Poster short abstract:

In current uncertain times, nature-based learning is needed to promote both children's relationship with nature and their well-being. By means of mutual care with a school garden, students can reconnect with nature and shape their environmental knowledge and attitudes through their lived experience.

Poster long abstract:

Children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of the current waves of environmental, economic and health crises. As part of the EU-funded PLANET4B project, environmental behaviour and attitudes are being studied among students in a school garden in Hungary. The participatory action research project was first initiated in 2018 together with a Hungarian secondary school. The school garden was set up in an abandoned green area where we explored how attitudes and values held by students and teachers formed a more direct and interactive relationship towards nature. Throughout PLANET4B this project is continued and broadened with similar best practices to see if and how values and attitudes can be formed and changed over time in human-nature interactions. While no significant change of environmental attitudes could be measured quantitatively in the original school garden project, occasions to spend more time in the garden, and participatory techniques applied therein, generated an emerging open space. Thus shared values could be discussed and developed, as well as jointly held understandings on enjoyment, responsibility and care for heritage could be formed. Based on these results, we argue that human-nature interactions can be changed in school settings from a one-way passive to a two-way active one. Through consciously selected and carefully designed in-class and extracurricular activities a more relational view on nature can also be developed. Such a shift towards relational values requires that green spaces around schools are not considered simply as passive resources, but as active partners in teaching and community-building.