Do children go to field? - The state of outside-the-school environmental education in the case of downtown Budapest schools

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving world of the 21st century, scientific knowledge is becoming more and more valuable. Today’s engineering and technological developments are inconceivable without specialists with excellent scientific knowledge. But how can today’s young people be interested in science? In our opinion, this is no longer possible with traditional education (formal classroom teaching, the role of the educator is to provide guidance, knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition, the student is present as an inactive participant, not active in the process of constructing knowledge), practice-oriented experiential pedagogy is needed for this, preferably in a natural environment. But what can a downtown school do if it wants to hold a science class outside the school building? We are looking for the answer to this in our study. Questionnaire and interview methods were used in the preparation of the research. These made it possible to analyse the data obtained qualitatively and quantitatively. The data demonstrate that downtown schools vary to a great extent regarding the realization of outside the school environmental education. According to teachers change in the curricula and in the organization of the work of schools would be needed in order to increase the outside the school environmental education. activities.