Evaluation of Green Spaces in the Elementary Schools with an Emotional-Oriented approach

Educational environment has always been one of the most important factors that play an important role in learning and education among students and as institutional spaces for learning communities, including students and teachers, that can be used as a tool for teaching. As part of the mechanism for improving student learning, green spaces in primary schools provide a valuable bed for designers and planners to play a role in realization of this goal through providing these spaces. In educational spaces, nature often occurs in a very restricted way, and this limited presence is created without considering the children’s certain needs as well as the natural environments’ high capabilities in meeting these needs. Hence, to reform the body of education, it is essential to create spaces related to student activities, spaces with appropriate and favorable conditions for children’s physical, mental, emotional, and social development, realized by designing the details of the spaces in accordance with the pattern of children’s sentimentality. Considering the creation of a suitable environment for the child’s growth besides getting familiar with his/her needs and pure nature required during his/her childhood, provides the bed for the proper development of the children’s personality and upbringing as a healthy generation of tomorrow. The school is one of these environments, i.e. part of children’s daily lives that has been severely neglected.
In the meantime, the design of green space in primary schools is one of the fields in which sentimental design may be well employed. Emotions are a key part of life affecting how one feels, behaves, and thinks. On the other hand, emotions enhance creativity while increasing one’s ability to enjoy life. In reviewing the current situation of schools in Tehran, it was seen that green space is just considered in open environments; moreover, schools have not taken into account the sentimental approach in design.
The present research seeks to test the interior and exterior spaces of green primary schools in terms of sentimental approach experimentally. This is an applied study in terms of purpose, with a mixed approach (qualitative-quantitative). The approach of the current study is to investigate the importance of primary school’s indoor and outdoor spaces with a sentimental approach. To this end, we try to prioritize these spaces as a solution to make better use of schools and help students’ progress and academic motivation. In the qualitative phase, library studies were employed for obtaining information about educational space and green spaces, besides getting familiar with the sentimental approach and its related components; then, the relevant theories were collected from books, papers, journals, and dissertations. Library studies revealed that school design could promote growth or inhibit learning. Architectural designers should consider how to design the schools’ natural space and the quality of the presence of nature. The presence of nature and its designers’ strategies may affect the quality of children’s education and green space may be employed as a tool for the child’s learning and multi-faceted growth. The questionnaire and the interview resulted in six indicators for studying the primary schools’ green space, given the students’ sentimentality. These indicators include entrance green space, closed educational space, breeding space, open spaces, rest and sitting spaces, and educational space in nature.
In the quantitative phase, these extracted framework and components had to be approved by a group of experts in the education field. Accordingly, a pairwise comparison questionnaire was designed with the statistical population consisting of managers, experts, education specialists, and teachers. Purposive sampling method was used in this phase and 180 people were studied. Fuzzy AHP method was employed for ranking and statistical analysis. Given the ranking results, it can be claimed that the presence of green space in the library may contribute to the scientific level and greater effectiveness of the school in learning; since along the way of green spaces, students can have access to different books and enhance their level of learning. On the other hand, considering the children’s sentimentality, green space in school gyms may contribute to motivate students more and make them more interested in learning; then this is very significant in design. The design of green space in classrooms in the right environment as much as possible may help students’ learning. The indoor and outdoor spaces are mixed in such a way that the child can satisfy many of his/her needs in that space including discovering the unknown and curiosity about it, initiation, creativity, experiential learning, etc.
Besides considering physical standards and physiological needs, students’ mental inclinations should be considered in creating an educational environment. As one of the factors in increasing the quality of education, investigating sentimentality is a considerable and significant discussion. It seems that the time has come for other architects to think about the users’ characteristics and quality needs in education, in addition to the quantitative aspects of education. Hence, using the opinions of the expert professors and managers of various organizations and institutions, the present research revealed that considering the users’ needs, feelings, and moods will not only improve the students’ level of learning at the physical and quantitative levels, but also meeting these needs will lead to the users’ satisfaction and peace of mind. Constant communication with natural environments results in a positive emotional attraction to nature and formal and informal experiences that children gain from the environment will have a great impact on their environmental learning.
The researcher designed and distributed a pairwise comparison questionnaire among them. Using the experts’ opinions, six indicators were found to study the primary schools’ green space. These indicators include entrance green space, closed educational space, breeding space, open spaces, rest and sitting spaces, and educational space in nature. Given the ranking results, the priority of creating green spaces by considering the three dimensions of instinct, behavior, and reflection may be expressed as library indexes, sports halls, and finally classrooms as the first, second, and third priority. Considering the significance of the effect of contextual, behavioral, and social factors and students’ sentimentality in learning, the officials and designers are recommended to use this research’s results in reviewing and compiling green space with a sentimental approach.