Jeu en extérieur et développement durable dans les structures éducatives Erasmus Project

Project Title

Jeu en extérieur et développement durable dans les structures éducatives

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Pedagogy and didactics; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

While the time spent in nursery, then at school and in recreational centers is steadily increasing for children, their “outdoor” time decreases. The courtyard is often the only place where children can freely play outside. However, this is a pedagogically disinvested place, poor in games, where “chaos” reigns and which is, in fact, a very “accident-prone” and stressful place for educational teams. Meanwhile, our society produces more and more objects and as a result, we can observe the increase of waste of all kinds: unsold factory stock, default objects, packaging, objects that are old-fashioned … All of them are still poorly reused and recycled.

In response to these observations, the project partners based their approach on the English experience of Children’s Scrapstore and offered a project “Outdoor games and sustainable development in educational structures” which aims to:
– Transform the human and physical environment outside in the courtyard of educational structures so that children can live quality playful experiences during extra-curricular and leisure time by reusing objects;
– Change the view on playing in educational structures by developing a better understanding of its role and its impact in the lives of children in order to upgrade and promote its importance.

The project was experimented in France, in a school and a recreation center, as well as in Spain, in a nursery. It consisted in the installation and animation on the playground of the “Playpod”, a big box of 15 m² filled with disparate objects previously selected on the basis of security and its playfulness. This experiment included accompanying adult supervisors to become the game’s facilitators and not only “guards” of the yard, by providing training on free play and a sustainable development component on the issue of waste.
The objective of the partnership, beside the transfer of knowledge, was to measure the impact of this pedagogical device at each site in order to adapt it to local contexts and assess its relevance in the construction and development of the child. To do this, 2 research organizations were partners in the project and monitored the experiment at the pilot sites.

Six organizations cooperated in the project: Children’s Scrapstore, creator of this innovative pedagogical device, the Association Jouer pour Vivre, which carries the experiment out in an elementary school in France, the Ligue de l’Enseignement, a popular education movement, which worked with a recreation center and Encis, a Spanish cooperative that accompanied the nursery. The research institutions were the University of Paris 13 for France and the Ferrer Guardia Foundation for Spain. The project participants were leaders of NGOs, educational stakeholders and researchers. Around thirty are directly involved in the activities. Target audiences are the educational stakeholders of the 3 countries and more specifically children between the age of 3 and 11 and staff teams of educational structures.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 177181,82 Eur

Project Coordinator

LA LIGUE DE L’ENSEIGNEMENT & Country: FR

Project Partners

• ENCÍS
• Jouer pour Vivre
• Children’s Scrapstore Ltd
• UNIVERSITE PARIS 13
• FUNDACIÓN FRANCISCO FERRER