The concept of school forest was drafted in 1970 by the Forest in School organization and is defined as an area occupied by a school for outdoor educational activity. The main purpose of this study was to examine how schools use the school forest in practice, how it can be linked to the forest as an ecosystem service and find out how the forest is taken into consideration in the spatial planning. The study is mainly qualitative in nature and has been based on interviews conducted with educators engaged in outdoor education at four selected schools in a municipality in Sweden. Focus has been on the cultural ecosystem services for school forest, for example the physical characteristics that are considered as positive, forest influence on students' physical / mental health and the educational benefits available to be in the woods. Search has also been made to see how the forest is taken into consideration in the spatial planning and also what a contract agreements involves. The clearest prominent results from the interviews is the need for variation in school forests; you want to have access to many different kinds of environments that may suit for the different subjects they are to teach, or the various activities you want to pursue. Experience values of the different school forest areas varied widely, which also supports the idea that there is no specific type of environment that is optimal, but the variety of types of environment itself is far more important for a fruitful outdoor educational activities. The National Forest is considered to benefit students' physical and psychological health through the stress level is reduced and students will be more motivated. Furthermore, it is important to adapt the size of the area for utilization, as well as its distance from the school after the age of the students who use it. The forest is located near the school and is available can be seen as more important than that is experienced as restful and separated from the outside world. Other interests that use the school forest because of its proximity to other buildings has emerged, mainly has been for housing construction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-104780 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Larsson, Mattias |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Kulturgeografi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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