Abstract
The relevance of preschool children’s understanding of nature, its elements, how it affects the behavior of human beings, and how human beings influence it, is a two-purpose task. First, it helps to identify the necessary elements for the design of programs that have a significant impact in the development of environmental identity. Second, it also assists in the implementation of environmental education in the school curriculum in Mexico, in order to develop attitudes to preserve the environment from an early age. Based on this logic, the objective of this study was to identify the components of the concept of nature and its relationship with environmental identity, from drawings made by preschool children in a desert environment through a visual discursive analysis. The sample consisted of 118 preschool students whose ages ranged between 5 and 6 years. Participants were selected from four different schools in Hermosillo, Mexico: three located in the urban area and one on the coastal area of the State of Sonora. Participants were asked to draw the first thing that came to their minds when they heard the word nature. As a result, all the drawings presented categories such as plants, animals, waterbodies, celestial bodies, abiotic factors, natural locations, locations made by man, and others. Finally, the analysis showed that a general idea of what nature represents to children includes elements of known flora and fauna; however, they did not capture elements of the desert region in which they live. In addition, most participants’ self-definition contained environmental identity.
Highlights
The research of environmental psychology focuses on the study of the activity of the individual in their physical and social context in order to find logic on the connections between human beings and their environment
We focused on finding out how preschoolers represented what the word nature meant to them through drawing by emphasizing the objects and figures that children illustrate from their perception of nature, so that we could describe the relation with environmental identity
The study was based on a discursive analysis of the drawings produced by preschool children with the purpose of observing the elements that make up their understanding of nature
Summary
The research of environmental psychology focuses on the study of the activity of the individual in their physical and social context in order to find logic on the connections between human beings and their environment. On one hand, it analyzes perceptions, attitudes, environmental assessments, and representations, and, on the other hand, environmental behavior (Moser, 2014). These factors determine the level and the ways the subject is involved in each of these spaces This way, the physical space where an individual develops becomes a significant factor in the process of personenvironment interaction, where an analysis of the psychological processes and environmental factors that participate in them is indispensable (Corraliza and Berenguer, 2000). Given that the individual reflects their concerns on themselves, toward other people, or toward all living beings and ecosystems, these attitudes are reflected in the perception and behaviors toward the environment (Schultz, 2002)
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