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Today, cities become more dense, green spaces disappear and children spend less time outdoors. Research suggests that these conditions create health problems and lack of ecological literacy. To reverse such trends, localities are creating urban green spaces for children to visit during school time. Drawing on ideas in ecological literacy, this study investigates school children's perspectives on a forest garden, a type of outdoor educational setting previously only scarcely researched. Data were collected through walk-and-talk conversations and informal interviews with 28 children aged 7 to 9. Many children in the study expressed strong positive feelings about the forest garden, the organized and spontaneous activities there, and caring for the organisms living there. We observed three aspects of learning in the data, potentially beneficial for the development of children's ecological literacy: practical competence, learning how to co-exist and care, and biological knowledge and ecological understanding.

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.

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This case study explores a learning situation in a forest garden in Sweden. A forest garden is an edible polyculture landscape with different layers of mostly perennial vegetation. The forest garden is designed to maximize the yield of useful plants while minimizing the input of energy and resources, including human labour. Forest gardens may offer learning situations that contextualize interconnectedness and relations between organisms as well as situations that are beneficial for evaluative development (Kellert, 2002), i.e. the development of values, beliefs and moral perspectives in children. Twenty-seven seven to eight year old primary school children were followed in the first six months of a three year project in which they participated in developing a forest garden. The aim of the study is to investigate how the children reason with respect to different organisms' dependence on and relations to each other, themselves included. Specifically: How do the children describe their own relationships with other organisms, as well as the relationships between other organisms in the forest garden? What values of nature are expressed by the children, and in relation to which situations in the forest garden? Data were collected in the form of field notes, audio and video recordings and photos from the children's visits to the forest garden. The photos were used for stimulated recall in focus group interviews. The data were analysed using a combination of qualitative content analysis (Patton, 2002) and semi-quantitative methods. The children in the study presented a unidirectional perspective about the relationship between themselves and the organisms, especially the insects, in the forest garden. Rather than asking what these organisms can do for me/us, they pose the question: What can I/we do for the bugs/plants/ bees? This study shows that forest gardens have the potential to be places where children can connect emotionally and cognitively to other organisms.