van Dijk-Wesselius Janke E, van den Berg Agnes E, Maas Jolanda, Hovinga Dieuwke
Research Group Nature & Children's Development, Thomas More Hogeschool, University of Applied Sciences Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands.
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 9;10:2919. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02919. eCollection 2019.
With a growing number of primary schools around the globe greening their schoolyards, opportunities arise to realize outdoor learning in natural areas on the school's premises. Despite their promising potential, green schoolyards as outdoor learning environments remain mostly unintegrated in teachers' educational practices. In the current study, teachers of five primary schools in Netherlands were followed for two consecutive years during a participatory action research project. Based on their experiences in this project, teachers identified barriers when integrating the green schoolyard as a learning environment and found practice-based solutions to overcome these barriers. Across schools, a total of 20 meetings were organized, with 75 teachers participating in the project. Results revealed four broad themes encompassing barriers and solutions. Teachers feel hindered by outdoor learning having no formal status in their current educational practice, experience barriers related to a lack of confidence in their own outdoor teaching expertise, find it difficult to get started, and experience barriers related to physical constraints. Teachers, professionals, and researchers together found solutions to overcome each specific barrier. These solutions can be translated to general recommendations: just do it, get educated and inspired, engage in real-life experiences, get an outdoor pedagogical mindset, and follow a tailored process. The findings can be used by primary schools and other institutions to develop interventions that support teachers to further integrate the green schoolyard as a learning environment.
随着全球越来越多的小学对校园进行绿化，在学校场地的自然区域实现户外学习的机会也随之出现。尽管绿色校园作为户外学习环境具有巨大潜力，但在教师的教育实践中，它大多仍未得到整合。在当前的研究中，荷兰五所小学的教师在一个参与式行动研究项目中连续两年受到跟踪。基于他们在该项目中的经验，教师们在将绿色校园整合为学习环境时发现了障碍，并找到了基于实践的解决方案来克服这些障碍。在各所学校中，总共组织了20次会议，有75名教师参与了该项目。结果揭示了涵盖障碍和解决方案的四大主题。教师们感到户外学习在他们当前的教育实践中没有正式地位而受到阻碍，因对自己的户外教学专业知识缺乏信心而遇到障碍，觉得难以开始，并且因身体限制而遇到障碍。教师、专业人员和研究人员共同找到了克服每个具体障碍的解决方案。这些解决方案可以转化为一般性建议：放手去做，接受教育并获得启发，参与实际生活体验，形成户外教学思维方式，并遵循量身定制的过程。小学和其他机构可以利用这些研究结果来制定干预措施，以支持教师进一步将绿色校园整合为学习环境。
