Webinar with Gustavo Rojas Ayala, Editor: Designing Democratic Schools and Learning Environments

Recess is often treated as a break from the “real” learning of the school day. Yet it is one of the few spaces where children make decisions, negotiate differences, build relationships, take risks, move freely, and experience nature on their own terms. Drawing on Designing Democratic Schools and Learning Environments: A Global Perspective, which I co-edited, and particularly on Ángela Ibáñez and Marcial Huneeus’s chapter “Recess in a Learning Landscape: An Opportunity for the Development of Democratic Skills,” this webinar reframes recess and the schoolyard as learning environments where children practice autonomy, inclusion, conflict resolution, belonging, and civic life.

Participants will learn to recognize the developmental and democratic skills cultivated through free, active, risky, and nature-based play; examine how the physical design of a schoolyard can transform an exclusive or underused space into an inclusive learning landscape; and identify practical questions for assessing whether their own recess environments give every child meaningful opportunities for choice, movement, connection, challenge, and contact with nature.

Registration: https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/texaschildreninnaturenetwork/recess-where-children-learn-to-live-together