Writer in residence Hoang Viet Nguyen on the importance of bringing nature back into education
This op-ed was written by Hoang Viet Nguyen, who was a writer in residence with the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation in April 2023.
While transforming education is a big agenda, it can always start with simple but profound ideas. Reclaiming the green schoolyards taken away from our children over the past 25 years could bring back not only ecological but also social impacts.
I remember how much I enjoyed school 25 years ago. My usual two happiest times during the school day were the fifteen minute midday break and the free time after school. Yes, the schooling that I enjoyed happened beyond the classroom walls. It happened in the playground of my school.
The playground that I mentioned might be different from the one you’re thinking about - a playground with many facilities such as swings, slides, seesaws, and spring riders that we often see in public parks nowadays. My playground was just a vacant lot, but we used to be full of joy there. The popular game we used to play was marbles. We used our fingers to etch lines and boundaries in the dirt, estimate the distance, and try to strike each other's marbles.
By providing spaces for the soaring of our imaginations, the full engagement of our heads, hands, and hearts, and the interweaving of our home and school literacies, the school playground becomes the "Third Space" in education that has been recognized by educational research for its liberating potential.
Sadly, those "Third Spaces" have been disappearing over the past two decades in my home country of Vietnam. In the name of progress, school gardens and natural playgrounds with grass and soil have been replaced with concrete schoolyards. As schools become increasingly gated, closed, isolated, and cemented, we must consider the consequences of this trend.
The biodiversity loss in cemented playgrounds mirrors the loss of diversity in pedagogy. By institutionalizing students’ natural playgrounds with cement blocks, schools inadvertently reproduce the Western-backed ideologies of modernity and hegemonic ways of knowing.
Looking further, this anthropocentric worldview implies paradigms of domination and elimination that students and teachers internalize and perpetuate. In such a worldview, teaching and learning become a one-way road, as students can only learn from teachers and teachers can only learn from teacher educators. The curricula and pedagogies of the natural world, the more-than-human world, are resultingly overlooked. Schooling, in this way, shrinks the educational third space and reinforces authoritarian structures of teaching and learning.
Moreover, this concreting schoolyard movement undermines the transformative power of schools and their ability to cultivate a healthy climate.
In an institutionalized space like a school, when most of the interactions are framed by the intellectual lens, the relationships between teachers and students are reduced to knowledge transfer. In this notion, schools hardly provide enough space for everyone within to be seen as full human beings with their wholeness.
When students (and teachers) come to school, they bring with them in their backpacks the history, culture, and many other lived experiences of their families and communities. As their backpacks are always heavy in many ways, there should be a space for unpacking those heavy things and transforming them into strengths, pride, and assets. The land itself holds this transformative power, offering a pedagogy grounded in the wisdom of the natural world which the concrete yard could not.
Therefore, advocating for more green spaces in schools like reclaiming natural schoolyards is a radical call for more diverse, inclusive, and equitable learning environments.
These green spaces that I am advocating for should not be limited to physical spaces like gardens or playgrounds. Alternatively, they can be both real and imagined spaces that are built upon prioritizing interdependent relationships and the transformative power of the community.
Restoring the green in our schoolyards is a paradigm shift, a transition from a culture of human superiority, elimination, and isolation to a culture of community building, relationship restoration, and diversity nurturing. While discussions of global education transformation may continue for upcoming decades, we as educators can always take action here and now from the ground.
Regreening the schoolyards is a good starting point for a long journey that every educator, teacher, parent, and student can collectively embark on. Fostering ecological transformations within a school could catalyze broader social transformations within and beyond it.
Hoang Viet Nguyen is a teacher, teacher educator, social justice advocate, restorative justice trainer, and a Fulbright scholar, who has spent over a decade working with children, youth, and teachers in Vietnam for the empowerment and liberation of individuals and communities. From 2015 to 2022, he was a founder of Dream&Do School for Future Changemakers, a non-formal education center that incubates young environmental and social enthusiasts and changemakers. Since 2022, he has joined a pioneering initiative in transforming the Vietnamese school climate named The Classroom Circles as a restorative justice training coordinator. He is involved with many other regional youth leaders via forums like YSEALI, and ASEAN Foundation Youth as a fellow, speaker, trainer, mentor, project coordinator, and volunteer. Viet is now pursuing his academic development as a graduate student majoring in Culturally Sustaining Education at the College of Education, University of Washington in Seattle, USA.
The Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation offers three writing residencies per year to thought leaders and educationalists working to advance the agenda of education transformation. Our inspiring home at Schloss Leopoldskron provides the time and space for these individuals from across the globe to develop their work and creatively explore new ideas.
