#1: The Environment as the Third Teacher

Dear readers,

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Today I write from a student desk with the mountains stretched out before me like an unplanned lesson in perspective. Three months ago, I was quietly anxious about the change ahead - leaving behind the structured predictability of British classrooms for a socio-constructivist school with an open-ended, inquiry-rich curriculum. 

If Wordsworth had stood here, he’d have traded daffodils for jacarandas in an instant. He would have probably composed an ode to the distant call of “¡EL GAAAS!” (the gas truck) drifting down the street reminding us that the world is a classroom; loud and alive and wonderfully unedited.

My first week at Hábitat Learning Community, Guadalajara, was a sensory awakening - a mash-up of Reggio Emilia philosophy and real-life Mexico. I stepped through the entrance expecting chairs, tables, four walls, and a fire drill notice. Instead: sunlight, open spaces, children everywhere like explorers, and at least one cow from the granja next door offering a gentle moooo during afternoon reading. The environment wasn’t just present - it was performing.

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It was here that Malaguzzi’s words walked off the page and waved at me:

“The environment is the third teacher.” - Loris Malaguzzi

This week, Grade 5 - the British equivalent of Year 6, a year usually dominated by SATs - were engaging with Romanticism outdoors, using space and sensory experience to think critically. We’d watched a single video showing children their age bent over looms, smoke hanging like a grey ceiling, nature pushed out by the Industrial Revolution. They understood it academically - they knew it was bleak - but something was missing.

So we stepped outside.
Not to talk about Romantic poets, but to inhabit their world.

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"So we stepped outside."

Under palm trees, they compared their own surroundings with notebooks balancing on their knees:

Artificial spaces: classrooms, tiled floors, metal railings, plastic chairs.
Natural spaces: grass under palms, birds for background music, sunshine instead of bulbs.

They didn’t just learn that Romantic poets adored nature - they felt why.
Not because I told them.
Not because a video showed it.
But because the sky was open and green was everywhere and they could sense the difference between desiring nature and being inside it.

Their imagination, unleashed by space rather than confined by walls, surprised even me. Their keenness to read - to pick up books willingly, curiously, joyfully - felt like the natural consequence of fresh air, not an instruction given from the front of a room.

As a British teacher, the experience was both alarming and delightful. No one insisted on rows of desks. And not once did I hear the sacred UK chant of “Walk, don’t run!” Instead, movement, freedom, curiosity. I watched children building ideas with sticks like mini-engineers. Nothing was confined and everything was possible.

"Nothing was confined and

everything was possible."

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The secondary classroom here has no roof, because it doesn’t need one. Learning slips through the trees, hums with insects, stretches out across picnic tables.

So as I sit writing my first LETTER FROM MEXICO, I reflect that the environment doesn’t sit passively; it steps forward, takes part, offers perspective. I can’t help but feel that British classrooms could gain something from this - not a full reinvention, but a softening, a reopening of windows, a return to curiosity as curriculum.

Until next time,

Charlotte