summary
There is a growing amount of research showing that green schoolyards not only improve urban biodiversity, but provide co-benefits for the physical and mental health, cognitive development and pro-environmental attitudes of students, as well as ensuring a more equal access to nature and reducing spatial gender hierarchies. At the same time, urban heat island effects caused by climate change are steadily bringing schoolyard greening initiatives to the forefront of municipal agendas.
Introducing nature into schoolyards has a great potential to transform not only educational practices towards more outdoor and place-based learning – their role as a community hub can also bring awareness and sustainable practices to families and the neighbourhoods surrounding schools. The potential of schoolyard greening to initiate more systemic transformations in schools, however, mostly goes unrealised in schoolyard greening initiatives. It requires a collective vision, imagination and engagement from the school community. However, structural factors such as rigid curricula and lacking institutional recognition of outdoor learning, a lack of outdoor expertise in formal teacher training, poor funding and general overburdening of teachers often discourage or even prevent such engagement. By studying the case of a municipal schoolyard greening project in the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, my research therefore explores how greening schoolyards relates to the institutional context and the goals and values of the education system at large, while identifying which approaches can trigger changes to redesign schools as a sustainability hub. I approach this by co-creating shared visions for sustainable schools with a wide range of stakeholders around the schools, collectively identifying structural barriers and creating approaches to overcome them. As part of the BIOTraCes research project funded by Horizon Europe, which explores how diverse biodiversity innovations can lead to transformative changes for a nature-positive society, my research will also contribute to a larger theory of transformative change for maintaining and recovering biodiversity in Europe.
partners
This research is part of the BIOTraCes project (https://www.biotraces.eu), a European research collaborative project funded by Horizon Europe that takes a justice-driven and bottom-up approach to biodiversity and transformation in European landscapes.
Project duration: 1 April 2023 - 31 March 2026.
who's working on this project
Contact: Liam Ó Riada
