"Eduqa" is born in Naples: the first school with an environmental vocation

The Spanish Quarter Foundation was inaugurated in Foqus Napoli, 'EDUQA' the first school in Italy with an environmental vocation.

Born from the collaboration between the Bolton Hope Foundation, the "Dalla Parte Dei Bambini" schools, the "Con i Bambini" social enterprise and the Foqus Foundation itself.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony, with the mayor of the Campania capital, Gaetano Manfredi, took place on the opening day of GEA-Giornate Educazione Ambiente (Education and Environment Days), an event aimed at students, teachers, and parents to reflect on the increasingly inescapable connection between youth education and environmental protection. The event, which is underway at the Foundation until Sunday, October 1st, will be held.

'Eduqa', therefore, was born in the heart of the Spanish Quarters, the urban area with the highest risk of school dropout among 8-13 year olds 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 housed in a purpose-built complex on the former Montecalvario Institute, with a design inspired by the most modern theories that place the environment and active pedagogy at the center of the educational program. Six thousand square meters, 600 of which are outdoors (formerly the XNUMXth-century monastery gardens), abandoned for almost a century, will house the school and a garden lab this year. This lab, in addition to becoming a permanent classroom, will be the only green space in the Spanish Quarter.

'Eduqa' will involve 80 teachers, educators, laboratory assistants, and ATA staff, creating more than 100 new jobs. Teachers at the new school are undergoing a special three-year training program on environmental culture and the methods of active schools, according to a program involving CNR researchers and scholars and experts from leading Italian institutions and universities working on environmental issues.

The new educational center includes a full school system: a nursery (0-2 years), a kindergarten (3-5 years), a primary school (6-10 years), and a middle school (11-14 years). The new "green" program will involve over 500 children and young people, with methods that include the active participation of their families, making everyone a key player in the broader urban regeneration program launched by FOQUS just ten years ago.

Among Eduqa's objectives is the construction of "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's educational practices and their replicability will be studied and evaluated by Indire - the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation, and Educational Research - which will conduct, with its own researchers, analysis and evaluation of the results. To create learning environments for the development of innovative educational practices and the dissemination of a new environmental culture in the Spanish Quarters, the best international standards for spatial organization and design have been used as a reference.

Specifically, the furniture project was curated by designers at Play+, the same company commissioned to furnish the school recently promoted by the Mayor of Washington, the Takadanobaba nursery school in Tokyo, and the Ambassador Kindergarden of the Royal Family of Dubai. National and international partners are participating in the project.

Bolton Hope Foundation, committed to promoting accessible, sustainable, and quality education because it firmly believes this is the true driver of change, will support the launch of the Eduqa project, which it helped build and design, for ten years.

The Foundation, founded and headquartered in Milan, has agreed with the social enterprise "Con i bambini" to support the Quartieri Spagnoli educational center for its first three years of operations. To bring innovation, well-being, and sustainability to the neighborhood, the Foundation continues its collaboration with Siram Veolia, a leader in energy efficiency.

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 recorded 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.

This is the first time this project has been implemented at a school in Campania. Capgemini, a global leader in business and technology transformation services, believes in the importance of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future. Capgemini will help organize digital labs for students and environmental training courses, 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 suffragette memorial park, 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 activists' president, Lucy Neal, a previous guest of Foqus in 2021, when she learned about the Foundation's projects as part of its collaboration with the British Embassy in Italy. Now, the planting of the seed joins Naples in the network of cities around the world united in the "walking forest" project, bringing a message of encouragement to women's emancipation and respect for nature to the world.