Since the Jardim do Monte School has the privilege of being located on a farm, whose biodiversity offers the possibility of learning experiences and enriching experiences for human development in the context of the forest, agricultural cultivation according to bio-dynamics, and the protection of spontaneous flora and fauna in dry and wet areas, it has been inserting its teaching practice into the richness of the natural world that surrounds it year after year. Increasingly, the classroom is located outside, where nature is seen as the great teacher who wisely responds to the needs of human growth, both individually and socially.
The way in which the plant and animal world works to find appropriate responses to their needs, while at the same time cultivating dynamics of cooperation and inter-help, which not only allows them to share in healthy development but also protects the vital essence that allows them to exist, has become more consciously a source of study and learning for the entire school community, particularly for our students and teachers.
At a time when man’s life on earth is dominated by threats that stem precisely from a lack of respect for the natural world, our school’s pedagogical project, within the framework of Waldorf Pedagogy, which effectively aims to contribute to social transformation through the future performance of its students as citizens who can act with a free conscience in favor of Life and Humanity, has defined the following theme as the intention of its work for this school year: “The building function that the natural space of the school plays in the education of the human being, as responsible for the future of humanity.”
At the opening of the school year, we immediately presented our intention to the parents, creating a moment of silence and contemplation of the surrounding landscape. We dedicated the first in-house training session with all the staff to the start of this new dynamic, based on a holistic approach to the surrounding natural life that included exercises in phenomenological observation and artistic expression of manifestations of nature, according to the Goethean method. The individual experience of this practical work was then shared in order to integrate its conclusions into the Waldorf pedagogy’s vision of the human being and their needs at each stage of their development.
In order to deepen this work and allow it to inspire all of the school’s pedagogical and social practice, ways of acting in the school’s day-to-day life were outlined that would strengthen the links between the life of nature and human consciousness, leading it to an inner work of self-education to awaken new capacities and skills that will allow us to harmonize our way of being and being with a view to a globally sustainable future.
For this work, we are relying not only on the ability to observe all the “beings” of nature with respect and wonder, but also on the requirement that, in any area of knowledge, the teacher has developed the ability to approach it in an artistic way, in which beauty is the great motivation for learning until adolescence – skills that are inherent in the pedagogical training of the Waldorf teacher. But we also have the invaluable help of collaborators who carry out tasks directly linked to the life of nature (according to the principles of biodynamics) who will henceforth be the constant link between the course of life on earth and life at school, providing the latter with information about what is happening there, needs to be met, lessons to be learned, observations and discoveries to be made so that a solid bridge can be established between the two. As far as possible, teachers will have to integrate all of this into their work, allowing their students to reconnect not only by feeling, but also by thinking and acting to the great house we inhabit.
In addition to the existing activities which, throughout the year, follow their own rhythms in terms of working the land – preparing the soil, sowing, tending, harvesting, processing various products for food or therapeutic use – working with animals – from shearing wool to making yarn and its natural coloring – we’ve started collecting tree seeds for reforestation, marking out transition zones for observing and preserving native plants, drawing up field diaries that show the evolution of a plant, the life of a tree, the changes in a natural space over the seasons, in order to
understand how each species or ecosystem coexists and copes with the surrounding external conditions, thus establishing an emotional bond with the natural world. This diary will include various approaches: more descriptive, more literary, artistic illustrations, comparative studies with other forms of life on earth or other forms of adaptation to different external conditions, as well as the relationship between the location of their existence and human intervention over time. The various areas of the curriculum will be covered in these approaches, allowing for a lively relationship with knowledge, but above all a soulful and uplifting relationship with nature.
We hope to be able to progressively integrate parents into this cultivation of a more conscious relationship with nature, recognizing it as the essential and primordial link between human beings and Life.
Leonor Malik
