Outdoor Experience in Schoolyards Aimed at Widening Learning Opportunities

Abstract

Learning methods and educational programmes are increasingly dealing with the environment in which students and teachers spend most of their time. To this regard, the outer space has gained a leading role in many educational environments, above all in northern Europe and overseas. In Italy, it is often up to the teachers’ choice whether to carry out educational activities in schoolyards, whose use has been increasingly reduced also due to the fact that they are not fit for the needs of the lessons. This contribution aims to outline the relationship between the school ground and its use for learning activities, starting from outdoor lesson experiences for students’ physical well-being, providing some recent virtuous examples in which renovated schoolyards host well-equipped and structured classrooms. Indeed, outdoor classrooms are not a simple conversion of traditional indoor classrooms in the outer space. They are rather an opportunity to promote and facilitate the perception of natural elements as well as an inductive learning through practical experiences.