The Romanian battle for a better living environment is fought against ignorance! Every child has the right to know about the intricate processes that transform the built environment he/she lives in. By providing resources, tools for understanding the surrounding environment, children are better equipped to choose for the future and the ideas that they are, too, part of the society are reinforced.
The programs we’ve created since 2011, all linked together, are meant to support children in developing a range of skills and abilities hardly used in the traditional educational process in Romania: interpretation and abstract thinking; representation and visual expression, sense of place and space; creativity; the ability to observe, perceive and critically analyze the built environment, identifying its values; the civic sense and the responsibility towards both built and natural environment. Children love it; parents appreciate the unique activities, whilst teachers see the potential of a program which normally doesn’t take place in school as part of the regular curriculum, an intersection and coming to fruition of all other subjects taught, which tie together and give a bigger picture, helping children get ready for the real world. With a built environment professional alongside the educator, students are being exposed to another kind of education, an experiential one.
Recently we’ve created new content and we’ve shifted the focus to a slightly older public (youth). We’ve acted as mediators and mentors, creating fellowship projects that brought together teenagers and university students in their exploration of the built environment. We’ve continued our process of digitizing our programs and we’ve prioritized activities aimed at growing the skill set of our network (communication, public speaking and pedagogical activities).
We will continue focusing on our educators, so they can become disseminators, multiplying the built environment programs, in a field that is underdeveloped. We aim to level up in our participative diagnosis project for better schools, by involving all the stakeholders (community, local administration, beneficiaries etc).
Our programs can already be used in different contexts, but we are happy to customize and adapt them to any specific situation (cultural, geographical etc.), some simpler, others more complex. Most materials are in Romanian, but over the years we’ve translated some in other languages. In Romania, all teaching materials, workbooks and training courses are free for their users in the public schools.
