Redistributing power in biodiversity education: toward participatory and child-led learning

Biodiversity education within traditional school-based models often takes place through transmissive, one-way, teacher-centered dynamics (Persico, 2024; Guerra, 2019), in which adults retain and deliver knowledge that is passively received by students, resulting in unbalanced power dynamics in the construction of knowledge. In contrast, international literature emphasizes the need for educational processes to be more connected to real-life contexts, underscoring the value of exploratory and experiential dimensions in learning (Guerra, 2024; Matos et al., 2022). Furthermore, it highlights the importance of anchoring learning in local environmental issues faced by specific communities, through interdisciplinary approaches that foster a deeper understanding of ecological challenges. Finally, affective experiences - mediated by sensory engagement with nature, emotional relationships with living beings, and personal connections to the natural world - are seen as essential to cultivating awareness and understanding of biodiversity (Beery & Jørgensen, 2018). In response to these needs, this contribution presents the work of the interdisciplinary research group BEAT (Biodiversity Education and Awareness Team), part of the National Biodiversity Future Centre (NBFC), which has developed an innovative experiential, immersive, and place-based educational approach to biodiversity. As a key component of this approach, the group has designed a methodological toolkit: a set of playful, paper-based "becks" created to mediate outdoor biodiversity learning experiences with children, youth, and adults. This toolkit supports a process of subjective and inquiry-based exploration, enabling each participant to begin from personal questions and hypotheses that emerge from direct observation. These inquiries are then documented in field notebooks, which serve as artistic, scientific, and reflective tools. Through a diversity of expressive languages - such as narratives, drawings, photographs, and maps - participants track their evolving observations, ideas, and relationships with the natural world. The approach encourages active, participatory knowledge-building, especially when adults take a step back to let children explore based on their own curiosities, rather than following predefined, rigid learning paths. This openness increases motivation, strengthens children’s sense of agency, and promotes a more democratic redistribution of roles, responsibilities, and power in the learning process. Ultimately, this work proposes an alternative model of biodiversity education. In line with an ecological perspective (Mortari, 2020), rather than simply delivering alarmist, pre-packaged information about the environmental crisis, it aims to foster meaningful, situated encounters between people and places. This means offering immersive experiences in nature that cultivate emotional engagement and a sense of care and responsibility, and allowing for educational paths driven by children’s interests. In this way, biodiversity education becomes a relational, participatory process rooted in direct experience, rather than a top-down transmission of knowledge.