Built Environment Education (BEE) for children and youth
GLOBAL examples from: Argentina, Benin, Bulgaria, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, and Spain
Union University Nikola Tesla, Belgrade, Serbia; Technische Universitat Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and Misr International University (MIU), Cairo, Egypt
Built environment education is as multifaceted as its subject: the built, designed environment. It incorporates a broad field of activities, focuses and approaches to education such as environmental, architectural, design, and (visual) arts education, mostly for children and young people. All these types of learning activities for children and young people are linked by the use of buildings, places and spaces as topics and contexts for learning. The number of initiatives dedicated to teaching children and young people about architecture and the culture of building and planning has risen in the past 10 years. It has also become a more interdisciplinary movement, bringing together professionals from different fields such as architects, urban planners, landscape and environmental planners, pedagogues, and artists.
There are people all over the world working in the field of built environment education (BEE) for children. Their backgrounds and their ‘host’ organisations differ widely from education officers in museums, dedicated architecture centres and the wider cultural/third sector, through design and planning practitioners working either independently or via their professional bodies, to teachers in schools and kindergartens. In many cases, these practitioners work with little knowledge of others in the field, and they rarely have the opportunity to learn from these other experiences or to share their practice. The same is with students at universities, where education on BEE is not part of the curriculum of future teachers, architects, planners and other disciplines. The aim of the MOOC is to fill that gap.
SDG #11 Targets:
