Green schoolyards as havens from stress and resources for resilience in childhood and adolescence
Section snippets
Childhood stress, resilience, and access to nature
This paper connects the study of stress, resilience, and contact with nature by showing the potential of green schoolyards to reduce stress and enhance protective factors for resilience in children and adolescents. It summarizes observations and interviews in the United States that explored the value of green school grounds for young people: a wooded area for recess play in an elementary school (ages 6–12), an outdoor classroom for older elementary school students (ages 9–13), and gardening
Research questions
Guided by the concepts of affordances and behavior settings, research at each site pursued an open-ended question: How do students experience natural areas on their school grounds? (At one teen site, this question applied to gardening in an after-school program on city property.) In the language of ecological psychology, this question can be stated as: What values do students find in these natural areas?
Settings and samples
The research settings and samples are described in Table 1, Table 2. At each site, the researcher “zoomed in” from observations of the site as a whole to a focus on the experience of individual students. Researchers obtained parent consent forms and student assent to being observed and interviewed, except in the case of 18-year-old high school students, who could give independent consent. The research protocol was approved by the researchers׳ university review boards at the Antioch University
Recess in the woods in early elementary school
As research on children׳s developing abilities to express and analyze emotions would predict (Aldwin, 2007), the young elementary school students at the Jemicy School shared their feelings for their play areas in brief and general terms. Therefore this summary of findings at the Jemicy School relies heavily on observations of students׳ behavior during recess, showing how woods play enabled children to enjoy a sense of competence that was more difficult to achieve in the classroom, and
A naturalized habitat for interdisciplinary learning in grades 4–6
Although students in suburban Denver entered the naturalized area on their school grounds to do class assignments rather than to play, they also found it an escape from classroom stresses, and they could articulate this outcome with greater self-awareness than the younger children in Jemicy. When the sample of 106 students was asked to draw the habitat from memory and write three words that described it, 25% wrote the words “peaceful” or “calm.” The 56 students who gave interviews also used
Gardening programs for high school teens
By adolescence, students were able to reflect at length about their experiences of gardening on their school grounds or in an after-school program as they raised vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers. The heart of research with this age group was an open-ended interview of about half an hour, done one-on-one at each student׳s garden site. Students were asked to close their eyes and share what came to mind about first being in a garden, followed by questions about what they saw, smelled, heard,
Discussion
The findings reported here add to existing evidence that when students have natural landscapes for play, learning and green views, they show positive moods and reduced stress, anger, inattention and problem behavior (Martensson et al., 2009, Matsuoka, 2010, Roe and Aspinall, 2011). The results are also consistent with evidence that access to nature around the home and neighborhood decreases children׳s symptoms of ADHD (Faber Taylor et al., 2001, Faber Taylor and Kuo, 2009, Kuo and Faber Taylor,
Implications for research and practice
Access to nature at these six sites was not part of any deliberate program to reduce stress and anxiety and build protective factors for resilience, yet it created conditions for the three strategies to enhance resilience that Masten and Reed (2002) identify reducing risks (such as inattention and aggression), building assets (such as concentration and a sense of competence), and mobilizing human adaptational systems (such as cooperative friendships). These findings suggest that the basic
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