Are You also a Basalt School?

Schools are the key to the rise and future of the community and youth – and, therefore, of the region. Nature is a newly rediscovered educational tool of the 21st century. It helps transcend usual physical, mental, spiritual and communal boundaries, connect generations and create a responsible, glocalist community.

The Basalt School is the Kodály method of outdoor learning, the flagship of formal, informal and non-formal outdoor learning processes and spaces launched in Hungary. It aims to enable participants to become productive actors, experience their natural environment, identify its potential and become aware of the responsibilities it imposes.

1. Basalt Classroom (creating the space): Outdoor learning spaces are created using architectural and landscape building tools, working with local children and young adults throughout the entire process of finding the appropriate location, design and construction. Once built, the classroom offers a learning space for schoolchildren and adults alike.

2. Learning the lay of the land, creative and cultural get-togethers (creating content): The planning and testing of the classroom’s formal, informal and non-formal settings. It is an exercise in collaborative thinking and experimentation, working with local educators and eminent national education development practitioners.

3. Basalt curriculum (creating methodology): The methodology of each subject’s complex instructional and educational programme will be published in book form. Serving also as a task book, it will be available nationwide to all teachers and students and will be a road map for the respective Basalt Classrooms and their classes.

In its work on youth education, the European Union attaches particular importance to activities in streets, public areas and public parks, stating that educators should move into an environment that young people have an ownership feeling of.

The natural landscape plays an increasingly important role in modern pedagogy as a learning and cultural development site on formal, non-formal and informal levels. A strong example is Scandinavian education, where everything from outdoor classrooms to forests is used. Basalt Schools are an extension and development of this: a programme close to nature, aimed at cognitive development and emotionally connected to our landscape’s riches.