ABSTRACT

This study was carried out within a project to promote health and ecosystem services, ‘the benefits people obtain from ecosystems’, in preschools in Sweden. The paper applies the concept ‘affordance’ to capture the functional meaning that children assign to different material aspects of their schoolyards before and after the installation of additional environmental features. The findings from walk-and-talks with 23 preschool children highlight what features children preferred in their yards and why. Few children showed spontaneous attention to the installed features, e.g. insect hotels. This might be more because children were not enough involved within the schoolyard development and experienced little guided exploration of environmental affordances, rather than a lack of interest per se. Given this, we suggest that development projects to upgrade schoolyards for improved ecosystem services should involve children in the design of the ecosystem services promoting features throughout the development work, and thereby, integrally, promote ecological literacy.

摘要

这项研究是在瑞典学前班促进健康和生态系统服务、“人们从生态系统中获得的好处”的项目中进行的。该论文应用“可供性”概念来捕捉儿童在安装额外环境特征之前和之后分配给校园不同材料方面的功能意义。对 23 名学龄前儿童进行的步行和谈话的结果突出了儿童喜欢院子里的哪些特征以及原因。很少有孩子对已安装的功能表现出自发的关注，例如昆虫旅馆。这可能更多是因为孩子们没有充分参与校园发展，并且很少经历对环境可供性的指导探索，而不是本身缺乏兴趣。鉴于这种，