Nursery Fields Forever

ORGANIZATION NAME:

LOCATION: Italy, United Kingdom

SUMMARY: Our project proposes an unconventional educational approach, together with the innovative space where it can be performed. It’s a real hybrid between a farm and a nursery school where the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of children is encouraged by the constant interaction with animals and plants.

PROBLEM SPACE: “Nowadays the absence of direct experience has completely misled children’s perception of the world and of its most basic processes.
This appears particularly true in urban environments where children often ignore, for instance, that the milk they drink comes from living animals or that beans don’t sprout in cans.
The dominant preschool system does not face this problem, keeping children in classrooms where plants barely peek out from the window and animals only appear in extraordinary visits.”

SOLUTION: “We feel the need of a deep reconnection with the basic, direct, slow relations that exist between mankind and nature. Hence, our project proposes a way – and a place – for this reconnection to happen since the early childhood. It’s commonly known that children are inherently and intuitively curious naturalists. We believe that this innate quality should be exploited, stimulated and guided through the educational approach of the nursery of the future.
This model sees the nursery as a catalyst capable of combining, along with game, nature and technique in a renovated didactic path based on three approaches: learning from nature, learning from technique, and learning from practice.
Hence, the spatial definition of the nursery establishes an integration of traditional scholastic environments and experimental spaces that merge didactic and farming. Rather than merely relying on a fixed subdivision in classrooms, the daily and seasonal routine of the groups of children 2 to 5 years old unfolds along a trajectory based on natural cycles.”

CONTACT: [email protected]