Brussels Outdoor School (BOS)

Brussels Outdoor School (BOS) was founded in 2017 with the mission to bring outdoor education to Brussels and allow as much children as possible to discover nature and "learning in nature", by using innovative and child-centred pedagogy. Our association is deeply involved in environmental education and in spreading our values. Our values are the following: 1) Trust CHILDREN and their natural drive to learn 2) Connection with NATURE and sustainability 3) Open, inclusive COMMUNITY Since the beginning, we have been offering different activities, and we have been working for opening a full time democratic nature school for children from 3 to 12 years old. Our major target group are children from 2,5 years old to 12 years old, although now we are also working on projects on teenagers and environmental education. Our secondary target group are also teachers and educators interested in being sensibiliser about nature protection and outdoor learning. In 2017 our team started the project "Graines de BOS": 2 full days a week of nature education for children from 2,5 to 12 years old. We are also organizing holiday camps to discover the forest and its seasonal treasures. We organises teachers trainings on environmental education and outdoor learning and we take parts in different other projects involving networks in Belgium. Lately, we have also been applying for an Erasmus + K2 consortium. Our organisation and its activities are bilingual: French and Dutch are the main languages. In September 2020 we will also open the first full time democratic forest school of Belgium. In all our activities, three major relevant aspects are recognizable: 1) INNOVATION and REPLICABILITY: Our philosophy is very innovative. We are the first "forest school" in Belgium, the first project to merge democratic education with forest school approach, and the first one to do that in two languages! This innovative approach is for us pivotal as we try to always improve ourselves in order to adhere to a pedagogical vision that is ready to face the challenges of the 21st Century. Moreover, we do not want to be the only "keepers" of this education. We want for our project to be of inspiration for other realities, and therefore that every of our activity (the school, the 2 days a week programme, the trainings, etc..) can be replicable in a different context. Innovation in education and replicability are for us important features as they combined both allow to spread our educational philosophy and to raise awareness of the importance of connecting children with nature and society. 2) MULTILINGUALISM: Being located in Brussels, it seems natural and necessary to us to be a multilingual organization, with multilingual projects. Our school and our educational project have French and Dutch as the two main spoken languages, but we are open to all the other languages spoken by our community. Indeed, we are a community of solidarity, open to the world and not stopping at geographical and linguistic borders. Multilingualism helps us to be more connected to different cultures and it takes us away from preconceptions. That is valid both in our organization and in our pedagogy with children: languages are an important instrument of exchange, a richness that opens us to new cultures and gives us another instrument to see things from different perspectives. Moreover, the brain, used to navigating between different languages, is more alert, resilient and agile than that of monolinguals. 3) SOCIAL INCLUSION. In a city like Brussels, many children suffer from an underexposure to nature and green spaces. Spending time outdoor and access to greener areas is becoming a privilege not everyone has access to. BOS is working to challenge such inequality by supporting the right to every child to access to outdoor learning experiences and benefit from contact with nature. Moreover, we always look for ways to make our activities more accessible for families, and to allow as much as possible to ha