage, dreaming - planning - making - celebrating. Teachers design learning situations so that the competences and the knowledge are acquired by the students.
In parallel, meetings with the families are initiated in order to explain the principles of the project and to get them to join it.
This scheme is flexible and adapts to the different circumstances of the school and of the moment.
Student participation is carried out through workshops and a children's council. Everything is documented in order to gather information for the process and for its communication to the rest of the community.
At each stage, families, students and teachers are involved, sometimes together and sometimes in parallel, and the driving group is in charge of promoting and cohesion of the project.
Impacts
_ Reconnect with our transforming power. Reconnect children and adolescents with their capacity to create and transform their reality through systemic thinking and a critical view.
_ To create strong communities that feel cohesive and capable of being agents of change.
_ Create real Learning Ecosystems.
_ Understanding the linkage between spaces and pedagogies, the transformation of one cannot occur without the transformation of the other.
Each school has its own context and the commitment's degree of the skateholders differs accordingly.
As far as possible, each educational center assumes the workshops and part of the cost of the implementation with its own resources.
Families contribute knowledge, time and resources by actively participating, especially in the cooperative work days in the schoolyards.
Family Associations finance training for families, workshops for students and resources for implementation.
Teacher training is financed by the Teacher Training Centers.
Forestry’s Communities are entities of great value in Galicia. In many cases, they provide advice and material resources to the educational centers located in their areas.
Some workshops are costed by the Official College of Architects of Galicia through the Terra Project and with the collaboration of the Xunta de Galicia, the Agency for the Protection of Urban Planning Legality.
The involvement of municipalities varies according to their degree of awareness of the value of education and the resources available to them. Their contributions may be in the form of financing or by making their maintenance personnel available to the center. In some cases, by advising and supporting the drafting of the project.
The deputations support the projects with funding for the implementation and also with their own programs such as the Revitaliza Plan, providing training and equipping to compost.
The Technical Units of the Department of Education and Central Services collaborate with some centers by providing technical advice and financing projects.
The Department of Equality finances training, workshops and materials to educate in equality and achieve coeducational schoolyards.
In the project process it is necessary to address different fields of knowledge, from the more technical to the more humanistic. Balance is a transversal objective in the project, also in this case.
Even more relevance is given to the process than to the final result. Therefore, the knowledge related to personal development and participatory skills are at the forefront of the project.
Different languages and representation techniques as instruments of communication are essential.
In the field of pedagogy, active pedagogies, environmental psychology and neuroscience should be highlighted.
Of course, architecture, landscaping, ICTs as tools to address the project. As well as geography, biology, geology and climatology.
From there, the knowledge of the local (physical, social and cultural context) is opened.
And, obviously, the artistic disciplines: photography, drawing, painting, sculpture,... especially those related to nature such as land art and its referent figures.
Permaculture’s fields of knowledge are also incorporated:
- Land and Nature Stewardship: edible forests, seed saving, organic and biodynamic farming, keyline water harvesting, waste food recovery.
- Construction: passive solar energy design, natural building materials, water management and waste recycling, self-build, natural pattern language.
- Tools and Technology: creative reuse and recycling, hand tools, energy storage, transitional engineering.
- Education and Culture: nature education, ecopedagogy, nature-based art education, participatory arts and music, active research, transition culture.
- Health and Spiritual Wellness: learning from ancestral cultures, self-knowledge and wellness seeking, forest bathing.
- Finance and Economics: ethical investments and fair trade, km 0, community resources, volunteer work, barter, life cycle analysis and embodied energy accounting.
- Land Tenure and Community Governance: cooperation, open space technology and consensus decision-making.
The innovative character of the SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems project results from the following reasons:
1_ Children and adolescents are at the center of the project as full citizens.
2_ The transformation project becomes a pedagogical project of the center, giving meaning to knowledge and allowing the acquisition of key competences in the European framework of education and sustainability.
3_ Participation is at the heart of the project. At all stages of the project, the community is the one who carries out the transformation, they are accompanied and empowered in the process.
4_The transformation of the space implies a training, an apprenticeship. This acquisition of competences makes possible other future transformations of that or other spaces and moreover:
The personal transformation resulting from the change of look towards our surroundings and towards ourselves as nature.
The collective transformation into a solid community by creating strong bonds between people and rooting them to their places.
The pedagogical transformation resulting from a deep reflection based on the reconnection with nature. Renaturalizing spaces, methodologies, times and relationships.
5_ Education in Nature is introduced in educational centers, converting schoolyards into learning ecosystems and training teachers to be able to work on any competencies and knowledge there.
6_ With the renaturalization of the space and the reconnection of the educational community with nature, the aim is to promote symbiosis between the two. We know that nature is good for us, that being in it has numerous benefits for health, learning and coexistence. And we also know that it is good for nature that we inhabit it from an attitude of gratitude and respect because this way we will be linked to it, we will know it, we will take care of it.
The SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems project could be replicated in its entirety (methodology, processes, learning) in any educational center or in any space where children and adolescents are present.
In fact, one of the objectives of the process is that, to provide the tools and training to be replicable.
The desire of T R E E S_Ecosystems is to allow and guarantee the participation of children and adolescents in real life and to protect their connection with nature.
That is why this schoolyards project was initiated years ago, to take the first steps in schools, the most familiar spaces for children and adolescents. With an eye on the next step, to participate in the renaturalization of spaces beyond, outside the school grounds either in rural or urban areas.
From the project SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems, we accompany the educational communities in the transformation and renaturalization of the outdoor spaces of their kindergarten, primary, secondary and high school schools.
This accompaniment allows a heterogeneous group, the educational community, to lead the process and achieve it. By stimulating learning, creativity and co-creation based on techniques and processes derived from Ecopedagogy, Universal Design for Learning and Dragon Dreaming we move towards the renaturalization of the educational ecosystem.
In order to ensure participation, it is essential to spread motivation for the project using methodologies eminently practical and experiential and make an effort to communicate the progress made.
The project proposes a methodology and a toolbox that each community adapts to its specific characteristics and needs.
ECOPEDAGOGY
Ecopedagogy is the pedagogy for responsible action with the environment and learning through the environment itself.
Seeks a critical and systemic understanding of the world aimed at the common good that fosters an active attitude towards sustainability.
Promotes personal and group transformation through participation with experiential methodologies that foster development in the emotional, creative, ethical and aesthetic spheres.
UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING
Focusing on capacity and not on disability, seeing diversity as a richness, based on a competency model and seeing contexts as disabling and not people.
DRAGON DREAMING
The Dragon Dreaming philosophy comes from the indigenous culture of the Western Australian Aborigines and is based on three objectives: Service to the Earth, Building Communities and Personal Growth.
"The Only Constant is Change" (Heraclitus).
Society has always had to transform itself to adapt and respond to new realities. It is now essential to prepare for a new transition, the ecological transition.
Children and adolescents are fundamental in this process for the present and for the future. To this end, it is crucial to reconnect with nature.
School playgrounds are the spaces where they spend the most time outdoors. The hard and cemented configuration of outdoor spaces in schools has many drawbacks, among which are the uninhabitability of the space, the loss of biodiversity, gender inequality and non-responsiveness to diversity.
If we turn schoolyards into natural spaces, we will be enhancing biodiversity by turning them into climate change regulators, pollution buffers and habitats for all species.
From a pedagogical point of view, the paradigm shift comes from discovering the potential of space as a pedagogical tool. A learning ecosystem in which all possible types of learning take place and which responds to all types of intelligences.
It is vital to change the way we look at schoolyards and transform them. If we do so, we will be achieving a personal reconnection with our nature and with nature, the renaturalization of our own space. We will be learning in the process and, fundamentally, we will become aware of the capacity for transformation that we have as individuals and communities.
Transformation goes beyond this, it should begin with personal transformation, to be affirmed in the transformation of the community that inhabits it and finally materializes in the space to achieve a deep reconnection with nature and with our nature.
"If we want children to flourish and be truly empowered, we must allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it." David Sobel
The extent of the initiative's progress is different in each of the 40 participanting centers due to their own idiosyncrasies and to the time they have been developing it.
In 95% of them there was a reconnection with nature, starting with a change of perspective and a conquest of outdoor spaces as learning ecosystems. In all the centers that have reached the celebration phase, more or less ambitious implementations have been carried out in the playground (materials and furniture to be able to inhabit it and turn it into a place for learning, planting native trees, school gardens, conquest of natural spaces inside the center that were not allowed to be used, ponds, sensory garden, edible forest, living willow structures, fauna observatories, bird feeders, bug hotels, botanical trails, ...).
In all of them there has been or there is a working group formed by members of the teaching team that has been trained with the necessary skills and knowledge for the implementation of the project and the design of learning situations that allow student participation.
Approximately 80% of the students of these centers have participated or are participating (in those projects that are in process) in the project, thus achieving the objectives of sustainability, esthetics and inclusion that were pursued in relation to the stage of the project.
Families have joined the project in 50% of the centers, receiving training and participating in the design and implementation process.
In some centers, the families have been the driving force behind the project, having already understood the importance of renaturalizing the schoolyard. There has been a transformation in them feeling part of the community, proud of the school and wanting to participate much more in the life of the center. In some cases, there has even been an open dialogue on the use of the playground outside school hours as a meeting place for students and families, who have taken responsibility for it.
Reconnecting with nature, rooting ourselves in our environments implies approaching, being in, inhabiting our natural environments and, also, an understanding of them is the way to develop this competences.
This comprehension comes through a deep observation and understanding of the system, the ecosystem in its complexity and totality, thus developing a critical view.
From there, we can empower ourselves by acquiring the necessary knowledge to be agents of change.
Renaturalizing school playgrounds through a participatory project with children and adolescents as protagonists, creating community and generating a parallel reflection and renaturalization on pedagogies, times and relationships promotes the creation of learning ecosystems that guarantee the acquisition of competencies on sustainability.
The SCHOOLYARDS, Learning Ecosystems project aims to be transformative in the present by improving the ecosystems of childhood and adolescence (educational spaces, communities, quality of education,...) and also to be a seed for the future by training students in the transformation of their present ecosystems so that they can do so in the future ones.
