Living classroom. Experimental classroom in early childhood education

This project focuses on the renovation of classrooms at the Faculty of Education Sciences to adapt them to a new innovative teaching and learning model. It is about the creation of an “Experimental Classroom for Early Childhood Education”, where educational innovation becomes a space in itself, recovering and recreating the essence of the concept of education, a process accompanied by the integral and autonomous development of the human being. From this point of view, we start from the incorporation of nature and respectful education into the classroom as a mechanism for the vital and human transformation of space.

New technologies and the intense demand for academic extracurricular activities are transforming the relationship of learners with the environment and especially with the natural environment. This digital hyperconnection is generating what Louv (2008) called nature deficit disorder. Children spend a large part of their day sitting, in closed environments and totally alien to the natural environment. All of this generates health and educational problems, such as obesity, attention deficit, allergies, respiratory diseases, visual and information hyperstimulation, and serious difficulties in developing one's own, critical and creative thinking, among others. Today's school must respond to the needs and challenges of the present, which is why it is considered vital that children, as well as future teachers, incorporate that link with nature and natural development; in short, it is about recovering the natural elements in their living space, as proposed by Heike Freire, establishing a "triangular" relationship between the educator, the child and the natural environment.

In the project, nature is incorporated into the classroom through plant walls and a ceiling that will become filled with nature over time. All of this is completely sensorized and monitored to verify in real time the improvement in air quality in educational rooms.