Outdoor learning isn’t a new new concept: outdoor classrooms may have become increasingly trendy in recent years, but California has an “environmental education” movement dating back to the 1960s, while Waldkindergärten (“forest kindergartens”) started cropping up in Europe as early as the 1950s. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, historians and journalists pointed out that open-air schools helped curtail the transmission of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases in the early 1900s, and may prove useful in the present crisis.
Earlier this year, Manor College enlisted our help in creating a new outdoor classroom for the benefit of their students and faculty. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the design considerations that we encountered on this project.
Continue reading Thinking Outside the Building: Designing an Outdoor Classroom →