Viktiga egenskaper hos framgångsrika svenska skolskogar

Abstract: A substantial part of the Swedish outdoor education is being practiced in so called "school forests". The concept school forest was first introduced in the 1980's by the organization Skogen i Skolan. The definition of a school forest is an area that is being used for educational purposes, over which the school and the land owner has reached an agreement of how the school may utilize it. The success of the school forest activities vary between different school forests and the role of this study is to examine characteristics of successful school forests. This study is based on interviews with pedagogues who practice outdoor education in eight different schools in Sweden. The physical features of the forest area has been in focus, but also non-forestal factors like support from the school board or need of an agreement with the land owner has been discussed. Furthermore, the physical features of the school forests has been documented by surveys, photographies and semantic environment reviews which deals with the experience values of different environments. The most outstanding result of the interviews is the need for variation in the school forests – the access to different kinds of environments that correspond with the different school subjects or the different activities that are desirable to perform. The experience values of the successful school forest were very divers, which also supports the idea that there is no specific environment type that is the optimal one, but the environmental variation per se is rather much more important. The features that characterized the most successful school forests were spatiality, complexity, originality and wildness. This indicates that forests that give an enclosed feeling and that is experienced as exciting and thrilling can improve outdoor education. Moreover it is important to adapt the size of the school forest area to the degree of utilization and its distance to the school to the age of the pupils who utilize it. Having the school forest located close to the school itself seem to more important than having a peaceful area separated from the outer world. For the pupils to gain understanding of the interactions in nature it is important that the outdoor education is practiced continuously all year around and consisting of many different activities. For the school forest activity to reach long-term stability, measures like composing long-term activity plans, utilization agreements and school policies should also be carried out.