Achieved outcomes and impacts:
The experience aims to make students reflect on the link between the school and its natural environment, as well as the achievement of learning through practical experimentation and the promotion of the acquisition of civic values.
The project promotes the design, construction and maintenance of a green space of which the students will have to be, to a large extent, its future users. It therefore favors the reconnection of young people with their immediate environment.
The students will propose the contents they want the green space to have, but they will do so after a research work in which they will have taken into account all the elements involved, with a clear objective: to get them involved in the project, to make the space their own and to ensure its improvement and conservation in the future. The aim is to involve the students in a project that will entail the adaptation of a space that is normally alien and marginal to them and that should eventually become part of their environment.
The students who participate in the experience receive training, appropriate to their level of understanding, on how the different municipal services deal with the process of creating green spaces and the needs of cities to have natural, permeable, inclusive and dynamic places. The success of this project is only possible through the joint work with the team of teachers, the involvement of the school and, sometimes, of other groups of the educational community such as mothers and fathers.
Success factors and lessons learned:
The key to success has been the way in which the students have been involved in the projects of the "Fem un Jardí" program. They also highlight the benefits of the remodeling of the improved green spaces, including non-tangible elements such as the students' learning that will be very useful for their education, both from a conceptual point of view and in terms of procedures and values.
This instrument can be applied in other places, adapting the program to each case and could even be applied to school children or other citizen groups.
