BLES creates natural school grounds in Flanders

BLES (Buiten Leren en Spelen, Belgium) guides schools to transform their playground into a green environment. In collaboration with various experts - landscape architects, social workers, researchers, teachers school boards, engineers, municipal officials - we turn outdoor spaces into stimulating places to live and learn.

For our students, the schoolyard is where they spend one to two hours outdoors every day, some four thousand hours of their school career. The centre of their world, where the news of the day is discussed and friendships are forged, where they develop their identity and can practice living together. The most of our playgrounds in Belgium, however, are a dreary grey plain with 30 x 30 cm concrete tiles, here and there interrupted by a bench or a rare tree. Research shows that school grounds with green and adventurous elements not only lead to better physical development, but also boost the mental health and cultural development of our children. The 'smart' design of playgrounds, with sufficient variety and natural elements, encourages creativity, play, exploration and nature engagement. In contrast, a concrete plain often fosters boredom or even bullying behaviour. Consider, for example, a central football ground, where a stray ball hitting a casual bystander quickly leads to conflict. Children who want something different want, are pushed to the edge of the playground. There is little 'space' to tinker, experiment and build. There are few opportunities to get in touch with yourself, others and the environment. Smart zoning with playful planting provides for a variety of play and interaction, with still plate

The playground as an ecosystem

A search for insects, birds, mammals and amphibians yields very little in the classic playground. It is ecosystems with difficulty, nor relationships with nature in the near the school. In rainy weather, the playground is under water, because the drains do not drain fast enough. The water is not collected anywhere, has no chance to infiltrate into the soil and is not reused. During the summer months the concrete tiles  intensify the heat effect and there is nowhere to find shade. Commitment to climate adaptation is inextricably linked to softening, addressing heat islands and flooding. Space is created for greening, which enhances biodiversity strengthens and enables nature to cope more resiliently with climate change. By focusing on local plants, with an eye for value and food plants, you stimulate a lot of ecosystems. When these playful plants are also smartly placed and low-maintenance, a climate-friendly playground is a win for everyone. In addition, you can connect the roofs to rainwater collection, reuse rainwater and allow excess rainwater to infiltrate the planted areas. Playgrounds rarely reflect existing ambitions around climate change, love of nature and quality education. If we want our children and young people to care for their environment, they will need to understand how this works.

Neighbourhood in the school, school in the neighbourhood

Schools are open between half past eight in the morning and six in the evening for about 170 days a year. The other days the grounds are (often) not in use. There is a huge potential of space: what if we made meeting and collaboration possible, where the neighbourhood and the broad school environment become part of the learning? And what if we take care of the neighbourhood and the school together?

Playground projects offer opportunities to engage a neighbourhood

involved in a 'whole school' approach. Looking after a place and organise activities with all stakeholders, makes learning life-like. For example, by providing an access in the fence, you literally make the playground accessible to the neighbourhood, which can, for instance, organise activities there after school hours or organise activities there or maintain a communal vegetable garden. So it is an added value to include accessibility, multifunctionality and divisibility in the design of the new playground.

Playground as a powerful learning environment (curriculum)

Apart from some chalk graffiti within the arts lesson, temperature recording linked to natural sciences and team sports during physical education lessons, you rarely find curriculum-related learning activities on the playground. Worldwide, organisations such as Learning through landscapes (UK) and The Children & Nature Network (USA) are staunch advocate of nature-based & place-based learning, in which every aspect of the environment is used to achieve powerful learning achieve. When a learner erects ingenious structures in the play zone, uses pebbles as a base for building materials or builds a bridge with branches to help animals cross the pond, outdoor learning provides help, outdoor learning provides opportunities to involve and enhance maths, language sciences and creativity and combine them. For example for example, you can easily build links with an integrated STEAM approach and work on 21st-century skills such as collaboration, creative thinking and entrepreneurship.

The time is right

There is global momentum to soften and green playgrounds greening. In Flanders, greening projects from MOS Flanders, cities and municipalities, Agency for Nature and Forests and Department for the Environment are delivering great initiatives. Teachers' teams, parents' committees, design teams and governments see that something needs to change. However, investing in the playground is still too often seen as: 'we'll do that when everything else is ready'. The playground transforming into a green learning environment requires, besides gathering budgets, first and foremost a thoughtful approach in which it is best to involve all partners. The places most used by our young people should also be designed, conceived and managed by them.

A smart design in which the children and young people are involved parties and in which they can develop their love for the place develop, is therefore important. After all, simply offering more nature does not necessarily lead to more knowledge about and contact with that nature. (Zhang, Z., Stevenson, K. T., Martin, K. L., (2021). In a playground where romping and learning takes place, you find sand and pebbles, water moves, trees, bushes and plants grow. Is everyone on board? Are the team and all the parents behind this? And what about practical concerns such as dirty trousers, hands shoes and classes? To cut through knots and get the noses in the same direction, the broad school community will have to enter will have to enter into a dialogue with experts (designers, engineers and contractors), parents, the neighbourhood and certainly pupils and teachers. Government grants vary in interpretation, repetition, time and deadlines. It is important to start this in good time. Experience shows that when you start from a well-considered vision and at the same time focus on support, professionalisation of your team and the necessary experiments, you will soon be able to submit a solid story.

Within BLES, we focus on:

PROFESSIONALISATION - How can you design the learning space together and engage in outdoor learning, interdisciplinary collaboration and risky play? How can you collaborate with partners and experts and thus capitalise on opportunities of the outdoor place? Investing in professionalisation means giving your team space to look over the wall and work together on a shared vision.

EXPERIMENT - Learning by doing. You can do a lot of research before the playground has been renovated: leave branches lying around in the playground and see what happens to them, give an outdoor lesson together with a colleague, organise an activity, etc. lesson, together with a colleague, organise an activity together with the neighbourhood and the pupils. From these experiments you learn a lot what: what further support you need, experiences and tips you can share, examples to support the vision of a powerful play and learning environment.

Supporting base - There are endless possibilities to design the playground as a multipurpose learning and living space. But when this process of change is not widely supported, a lot of (negative) energy goes into fire-fighting. It takes deliberation and a creative open mind to see the learning benefits in all this see. Students as well as teachers, entertaining staff, policy and parents are best involved in this preparatory work.

www.blesland.be

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This article was published in magazine VRP Ruimte #56