Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The study explores whether children, in the primary school, located in Reggio Emilia, know plants and their uses and benefits. Moreover, it tries to rebuild a learning environment on the plant’s memory with stakeholders of the school. The first part of the project has been conducted with interviews about children’s ideas on the learning environment. The second part investigates children’s knowledge of plants, their practices, and the traditions of their culture. The methodology of co-research involves ethnobotany, which helps make visible the relationship between humans and plants (Caneva et al., 2013) connected to the pedagogical documentation (Rinaldi, 2006). In this study, the qualitative analysis of the content of the conversation and documentation of children in the group show how children make a connection with their innate relationship with the plants (Wilson, 1984; Barbiero, 2012) through their application in food or health, and underline their ʺnaturalistic intelligenceʺ (Gardner, 1999). Moreover, teachers affirm that a new setting support work in group, and collaboration, and their didactic was changing in relation to the environment. They conclude that the project with plants makes a connection with the earth’s environment developing some questions and curiosities, a bridge to the outside world. For schools, it has essential to know these new ethnical and migratory configurations and to confide in natural experiences brought by children, who in their turn have received from their relatives, “to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage” (UNESCO, 2003). This could be in the form of an elective module in the frame of an open curriculum that would also include plants growing in an indoor context and in a school garden, starting from their pre-knowledge that they learn from relatives or other important figures in their life and spread a diverse culturally and sustainability understanding of this world (Latour, 2017) to promote environmental consciousness.