Spiegelaar Nicole
Trinity College and School of the Environment, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 4;13:922275. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.922275. eCollection 2022.
Online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected student academic performance as well as mental, physical, and social wellbeing. During a lockdown at the University of Toronto in Canada (September 2020-April 2021), my students expressed an underlying sense of yet . I recalled a contrasting paradox from the teachings of Indigenous Cree on mental wellness in land-based experiences: a sense of and that we can liken to variations of Appleton's prospect-refuge theory. I modified my course to support stimulation and security through embodied, interactive pedagogy at student-selected individual field sites. My main goals were to (i) support student mental wellness and (ii) provide an alternative to experiential field trips for understanding and connecting with nature as an adaptive complex system. I prompted students with field activities contextualized by a course narrative that purposefully directed attention to nature through intrinsically motivated curiosity, exploration, and discovery; conditions more similar to evolutionary environments of adaptedness than "getting away" in passive retreats. Student weekly field observations and reflections culminated in a post-intervention Reflection Assignment ( = 15) which became the bases of thematic and narrative analysis. Other assignments were added to my evaluation of complexity comprehension. The intervention successfully instilled security and stimulation purpose-directed attention to different aspects of nature in the same setting followed by periods of knowledge integration. This empowered students with indicated by greater self-reported: sense of coherence, change agency, cognitive and affective restoration, nature connectedness, nature relatedness, social connectedness, and pro-environmental values. Assignments demonstrated an understanding of the environment as an adaptive complex system that was not present at the beginning of the course. Some students' self-construct adopted nature and its complexity, empowering them with greater trait resilience. This work speaks to opportunities for merging psychological restoration and analytical curricula by integrating cognitive and sensory meaningfulness in sustainability narratives. It asks scholars to reflect on how we operationalize foundational theories of Environmental Psychology based on ancestral survival conditions and encourages empirical research to consider how sociocultural contexts can direct attention to nature through purposeful inquiry.
新冠疫情期间的在线学习对学生的学业表现以及心理、身体和社交健康都产生了影响。在加拿大多伦多大学封校期间（2020年9月至2021年4月），我的学生们表达了一种潜在的……感。我回想起了原住民克里族关于基于土地体验的心理健康教义中的一个对比鲜明的悖论：一种……感和……感，我们可以将其比作阿普尔顿的前景 - 庇护理论的变体。我修改了我的……课程，通过在学生选择的个人实地场所采用体现式、互动式教学法来支持刺激和安全感。我的主要目标是：（i）支持学生的心理健康；（ii）提供一种替代体验式实地考察的方式，以便将自然理解为一个适应性复杂系统并与之建立联系。我通过一个课程叙事为学生提供实地活动提示，该叙事通过内在动机激发的好奇心、探索和发现，有目的地将注意力引向自然；这些条件比被动逃避式的“远离”更类似于适应性进化环境。学生每周的实地观察和反思最终形成了一份干预后反思作业（n = 15），它成为了主题和叙事分析的基础。其他作业也被纳入我对复杂性理解的评估中。干预成功地在同一环境中向自然的不同方面灌输了安全感和刺激，同时伴随着知识整合阶段。这赋予了学生……能力，自我报告显示他们在以下方面有了更大提升：连贯感、变革能力、认知和情感恢复、与自然的联系、与自然的关联、社交联系以及亲环境价值观。作业展示了对环境作为一个适应性复杂系统的理解，而这在课程开始时并不存在。一些学生的自我建构接纳了自然及其复杂性，使他们具有更强的特质复原力。这项工作表明了通过在可持续发展叙事中整合认知和感官意义来融合心理恢复和分析课程的机会。它要求学者反思我们如何根据祖先的生存条件来实施环境心理学的基础理论，并鼓励实证研究考虑社会文化背景如何通过有目的的探究将注意力引向自然。
