Site-Specific Outdoor Interaction Helps Enhance Students' Understanding of Landscape

The concept of landscape provides the bridge between society and environment, as landscape is what is created when the two interact. Landscape differs from the natural environment because landscapes are created and influenced by both human and natural factors. As humans increasingly impact the environment, it is important to understand both historical and current representations of landscape. Helping students to better learn how landscape is created and affected can equip them with better tools for understanding the changes in our current environment. Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are typically controversial topics related to how science and society interact. Using SSIs can help students be able to understand multiple perspectives and explore how development has, and will continue to, impact landscapes. This study asked whether a natural outdoor experience helped students acknowledge the various SSIs that impact a landscape.

This study took place in Koli National Park in Finland, a wooded park on the shores of Lake Pielinen in the east. The participants in this study were 36 students, aged 9-12, who attended two rural schools near to the park. Participants at both schools completed a study unit containing 20 tasks as part of their formal learning, 7 of which occurred in school before visiting the park, 11 while at the park (the “intervention”), and 2 back at school after the visit. Tasks included drawing, analyzing pictures, discussions, and other hands-on lessons. The researchers gathered data primarily through students' annotated drawings of landscape done before and after their visit to the Nature Park. These representations helped the researchers gauge the student's level of understanding of the intricate nature of landscape, as well as helped the student clarify their own understanding of scientific and ecological relationships.

Once the drawings were made and annotated, researchers analyzed them in three phases. First, they sorted the students' drawings from before and after the intervention according to what was included in the landscapes. The drawings were sorted into two categories based on whether they included human induced changes and non-human induced changes. Next, those two categories were broken down further based on how and what drove the change within the landscape (construction, vegetation, animal). The third and final level of analysis had the drawings sorted into either a multifaceted landscape model (included different scales, different aspects of change, and different rates of change), human-landscape interaction model (included 1-2 scales, and 2-3 elements of interaction), or a stable nature landscape model (local, scale, static landscape).

The results of the study clearly indicate that a natural education unit increased participants' understanding of landscape and the impacts and interactions that occur within them. Before the intervention in the park, students largely included pieces of the landscape that were familiar to them and that were pleasing to them. Noticeably, students also included very few mentions of rapid human induced change. After the intervention, however, students were more likely to detail the complex interactions between humans and the environment, and to include rapid change that humans have detrimentally inflicted upon the environment.

The authors also concluded that the student's work became richer throughout the learning process. Students' descriptions of landscape changes more than doubled. Within those categories, the references to non-human induced landscape changes (including rapid and slow, vegetal and animal) went up by over 100 references, a 113% increase. References to human induced change (including construction, society, natural resources, and agriculture) also went up by roughly 100 references, a 139% increase. Within nearly every category, references to landscape change stayed the same or increased. In one category, recognition and reference to animal induced landscape change decreased by 5 references, a 45% decrease.

Within the categories of non-human induced change, students mostly described rapid landscape change, mentioned slow change less frequently, and rarely mentioned vegetation. Within human induced change, the largest before/after difference were in the natural resources and society categories. In almost all the representations of landscape, both before and after, students included the human impact on landscape.

The main limitation of this study was the reliability of drawings as a data source. Drawings and writing can only truly represent the children's perception and knowledge if there is no interpretation, help, questioning, or input from researchers or teachers. Thus, the limitation in this study was the role of teachers on the students' drawings. Asking for children to annotate their own drawings, instead of asking them specific questions about the drawings, helped to minimize the risk, but there was still uncertainty regarding the impact of the teachers and researchers. Furthermore, the results of this study were specific to these students in Finland, and results may vary with different groups in another setting.

This study recommends enhancing students' knowledge about landscape using a similar intervention, thereby enabling students to examine how human society and societal issues change the environment. Additionally, the researchers point out that for this kind of intervention and education to be most effective, the science and the landscape must be relevant to the students' lives. Thus, they recommend using local issues and locations as the centerpieces of the socio-scientific issue intervention.