Abstract
Children explore their environment through experiences and each experience is meaningful in developing their environmental consciousness and identity. On the basis of the drawn landscape experiences, the present qualitative study set out to find out what landscapes the participating students deemed worth conserving. The data consisted of the drawings of 11- to 16-year-old Finnish (n = 311) and Swedish (n = 246) students. Deductive and inductive content analyses were used to analyse the data. The results showed that all three landscape types; nature, built, and social were presented in the drawings. Nature and built landscapes were the most frequent types, with the proportion of nature landscapes increasing and that of built landscapes decreasing with age. There were gender and cultural preferences: boys drew built landscapes more often than girls; and Finnish students drew summer cottages, a cultural phenomenon typical of Finnish landscapes, which was not found in Swedish drawings. Similarities in Finnish and Swedish data were identified e.g., in forest and water and “cultural landscapes”. Some of the students displayed a more distant, observing role, whereas others adopted an active one in relation to all three landscape types. The results are discussed in connection to the landscape theories and earlier findings of the drawn environments.
Highlights
The knowledge of students’ subjective world views [1], their environmental conceptions, experiences, and relationship to the environment are remarkable when developing sustainable education in schools
All three main landscape categories; nature, built and social environments were present in the data (Figure 1)
Social landscapes were more evenly distributed among the different grades and genders in the Swedish than in the Finnish data, being especially common in the Finnish fifth-and sixth-grader boys’ drawings
Summary
The knowledge of students’ subjective world views [1], their environmental conceptions, experiences, and relationship to the environment are remarkable when developing sustainable education in schools. The Finnish word of landscape ‘maisema’ and Swedish ‘landskap’ have a strong connection to the ‘bounded area’ or ‘region’ just like the German word ‘Landschaft’. They differ from the English word ‘landscape’ which covers more social aspects [3,4]. The study was carried out as a country school project between Finland and Russia in 2003–2005, [5,6] organised by the Finnish National Board of Education. Drawings were chosen as data, as the researchers did not write
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