An increasing body of evidence demonstrates positive associations between learning in the natural environment and a range of educational, social, developmental, mental and physical health outcomes (1-5). Today young people and children spend 50% less time outdoors than their parents, and very much less in natural environments like woods or fields.  The levels of child anxiety are soaring (15), the NSPCC (16) report a 33% rise in referrals to CAMHS (Child Mental Health Services). Among GPs 53% rate the CAMHS service as poor, many children deteriorate significantly whilst waiting for help.  Theresa May announced plans to give teachers training on spotting signs of suicidal behaviour.  This seems an huge responsibility to put on the shoulders of teachers?  

Does high quality, facilitated, outdoor nature connection activity result in improved mental health in children?

Aim of the WWWs.

To offer local children joyful outdoor journeys - learning about themselves and the natural world through art, embodiment practices and adventures in local wild spaces. 

Through this  offer to improve the children’s physical and mental health, fitness, confidence, engagement with learning, motivation to learn, cooperative behaviour, respect for each other, respect for the natural environment, pleasure in being in nature, sense of calm, enjoyment of and ability to see natural beauty, physical strength, resilience to weather and difficulties, improved knowledge about nature and responsibility to it, identity as local child through knowing their local area, sense of safety and belonging, trust in others, opportunities to take responsibility or lead others, care for others, work as a team, exercise judgement and flexibility.

The intended outcomes are:

To positively affect children’s attitudes, feelings and behaviours towards the nature.

To improve children mental and physical health.

To increase children’s knowledge of and outdoor play in local nature spaces.

What is meant by Nature Connection (NC)?

People understand many different things when referring to Nature Connection, what it means here is the extent to which nature affects a person’s attitudes and beliefs. Rather than a simple transient feeling, NC in this context means an effect on the person’s actions, beliefs, behaviours and identity. This may include a deeper personal or even spiritual quality to this connection with the natural world. 

Why should we seek to increase NC and how will we measure it in this case? 

Competing pressures mean that opportunities for individuals, especially for children and young people to value and enjoy nature and the environment are under threat. Over the past 20 years evidence suggests that the area that children explore and play around their homes has reduced by up to 90%. 

Last year 1.3 million (12%) children across England did not visit the natural environment, in terms of a park or wild space, at all. (Barrable & Booth, 2020) An individual’s sense of NC has been found to correlates strongly with ecological behaviours, as well as self-reported wellbeing (Mayer & Frantz, 2004, Leary et al, 2008, Nesbit at al, 2009, Mayer & Frantz, 2014). 

The lack of children’s NC opportunities are therefore significant for their academic learning (McCree,2018) physical and mental health, sense of wellbeing and importantly, environmental engagement. The Nature Connectedness Research Group from Derby University conducted a systematic review (2018) of 50 research studies involving 16,396 individuals, they investigated the links between the individuals connection with nature and their reported happiness. 

They broke ‘happiness’ down into: function, wellbeing and self-reported personal growth. They found that people who are more connected to nature tend to have greater levels of all three elements (Martin et al, 2020 Pritchard et al, 2019). The first, a greater level of ‘function’ is important for children at school as it indicates greater levels of ability to learn, which turn leads to a increased health benefits and standard of living (Cutler, 2006). An overall sense of ‘happiness’ really refers to feeling good and positive, this is well understood to be a measure of wellbeing and also an indicator for good for the physical health (Steptoe & Wardle, 2005).  

The physical benefits derived from the experience of being outside which is an important part of NC, are extremely well documented and summarised here by Dr Richardson, “There is already research evidence that exposure to nature can reduce hypertension respiratory tract and cardiovascular illnesses; improve vitality and mood; benefit issues of mental wellbeing such as anxiety; and restore attention capacity and mental fatigue. But more than that, feeling a part of nature has been shown to significantly correlate with life satisfaction, vitality, meaningfulness, happiness, mindfulness, and lower cognitive anxiety.” 

 Health is improved by being outside in nature; this is being demonstrated repeatedly through a multitude of studies. 

Evidence that children would engage.

There is evidence that children themselves want this connection and can be observe to display excitement, energy, curiosity and enthusiasm when outdoors. Kellert and Wilson’s hypothesis from 1995 states that humans had a ‘natural love’ for nature, they referred to this as ‘biofilia’. “Our Bright Future” a partnership led by The Wildlife Trusts asked 300 children across the UK:

 “If you could change one thing for you and the environment, what would this be?” 

The number one answer: “More time spent learning in and about nature.” 

In my experience children look forward to and love their outdoor sessions,

 “This is the best”, “Why can’t we do this everyday”, “I love this”, “This is the best day of my life”, it is not an exaggeration to say that I hear these comments every week.

What are WWW going to provide that playtime or other outdoor activities are not?

Simply being in the outdoors does not have the same NC impact as facilitated or guided nature connection activities. Barrable and Booth (2020), in reviewing all the research to date on the effect of different forms of outdoor or nature related activities on children’s measureable wellbeing, found that not all activities had an effect on participant’s attitudes, behaviour or feelings towards nature.

Bruni’s Getting to Know Program (2017) compared the effects of three different types of activity:

1) Creative Arts – outdoor organic arts

2) Natural Treasure Adventure – outdoor treasure hunt 

3) Virtual Hikes – online interactive activity.  

Bruni found that only activity 1) demonstrated a measurable increase in nature connectedness. The increase was significant, the reasons for this could be that the activity touched on more areas of connection, which include: 

Senses - tuning in to nature through the senses

Emotion - feeling alive through the emotions and feelings nature brings

Beauty - noticing nature’s beauty

Meaning - nature bringing meaning to our lives

Compassion - caring and taking action for nature.

Activity 1) involved four out of five areas of connection implicitly. The other two activities scored low on the five areas and therefore, they concluded, did not produce even a temporary change in the participant’s attitudes, feelings or behaviours. This suggests the need for children’s activities that offer participants the opportunity to engage with nature on a deeper level than simply being outdoors can provide. Facilitating focus and awareness through the senses, emotions through mindful practice, or drawing attention to beauty, meaning and compassion through art or drama. 

These examples describe why the experience of guided NC is such a different experience to free-play or school playtime in the playground. Free-play and the social engagement that takes place in school break times are also hugely important, but serve a purpose different to that of increasing NC. 

 Wild Woodland Workshops will be devised using the data above and from the creative methods used in the first sessions, to form a series of activities that follow the pathways of: senses, emotions, beauty, meaning and compassion. How could increased NC be measured?

The research should measure the extent to which NC and awareness of local natural environments was increased through the workshops.

Objectives:

A) To investigate whether sustained, facilitated nature connection activities effects children’s attitudes, feelings or behaviours towards the nature.

Ai) To investigate whether children play outdoors in local nature spaces as a result of these interventions.

What kind of information will be collected and how?

Information will be collected that suggests whether and to what degree children are influenced by the experience of facilitated outdoor nature experiences. 

Research suggests that a deeper and more substantial ‘love and care’ for the natural environment and the wider planet can result (Mayer and Frantz, 2004; Leary et al., 2008; Nisbet et al., 2009; Frantz and Mayer, 2014). 

 The information will be children’s attitudes, feelings and self-reported behaviours towards nature. This will generate qualitative and quantitative data.

Who will collect data?

This is a very small study so I will be conducting the research sessions. Care will be taken not to bias the format of data creation, a control class will be used and a triangulation of three methods. 

The pre-post Mood Marbles and the Creative Sessions, which include painting and describing, thirdly will be a multiple choice questionnaire read to the children. They will raise a card to indicate answer A, B or C. 

These three methods are selected for the breadth of expression that the participants will have: painting, describing and simple answers about feelings or choices. 

Each child will have the opportunity to use kinaesthetic, oral and visual expression during the research sessions. This should make the experience equally accessible for those with specific or non-specific learning difficulties as for those without. 

These three methods of measuring the outcomes will together provide qualitative and quantitative data that will provide rich data, especially as it is rolled out over time in more schools and the number of participants increases. I have selected 6 as the number for each research session for practical reasons, but with increased resources this number could be increased.

When will this happen?

The ‘Mood Marbles’ will happen Monday to Friday morning, in other words every day of the week that the workshops happen in. This is including 15 children from workshop and an equal number not participating Control class. 

The research ‘Creative Sessions’ will happen the same day as the workshops. With the cooperation of the schools and class teachers, 3 children picked at random (names in a hat) from the workshop group and 3 from the control group will attend the 20/30-minute session. The control children will be as close as possible to the age of the WWW group, if not the same year group then one above or below. 

The children will not be rewarded for attendance and the atmosphere will be as ‘calm and friendly’ as possible. The children will be asked if they want to participate, if they do not, the name is removed from the hat and another chosen. During the ‘Creative Session’ if a child wishes to leave and return to class this will be respected. There will be minimal ‘chat’ from me once the ‘Creative Session’ begins to make the sessions replicable. Children will all have prior knowledge of the research sessions and the workshops, I will give them brief instruction about the painting then they will begin. There will be music/sound-track, nature sounds of birds and water, and no talking, or at least minimal, the same environment for each session, the atmosphere will be calm and peaceful.

How will results be used to improve what we do?

This information could inform us whether any of the WWW Nature Connection had been successful in its own terms, if the experience had a measurable impact. It could inform us as to the overall impact of the workshops and lead us to conclusions or hypothesis about how to create the most impactful NC workshops for children in the future. It could also lead us to conclude what sort of research would benefit understanding of this area of learning and development. 

What would the research ‘Creative Sessions’ tell us about the WWWs? 

Results will be collated by thematically coding the language used by the participants to describe their paintings. This would tell distance or us how the children ‘feel’ about nature and themselves with in it, whether they feel part of it for example or whether it features highly in their life experience or is more peripheral. The multiple choice selections will be used to form data recording the attitudes, feelings and self-reported behaviours of those who have taken part and those who have not. The Mood Marbles might show us if there is any difference in mood over the days or weeks of the workshops or any difference in mood between the participants and control.

What are we trying to understand?

We are trying to establish whether there is a strong connection between facilitated exposure to these specifically designed activities to increase NC and therefore wellbeing, and an actual increase in NC and therefore wellbeing. In other words if this type of exposure to activities designed to connect children to the natural environment do have an effect, and if so what is the effect. From this we would also like to extrapolate if this has any effect on the families or communities of these children; especially as part of the NC activity is to introduce the children to local wild spaces that they could access with their families for free and on foot. 

What data already exists from recent or relevant research in this area?

There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating how important it is for children to be given the opportunity to discover, learn about and experience the natural world. It enables a sense of belonging and identity rooted in their local environment, enhancing health, wellbeing and educational outcomes while helping to safeguard the future of their environment. (Tam, 2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00492 Front. Psychol., 19 March 2020 Increasing Nature Connection in Children: A Mini Review of Interventions.

Increasing Nature Connection in Children (Barrable & Booth, 2020) conducted an extensive review of NC impact studies and noted the difficulty in making evaluations of the level of NC, when majority of participants are younger children (Knight, 2013), and no self-report instrument to measure NC in the early years’ age group currently exists (Barrable, 2019b). They also not that the majority of the studies evaluated environmental education projects, however new research suggests that the most effective NC is not necessarily through knowledge, but through aesthetics, emotion, and sustained contact with the natural environment (Lumber et al., 2017). 

 Their review concluded that “more emphasis could be placed on measuring alternative activities that bring children in sustained or condensed contact with nature, such as forest schools, nature kindergartens, adventure activities, and wildlife expeditions.” (Barrable & Booth, 2020) The above review recommended focus on non-educational interventions considering the impact of interaction between play or mindfulness in a natural environment would be of benefit (Unsworth et al., 2016). 

It was noted that many studies did not use a control, or pre-post measurement, both of which have been incorporated into this design. Thought has been given to the reliability, reproducibility, and generalizability in measuring the outcomes of these workshops. This will enable the data to be added to if the project continues and is rolled out to more schools this will in time create a larger sample size would then contribute to more significantly to advancing work in this area.

How will this research be conducted?

Mood Marbles:

These will be positioned at the door of the classroom on Monday to Friday mornings. Children select a marble and put it into the Happy Face, Neutral Face or Sad Face jar. The jars are changed every morning so that each day has a fresh measurement. Children in the workshop set will complete this each morning and a control group not in then workshop set will complete the week of mood marbles. The boxes containing Monday to Friday marbles will be collected each week and counted. Mood Marble will not be used for the Community Groups only in schools as there is prolonged NC experience. 

Creative Sessions:

It should require 20-30 minutes, one per week with 6 randomly selected students, all resources are easily transported, the results will be photographs, recordings and multiple choice questions recorded on paper. An iPad will be used for the photographing and recording. Three children from the workshop group and 3 children from the control will go into a classroom where there will be nature sounds music. 

How will this work?

Children will be invited to sit at separate desks with paint and paper, invited to paint a picture for which they have plenty of time (15-20 minutes) and entitled Nature and Me.

After 20 minutes they will stop painting/modelling to answer: Where are you in your picture/clay model? Where is nature in your picture/clay model?

Their answers are audio recorded for transcription and thematic analysis.

Multiple Choice:

Each participant has a paper with letters A, B, C on it, I then read each question and they lift up the corresponding letters. These would include a question about play in local nature spaces and others regarding identity with and feelings towards parts of nature.

Example questions:

Nature is 

A a bit boring

 • Use of pre-post measurements 

Radstock and Westfield BIG LOCAL 2021  

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