Responding to the needs of offering innovative pedagogical experiences promoting children's environmental stewardship and active citizenship, the project had the ambition to systematise and disseminate a new developing approach that bridges Nature Pedagogy with Democratic Education. Having the partners had a long term experience in this domain, they wanted promote a research on this approach and its application, a series of workshops and guidelines for schools.
Partners wanted to help schools become places where both connection with nature and democracy are not only taught but also actively practised, in order to allow nature schools to familiarise with democratic education and democratic schools to familiarise with outdoor learning. As the experience of the three partners showed, exposure to nature allows mitigating several of the difficulties that democratic schools encounter. Finally, partners wanted to allow traditional schools to familiarise with both pedagogies and learn to use them jointly. DEN project addressed the need of the participating organisations as well as of other democratic and nature schools to systematise this approach (Activity 1) and to create a deeper reflection and a network of exchanges (Activity 2). The project addressed the need of traditional schools to start a transition towards a greener, sustainable way, and to foster active participation and citizenship competences in school by opening the Workshops (Activity 2) to traditional schools, and by producing guidelines (Activity 3) to allow schools that were not yet familiar with our pedagogies to be able to be inspired and to implement them.