Finnish and Swedish students' drawings of the landscape they want to conserve and how the drawings reflect their environmental conceptions

 

 

It is important to find out the children´s and adolescents’ future views of the environment and in this way to listen to their “voices”. This study is part of the bigger projects were children´s, adolescents´ and teacher students´ future views about the landscape and environment worth to conserve have been studied dealing in some European countries and will be studied also worldwide. The theoretical basis lies on human geography, on environmental psychology, on environmental ecology and on education for sustainable development.

The aim was to analyze the drawings of a group of Finnish (n=311) and Swedish (n=246) students in age of 11-16 years and to identify the landscape they would like to conserve, and also to find out students’ conceptions of the environment.

In this research the opinions of the Finnish and Swedish students have been studied using a qualitative and phenomenographical approach, while the focus is to study students’ conceptions of a landscape and environment worth preserving as a phenomenon.

The results show that all three landscape groups; nature, built and social environment were present among Finnish and Swedish drawings in all studied age groups. The landscape most commonly represented environment as a place including living things and very few of them represented relational focus between the drawer and environment. In general, students demonstrated positive relation to the environment and in the written text the worries about the environment were expressed. The Swedish students seemed to focus in their drawn landscapes more into the nature conservation and taking care of the environment, while Finnish students seem to want to conserve an environment which they have experienced.

The drawings together with the written text can be used as a kind of “teaching tool” to evaluate the students’ future views of the environment. This study gives important information for the teachers in their work for sustainable development education. Teachers are the most influential in educating children and adolescents to be leaders of tomorrow in conserving and protecting our environment.