The “School in the Green”: An Experience of Developing Scholastic Intelligence Through the Enhancement of the Naturalistic and Visual-Spatial Ones

Abstract:

The "Cipolletti" Institute has launched, from the 2020-21 school year to today, in the summer months, the experience of the "School in the Green", located in a wood in the town of Banzano di Montoro (AV- Italy). It is a space equipped for the safety of kindergarten and primary school children, in which motor, artistic, and laboratory activities are carried out in English since the Institute is a bilingual school. The school, which has been using the "Embodied cognition" model for years, has intended to integrate "Embodied" learning, precisely "Embodied", with outdoor teaching, trying to develop, in parallel with scholastic intelligence, also naturalistic intelligence, and visual-spatial. Among the scientific assumptions is that of Waldpädagogik, of experiential pedagogy that values discovery learning. The project of the "School in the Green" was supervised by the Chair of Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Department of Medicine, Surgery, Dentistry "Scuola Medica Salernitana" of the University of Salerno (Italy), and the same Department sponsored the project. The activities carried out were: Study science directly through sensory experience in nature; Music and movement workshop with Orff instruments; Sensory and musical journey with handcrafted instruments; Motor paths and motor coordination to develop naturalistic intelligence and visual-spatial intelligence; Motor-sport activity in the greenery; Immersive learning of the English language; Peer tutoring for learning English; Small group activity in Spanish; Learning of less widespread languages with the 3D construction of morpho-phonemes (for example Korean, Portuguese); Theatrical activities in nature; Garden care; Workshop for flower arrangements; Outdoor cooking workshop¸local field trips. This short article reports the theoretical construct of reference and research to evaluate whether school learning activities benefit from being implemented in a naturalistic context.