The project aims to improve the quality of early years environmental education of blind and visually impaired children, to develop their interest in nature, enhance their contacts with nature and thereby support them in feeling socially included and to achieve high quality learning outcomes. In order to achieve this, the project will provide teachers of blind and visually impaired children with innovative teaching materials to enable them to deliver an engaging, enriching programme of environmental education in truly appealing manner. The project will give the opportunity to the teachers to strengthen their skills and confidence when it comes to teaching about nature, to understand and learn how to teach about nature and how to use the outdoor activities to engage disabled pupils in various school subjects. For visually impaired children the project will develop a mobile application allowing them to learn to recognize bird sounds while spending time outdoors across Europe. Seeing the World through Nature is based on experiences and intellectual outputs of the completed in September 2018 international Erasmus+ project Empowering Teachers and Pupils for a Better Life through Nature and on the international cooperation between BirdLife Partners engaged in the Spring Alive project, both focused on birds and nature. The transnational dimension of this project is very important, bringing the best examples of how nature based education can deliver profound and lasting learning outcomes to children with vision disabilities from all the partner countries. The transnational cooperation enables best practice in one country to be extended to other countries and provides a simple structure to demonstrate how nature works at local to global levels. It also provides a basis for future international networking. Activities planned for the 35 months of the duration of the project: During the first 22 months of the project, the central focus will be on the development of highly effective educational resources, which will enhance teachers' abilities in providing nature education for preschool and primary school children with visual disabilities. The project activities are designed to benefit from the scientific expertise and educational experience of the staff of the conservation partner organisations combined with the needs of visually impaired learners provided by experts from the Polish Association of the Blind and national experts from the partner countries. The last year of the project will be dedicated to testing, conducting trainings, multiplier events and disseminating established intellectual outputs amongst the schools, kindergartens, as well as teachers and educators who provide education for blind and visually impaired children from preschools and primary schools in the partner countries and the whole EU (multiplier events and European Conference for BirdLife Partners). The educational materials which are planned to be delivered in the project are: 1) Set of nature themed educational materials for preschool and primary school teachers of blind and visually impaired children from the partner countries (O2) 2) Mobile application for children with vision disabilities to enable them recognizing birds by their sounds (O3) 3) Template of the teachers' training (O4) universal for all European countries to provide professional trainings of implementing developed resources for the teachers in question. 54 teachers from preschools and primary schools for children with disabilities will take part in the multiplier events for the teachers from special preschools and primary schools in the countries. Together 80 pupils will participate in the demonstration lessons in all the partner countries. 90 educators, journalists, representatives of the organizations for blind and visually impaired people will participate in the multiplier events for wider public in all the partner countries. 35 representatives from the BirdLife Partners will take part in the European Conference and they will be able to disseminate this project's results and outputs further to the institutions, which might benefit from them. The intellectual outputs might reach 300 educators of formal and informal education through BirdLife Partners.
The aim of the project was to provide teachers with highly functional educational materials that will enhance their skills in delivering nature education to early years children with visual impairments. We intend to strengthen teachers' skills and confidence in teaching the visually impaired about nature, especially how to use outdoor activities to engage students with disabilities in various school subjects. By doing this, we hope to improve the quality of early environmental education for this group of children, strengthen their contact with nature and thus help them feel included. This will help in achieving better learning outcomes. Another aspect is the transnational dimension of this project. Transnational cooperation enables best practices from one country to be extended to other countries and provides a basis for future international networking. The project creates the conditions for synergies between different fields of education, training and nature education (school sector and non-government sector). The project activities integrate the knowledge and educational experience of conservation organisations with the knowledge about the needs of visually impaired pupils provided by experts.
Learning outdoors is beneficial for all pupils. It has a positive influence on cognitive processes (develops imagination, sensitises the senses, motivates to exploring the surrounding world). However, working with visually impaired children requires appropriate methods, resources and teacher experience to make outdoor activities more accessible to them and to make teaching more effective. Additionally, nature education is underappreciated in the national curricula at early years levels. In the project partners' countries blind and partially sighted children are either educated in special schools or are integrated into mainstream education. The project partners were aware that teachers in mainstream schools are usually at a disadvantage. They may be less well equipped with appropriate teaching resources and lack both the skills and confidence to teach science to visually impaired students. In developing our project, we intended to support teachers, as well as other educators, in planning and conducting attractive nature lessons for visually impaired children by providing them innovative teaching materials and help them to face challenges in outdoor nature education of the blind.