Foresta KIDS is a long-term inquiry into childhood, learning, imagination and togetherness within Foresta. Our practice has taken shape primarily through a collaborative creativity studio for artistic, ecological and embodied learning. The diverse formats we propose hold space to explore how children meet the world when they are given (back) time, attentiveness and trust, as well as generous possibilities for movement, expression and material exploration. Our work is a hopeful practice for ecological futures, that grows from inquiries into complexity and beauty of the living world. Which knowledge(s) are meaningful and necessary in contemporary contexts? How and what is worth learning? What is the difference between having an environment and inhabiting a world?

Workshops and Installations

We offer workshops in a variety of formats and constellations: short ones and long ones, indoors and outdoors, one-timers and long-term, fun and serious, wild and peaceful, concrete and in-between. We also offer formats for families, and share our experiences with educators or anyone working with kids. Clicking on the image below you’ll find more information, examples and impressions from our activities.

Principles of this work

The question of “nature” is complex, but however we understand what “nature” is, it always includes the interplay between the potential, or the possible, and limits, whether material or otherwise. This is potentially true for ecosystems, cultures, ecologies, societies, personalities. We see purpose of education as a way to support the unfurling of potentials while being attentive with limitations, as a process rooted in discernment, curiosity and care. Definitions may be a challenge, but here is an attempt to express some key principles of our work as directions of practice.

* A living field of relations

Foresta grows within metaphors of a forest — an ecosystem, an alive organism, a living field of relations that is home to multitudes of beings, entities and perspectives. Children are often asked to become competent before they have had enough time to be sensorially, emotionally and imaginatively alive. They are offered information about the world, but not always the chance to enter into meaningful relation with it. Our work is expresses a wish to invite children to experience relationality. We try, whenever possible, to reconnect pieces of our fragmented world(s) as a practice for regenerating connectedness. Our understanding of regeneration is rooted in attentiveness and discernment within ecologies, inner and outer, tangible and invisible.

* Slowness, Open-ended exploration, and Joy

In times when cognitive capitalism has entered every field of education, making it not only into a business, but even a battlefield where societies distribute futures, to say it with the philosopher Marina Garcés, we are inspired by pedagogy otherwise, a pedagogy that nurtures slowness, open-ended exploration without predetermined outcomes, deadlines and evaluations. Joy is not something that needs to be justified, it’s an essential part of human experience, a dynamic mode of deep attention, action and empowerment. Joy is an active commitment to engaging with the world that children are naturally driven by. Neurobiologist Gerald Hüther gives a valuable insight into the essential role enthusiasm and joy play in the learning process and how through and with such states brain creates new connections so that we are able to learn, grow and feel inspired to live. Learning becomes meaningful when people experience participation, curiosity, resonance and a sense that their actions matter.

* Listening

The lived experience is a layered relational experience (intellectual, emotional, physical, intuitive, relational,..) and it needs a continuous practice of listening, honouring and discernment, to acknowledge that understanding and knowledge through the intellect are just as important as movement and body knowledge, as emotional and aesthetic awareness. To be able to feel emotions, even the difficult ones, and to be supported in the process, enables children (and adults) to learn how to meaningfully deal with these emotions rather than suppressing, running away, overreacting, or following other patterns one learns when emotions are not allowed. Learning together offers a chance to explore these multifaceted versatile qualities with care and affection. So often children are encouraged to listen to everything and everyone rather than themselves. But life does not unfurl only in moments of inspiration. Also moments of boredom, frustration, repetition, disagreement, uncertainty, conflict, repair and other facets of life need listening and careful space-holding. We find it important to encourage inner listening, sharing what wants to be shared, and respecting principles that children naturally follow.

* Inquiry-based approach

Inquiry-based learning is rooted in experience and context. It tries to reconnect theory and practice, to respond to real needs, to open choices, expand options and invite us to be present in any situation as it is experienced in our layered perception, offering tools for refection and decision-making that are informed, diverse and thoughtful. It means that everything begins with a question, connected to the lived life of a child, not removed into theories or subjects that don’t require personal involvement. We encourage children to find their own questions rather than learn the answers to questions they never asked. Personal agency and critical thinking gradually evolve into capacities for understanding smaller and larger contexts, as well as interconnections between them. In the age of information its intention is to ask where knowledge comes from, whose voices become visible, what assumptions shape our understanding, and how our own experiences participate in meaning-making. It also includes engaging with knowledge as opposed to “having” it. We never own knowledge, we build on it. Everything changes continuously, and what we know today may be different tomorrow. So inquiry helps children practice asking better questions, noticing assumptions, staying with uncertainty, and participating actively in the shaping of meaning.

* Creativity and learning through arts

We understand creativity as an inherent drive to experiment, inquire, ask questions, think different, give birth to new ideas, try things out and be open to surprises. Creativity allows knowledge to remain alive, offers a fluid container to engage with knowledge as something living, relational and unfinished. It’s a kind of safety net within the changing circumstances that asks for open-mindedness, adaptability, and staying curious. We join Elliot Eisner and other thinkers and practitioners who reflected on arts as “literacy of the heart'“, and a way to reach one’s poetic capacities, to learn to say what cannot be said. Arts offer a way to continually reinvent ourselves and our worlds, to dance with the unknown, and stay mutually affected by open and living discoveries. Echoing Jacques Ranciére we understand aesthetic practice as both a finely tuned and unconscious process of “knowing what you are doing without knowing what you are doing”.

* Culture of collaboration

Who we are is always in relation to others. Education is an encounter between someone who knows something and someone who knows something else. Collaboration becomes possible where respectful, attentive and inclusive relationships to each other are capable of building a culture of trust and empathy. Trust goes both ways: trusting and being trustworthy. We understand empathy as an interpersonal sense of being able to see, feel and recognise the other person and not our assumptions or interpretations of them. That is true for learners and educators (for a lack of a better word) alike. We value communication on eye-level. Everyone is a teacher and a student in their own ways.

* Nomadic orientation and the Outdoors

Fascination and love for the living world and a desire to share this love is a major driving force of our work. We are interested in how natural environments invite forms of attention, relation and perception that are harder to sustain elsewhere. Foresta Kids emerged as a mobile practice — working across institutions, landscapes and communities taught us to treat context as a co-author rather than a backdrop. Different places invite different questions, rhythms and forms of attention. Rather than carrying one method everywhere, we learned to respond to each place on its own terms. Shifting perspectives physically you also shift inner perspectives. We value multicultural cosmopolitan worldview, especially in the contexts of shared identities, “othering”, and multitudes of ways of being in the world that ask for acknowledgement and respect.

Methodology

* Engaging with stories

Stories is how we make sense of the world around us. Engaging with stories, fairytales, myths, collective reading, and other activities connected with storytelling, we learn, change and grow under the influences of stories we hear and tell each other.

* Doing things with own hands

Learning to do things with our own hands is a powerful way to express oneself, gain confidence, connect to embodied knowing. There is plenty of research showing that making things with one’s own hands enhances wellbeing in our technologically saturated culture.

* Diversity of materials and mediums of expression

To experience different materials and mediums of expression expands child’s world and allows to explore diversity of ways and means to play, try something new, or find meaningful means for whatever is searching its way to be expressed.

* Movement and awareness

Chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain, they are one process. Our bodies are ancient, millions of years old, intelligent, powerful. Movement and physicality is an inherent part of any learning process. The difference between movement as we understand it and sports is that movement is done with awareness that brings us closer to experiencing our bodies as inherently part of our perception and sense of self.

* Moments of silence, observation and reflection

These are just as important as times of activity. Sometimes these moments are for simple being, doing nothing. Sometimes these are moments for reflection (what I’ve been doing, what I liked, what would I like to do differently, how did other experience it). It’s time to listen, to digest, to learn, to realise what’s true for oneself both as a personal feeling and reflected through others.

* Open Play

Play is sacred. It offers people time and space to explore the world without structured external intervention, to follow personal curiosity, willingness to try, to experiment own ways, to make mistakes, to realise what works for them and what doesn’t, what they like and don’t like, and to try again. Play does not remove structure, it redistributes authorship. Free play is improvisation, but it still gives a framework, within which people can experience different situations, explore, create, communicate, handle situations, be changed by each other, discover things about themselves, learn to develop feelings and ways of being. Everyone involved into a play can be many things. For example, in stories about animals, each animal is a kind of crystallization of a character, a certain aspect of a personality: the rabbit, the bear, the wolf - everyone could stand for something, have different qualities and ways to relate to the world. In play anyone can try out a myriad of roles, learn to listen, to express themselves, to develop impulses, to sympathize, to contribute to the common process, to take responsibility according to personal curiosity. From such responsibility, intention is born, the world expands. This description is true for children as much as for adults. Grown-up’s work and play are two sides of the same thing unwilling to exist without one another. Most authentic play is built on work, on something real and committed. Deepest work is built on play, on something light and fluid.

Children are explorers of the world, it’s a cliché but it’s true. Curious of all life, natural learners, interested to try, experiment and experience, in free play children have the space to follow their own curiosity, find their questions and form their own intentions, to develop freely as their becoming requires. Adult is a reference point for a child. Many times children learn their ways of being from who we are and how we act, and not from what we say or want them to be. Adults responsible for a child day to day of course influence the world of a child and bring their own order to it. However we see it as equally important for kids to be in a structure that takes seriously their needs, ideas, wishes, and acts, and doesn’t try to interfere into those inattentively. In open play adults's role is oscillating between co-creator and attendant, accompanying children in a journey, but leaving them to invent, create, and act. In this role the adult doesn’t impose any of their standards of a ‘successful future’ onto a child that seem reasonable to an adult but potentially overburden the child and prevent the child from fulfilling something that is real to them, for example, as a writer Natalie Knapp puts it “to be ambassadors of spring and to give an entire society the primal power of life”, as a child is a child not in order to become a successful professor or a brilliant musician, but in order to experience the world as a child, enriching it through their being.

Team

Foresta KIDS is part of a larger forest. It’s an eco-system of collaborative networks. This means that we work in collaborations with a variety of other individuals and collectives that are not mentioned here, but are mentioned at each specific project or a workshop we did together. This is our core team.

Find us on Instagram @foresta.kids

We Work(ed) With

Background Story

To read more you are welcome to download our recent publication Education as a Collective Practice