The Future School: More compost than concrete and more plants than plastic

There are rocks to balance on, chips of bark to be felt underfoot, long dew-covered grasses to feel, soft flowers to touch, and all the sounds and smells of the garden to take in. By the time they get to their classrooms, they have navigated the winding pathways that run around the trees of our fruit forest, walked through the vegetable gardens, or skipped under the creeper-covered sapling tunnel. They have covered quite a distance, moved their bodies, activated their senses, and are ready for a day of incredible learning. This is the daily experience of Green School SA’s learners.

Green School South Africa’s campus, in the heart of the Cape Winelands, is a wonderland for the children who come here. It is a place that fully ignites and engages a child’s mind, a place where learning is hands-on, real, relevant, and contextual. It is a campus where the infrastructure and learning programme is designed for connection: to self, to place, to each other, and our learning.

We approach sustainability from every angle. It is designed for our campus from the foundation up. Our built structures are free of harmful chemicals. Our landscape is home only to fauna and flora that belong in our valley. The lines between our indoor and outdoor spaces are intentionally blurred. Our infrastructure and the systems that keep our school waste-free, powered up, watered, and fed are regenerative: giving back more to the environment than we take from it. We investigate, interrogate, and challenge every system we put in place and every item we procure, from the toys we buy for our Kindergarten classrooms, to the marker pens we use on our whiteboards in High School. In being this meticulous, we are striving to lead by example, setting the stage for a sustainability-focused learning environment. As a school, we must live sustainability to its fullest, before we can teach it.

In our classrooms, our educational philosophy is layered on top of the school’s physical, sustainability-focused backbone. Teachers draw inspiration from David Sobel’s book, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. Following the Stages of Environmental Readiness, outlined in Sobel’s book, how we introduce the environment into our lessons, is carefully considered and age-appropriate. In the Early Years, our focus is on instilling wonder for the environment and nurturing in our little ones, a love of nature. Planting seeds in the soil becomes a lesson about the water cycle, searching for tadpoles in a rocky stream uncovers questions about the life cycle of a frog, while separating our used paper from our orange peels, is a gentle introduction to recycling and composting.

As we move up into the Primary School learning neighborhood, the teachers begin unpacking more complex environmental topics, reaching beyond their classroom to the boundaries of our school and our town. Picking herbs from the garden to brew medicinal teas, may form the foundation for a series of science lessons about mixtures and solutions. Collecting and sorting different coloured flowers from the garden becomes the catalyst for lessons in data collection and information communication. Delving into the design of a sustainable city as a class project introduces some of the many environmental challenges that we are facing within our built environments. We always look at these issues through a solutions-focused lens.

As our Green Schoolers move up into Middle and High School, they become familiar with global environmental challenges and can begin unpacking issues that are more complicated and multi-layered.  The teachers craft their lessons based on the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using scientific tools and methods to investigate the health of our local river, ties into SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, participating in one of our school’s zero-waste circular systems, by planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and composting their food, ties into SDG 2: Zero Hunger, and beginning each day by practicing mindfulness together, ties into SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being.

Our nature-connected campus promotes a deeper connection to oneself, each other, and our broader community and this impacts how our Green Schoolers learn. Physically, the frequent opportunities provided to the children throughout the day to move, run, play, and climb in nature, are resulting in a teaching environment that is calm and regulated. Emotionally, having access to the outdoors where children can walk, breathe, and re-calibrate, is enhancing their sense of well-being. Intellectually, these children are developing an understanding of how the content of their lessons can be applied, that it is of value in their own lives, and that the themes that they are unpacking are linked to the world they live in.

When we imagine the schools of the future, we imagine schools that prioritise the health of the natural world. We imagine them as self-sustaining, regenerative places, where there is more compost than concrete and there are more plants than plastic. We imagine schools being catalysts for the environmental change we want to see in our world. We imagine them being able to mobilize an entire community to make a positive impact. We envision schools as the places in which youngsters can put their agency to work, in positively influencing our world.

We imagine schools as places where children are as excited about climbing trees, scaling boulders, and finding frogs on the day that they graduate, as they were at the age of three, on the day they arrived.

By: Andrea Hofmeyr - Green School South Africa

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