The Schoolyard as a Teachable Space: a Research-Training Project with Teachers and Parents

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to reorganize. By and large Italian schools were not ready for online didactic. Teachers had to learn tools and reinvent their teaching rapidly and without a clear institutional mandate. While this process proved to be extremely stressful, it also fostered a greater sense of agency, independency, empowerment in teachers (Jones, Harris, 2014). It also consolidated informal professional learning communities (Watkins, 2005). These gains are proving to be lasting and are bridging across different sectors. In summer 2020 teachers at a primary school in Reggio Emilia (Italy), started a deep reflection on the new school year and how to make the best of the difficult and uncertain situation ahead of them. More specifically, the schoolyard was identified as a ‘teachable space’ that is a healthy environment, given the pandemic, where teachers can extend classroom learning to natural and authentic environments (Feille, 2019). Teachers had no lasting experience on outdoor education (Humbestone et al., 2016), so they reached out to outside experts (environmental educators and researchers). A research-training project (Asquini, 2018) has been structured and is currently on the way to redesign the schoolyard on the basis of the educational potentials highlighted in the literature and in the training path itself. This study refers a preliminary account of this process that involved both the teachers and the parents of the school. It will present: the documentation of the process of co-designing; the results of a survey, analyzing teachers’ perceived self-efficacy (Glackin, Hohenstein, 2018) and believes regarding outdoor education before the project started; the presentation of the reflective notebooks that accompany the teachers throughout the training meetings (Moon, 2003).