Improvement and Continuity of Childhood Experience in Children’s Educational Environments (A Reflection on the Home and School Environment among Elementary School Children in Kerman)

Since children spend a significant proportion of their life in school, one of the important issues for designing such environments is to provide them with the proper setting for development and childhood experience in these spaces. This paper seeks to provide a theoretical framework for identifying the main variables, explaining the relationship between the physical characteristics of the children’s environment and the childhood experience in this environment, and defining the children’s place-development model. Thus, the questions of this paper are: what are the environmental components of the childhood experience? and how do they affect the childhood experience? Accordingly, by reviewing the literature, different views on what an ideal children’s learning environment is and important environmental factors are identified, and the basic views that consider childhood experiences as continuous (children’s experience based on the continuous needs of different environments) are evaluated. Then, to achieve a theoretical paradigm with a developmental-ecological approach, 30 children living in co-operative families were selected. The research method is qualitative with an ethnographic approach and tools of interviewing, tour interviewing, observation, and Q method were used in data collection, while content analysis was used for analyzing the data. The findings show that childhood experience is affected by how the psychological needs of children are met in the ecological context that they live in. In this context, the physical characteristics, the environmental affordances as well as the psychological and social characteristics of the children’s environment are of high importance. Also, the children’s experience in one setting influences their experience in another one. The main themes that were obtained from the data represent the psychological needs (cognitive, social, and emotional) that are met through interacting with the environment (control, opportunity to be alone, comfort, freedom, coziness, sense of ownership of the place, implicit learning, exploratory learning, etc.). Regarding the theoretical aspect, this research proposes the following theoretical model based on the literature review and its empirical findings on the environmental factors affecting children’s psychological development: 1. Environmental affordances that are responsive to the symbolic and spiritual tendencies consist of the semantic components of the environment that affect children’s emotional development, 2. Environmental affordances that are responsive to physical interaction with the environment consist of the cognitive components of the environment that affect children’s cognitive development, 3. Environmental affordances that are responsive to interpersonal communication consist of functional components of the environment that affect children’s social development. In conclusion, enhancing the children’s environment, particularly the continuity of childhood experience requires considering theoretical as well as practical aspects and addressing basic and common needs in all environments for children. Therefore, a reflection on the environments that are more responsive to the childhood experience and their impact on the mental development of children would be helpful in designing overlooked environments such as schools. The results of this research can lead to a holistic view in designing children’s environment on a large scale and it could also result in designing environments based on the needs of the children on a small scale and ultimately enhancing and sustaining the childhood experience in the environments.