Abstract:
Contrast in School Landscapes: Creating Opportunities for Children to Develop Their
Research demonstrates that by spending time in nature, children learn better, become more interested in nature, and develop an affinity for the natural environment (Kals, Moore, Wells). This research helped initiate a wave of natural playgrounds recently installed across the United States and other countries which typically feature woodland play, water features, and an althogther less-structured play environment. While natural playgrounds create a strong affinity for nature in children (which seems to be beneficial), research does not currently demonstrate that these natural playgrounds provide children with the opportunity to freely form and develop their preferences.
The discipline of psychology provides that through ways of conditioning, designers can elicit
a preference in an individual that is the result of that individual's experience of stimuli. While
this study does not aim to condition children into a particular preference either for or against
nature, R.B. Zajonk's 1968 understanding of the mere exposure effect, explains that children
are currently (deliberately or accidentally) being conditioned to prefer the environments
they are exposed to, natural or unnatural (Bunting). Psychology offers insight into how to
design to avoid unfairly influencing the development of preferences. Gillian Fournier, writer
for PsychCentral.com explains the mere exposure effect asserts that generally, the more
exposure people have to a stimulus, the more they are conditioned to prefer it (Fournier). By
implication, natural school landscapes condition children to prefer nature in the same way
completely unnatural school landscapes condition them to prefer non-nature.
The designer analyzed East Washington Academy's school grounds in Muncie, Indiana, and developed a design that allows children to develop their own environmental preferences, either for nature or for the built environment. To accomplish this, the design juxtaposes aspects of built and natural elements in the same landscape, and their proximity to each other affords children a better opportunity to understand the differences between them.
