Gröna miljöer på skolgården : som plats för utomhuspedagogik

Abstract: School ground development is becoming increasingly popular in Sweden today and local community settings are also seen as an important resource for education. The debate today raises the question about the whole city’s pedagogic potential. Outdoor education is a pedagogy that comprises outdoor learning with focus on the sensual experiences. Connection to the classroom education is an important part of the pedagogy and so is the place for the tuition.But how should the place for the tuition, i.e. the school ground, be designed? This paper discusses what different designs of the green physical environment mean to the outdoor education and how the quality of the lesson is affected. Considering that research has shown positive effects of being in green, nature-like environments; this study focuses on two schools with different prerequisites in the green school ground environment. One school has nature-like areas on the school ground whereas the other school only has formal vegetation to teach in. The study has been a multiple case-study comprehending teacher interviews, walks with children and landscape architectural analyses. The study’s conclusion is that several factors in the physical environment are important for outdoor education to be conducted with high quality. Access to a green physical environment on the school ground or in the local community setting is an important prerequisite. The school ground is chosen for education in the first place but also the local environment is used regularly, especially when the right prerequisites are not to be found in the school ground. Important factors for the education is a meeting-place, enough variation considering easy access to different types of surfaces and plenty of loose material to use for different exercises. The result indicates that a nature-like environment gives better prerequisites for outdoor education than a formally designed environment does, since the nature-like environment contains more material to use in the education. The school that has a nature-like school ground environment also uses the hard surfaces more in the education than the school that does not have a nature-like environment does. Lindholm (1995) got the same result and concluded that the nature-like areas affects the inventiveness. The results of this study shows that the school that has good, nature-like environments on their school ground go to more areas in the local community setting than the school with a formal school ground does. This was also the result of previous studies by Lindholm (1995) and Grahn (1991).