Schools in and with nature. The educational revolution of the 21st century
Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon, ESF sciences humaines, coll. Pédagogies, February 2022
"To the young Isabelle who, in Jean Giraudoux's play Intermezzo (1933), has decided to take her class outside, the inspector docently explains that "the ceiling, in teaching, must be understood in such a way as to emphasize the size of the adult in relation to the child. A teacher who adopts the open air admits that he is smaller than the tree, less corpulent than the ox, less mobile than the bee; he thus sacrifices the best proof of his dignity." Yet Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon show us precisely the opposite: teaching in nature, bringing nature into the school, accompanying pupils in the discovery of the outside world, putting them in a position to observe and describe it, to make hypotheses and experiment, to understand the profound solidarity that unites humans and the planet, is to confer on today's teacher an essential mission: to enable the coming generation to give a future to its future."