EDUQA, the first environmental school in Italy inaugurated in the Spanish Quarters

The new “green” educational project that will involve over 500 children and young people was presented on the opening day of GEA-Giornate Educazione Ambiente.

Inaugurated at FOQUS, the Foundation of the Spanish Quarters of Naples (via Portacarrese a Montecalvario, 69), EDUQA, the first school in Italy with an environmental vocation, born from the collaboration between the Bolton Hope Foundation, the Schools “Dalla Parte Dei Bambini”, the social enterprise “Con i Bambini” and the FOQUS Foundation itself.

The ribbon cutting, with the Mayor Gaetano Manfredi, on the opening day of GEA-Giornate Educazione Ambiente, the event aimed at students, teachers and parents, to reflect on the increasingly inescapable relationship between the education of young people and the defense of the environment, underway at FOQUS until Sunday 1st October (the program on www.giornateeducazioneambiente.it).

EDUQA was born in the heart of the Spanish Quarters, the urban area with the highest risk of school dropout between the ages of 8 and 13 in Italy and characterised by the highest degree of anthropisation of the urban context in Europe and by an almost total lack of greenery.

The new school is located in a complex built specifically in the former Montecalvario Institute, with a design inspired by the most modern theories that place the environment and the methodologies of active pedagogy at the centre of the educational programme.

Six thousand square meters, of which 600 are outdoors (which were the vegetable gardens of the seventeenth-century monastery), abandoned for almost a century, will host the school from this year and also a garden-lab, which, in addition to becoming a permanent classroom, will be the only green area in the Spanish Quarters.

EDUQA will involve 80 teachers, educators, laboratory assistants and ATA staff, creating more than 100 new jobs. The teachers of the new school are following a special three-year training course on environmental culture and the methods of active schools, according to a program in which CNR researchers and scholars and experts from the main Italian institutions and universities engaged in the environmental issue participate.

The new educational center includes the opening of an entire school cycle: a nursery school (0-2 years), a kindergarten (3-5 years), a primary school (6-10 years) and a lower secondary school (11-14 years).

The new “green” educational path will involve over 500 children and young people with methodologies that also include the active participation of their families to make everyone protagonists of the broader urban regeneration program launched by FOQUS exactly ten years ago.

EDUQA intends, in fact, to contribute to building a new identity for the Spanish Quarters, from an emblem of social fragility to a neighborhood in which the rights and needs of children and young people are placed at the center of a real process of emancipation and regeneration.

The effects of EDUQA educational practices and their replicability will be studied and evaluated by INDIRE – National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research – which will carry out, with its own researchers, analysis and evaluation of the results.

For the creation of learning environments for the development of innovative educational practices and the diffusion of a new environmental culture in the Spanish Quarters, the best international standards of organization and design of spaces were taken as a reference. In particular, the furniture project was curated by the designers of Play+, the same company called to furnish the School recently promoted by the Mayor of Washington, the “Takadanobaba” nursery in Tokyo, the Ambassador Kindergarden of the royal family of Dubai.

National and international partners are participating in the EDUQA project. Bolton Hope Foundation, committed to spreading accessible, sustainable and quality education because it firmly believes that this is the true engine of change, will support the launch of the EDUQA project for ten years, which it helped build and design. The Foundation, which was founded and is based in Milan, has agreed with the social enterprise “Con i bambini” to support the first three years of activity of the educational center of the Spanish Quarters.

To bring innovation, well-being, and sustainability to the neighborhood, the FOQUS Foundation continues its collaboration with Siram Veolia, a leading energy efficiency group. Specifically, in addition to installing smog-absorbing panels in the courtyard of the former Montecalvario school, Siram will monitor air quality inside and outside the classrooms of the new school complex, reporting the values ​​on dedicated interactive monitors.

Students and teachers will receive a training session explaining how to interpret the data collected and, more importantly, what improvement actions to take. The project, implemented for the first time in a school complex in Campania, will ensure a safer and healthier environment for children attending school, educating them about the importance of breathing clean air.

Capgemini, a global leader in business and technology transformation services, convinced of the importance of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future, will contribute to the organization of digital labs for students and training courses focused on the environment, as well as donating computers to the school.

The inauguration of the new school complex saw the planting of the seed of the Austrian pine from Annie's Arboretum, the only tree left standing in the memorial park of the suffragette movement, donated to FOQUS by the women of the British collective Walking Forest. The seed was brought to the Spanish Quarter by Rachel Launay, Director of the British Council in Italy, who received it from the hands of the President of the activists, Lucy Neal, already a guest of FOQUS in 2021, when she learned about the Foundation's projects as part of the collaboration with the British Embassy in Italy.

Now the planting of the seed affiliates Naples to the network of cities in the world united in the project of the “walking forest”, bringing to the world a message of encouragement for women's emancipation and respect for nature.