Natural Settings, Restorative Environments, and Adult Learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lisa, a weekend workshop participant at the Omega Institute, a residential retreat center, described her reaction to the wooded campus located in rural upstate New York: The setting is very, very important. I mean, that really is a huge part of the experience with their location. You could just take a huge breath of fresh air. I loved the grounds, the flowers, the herb garden, all of that; everything was just really well kept as far as the grounds, the trees. Everything was really pretty, the lake ... they picked a really good spot for [the campus]. I love hills, so I like the rough terrain and everything; it just felt fresh and clean. Most people would agree with Lisa that a lovely natural setting could be a great boon for any educational environment. Like Lisa, most of us have similar reactions in such settings; we feel relaxed and yet invigorated. Intuitively, most of us would agree that having pleasant natural surroundings is preferred. A beautiful location is a great selling point particularly in the case of organizations that offer residential learning experiences such as retreats, workshops, and conferences. This is no small detail in terms of the marketability of a program. Making informed decisions about program location is critical for program planners in adult education. And if educators and administrators understand the benefits of certain natural settings, they could use them to enhance the appeal and overall effectiveness of educational programs. Unfortunately, the role of the natural setting is not explored in depth in the literature on adult learning environments. In Toiviainen's (1995) work on folk high schools, he notes that most are located in beautiful settings: It is extremely difficult to estimate the impact on learning that the practicality and attractiveness of the teaching premises or the beauty of the surrounding nature have, but it is clear that folk high school people have always considered them as important contributing factors (p. 14). Other adult educators have noted this too. For example, Bersch and Lurid (2002) studied the formation of an adult learning community on Yukon Island, Alaska. The setting was remote and somewhat harsh, with dense woods and an abundance of wildlife. The natural setting was beautifully rugged; Bersch and Lurid suggest that it aided participants in their learning and community building because it heightens the senses and brings one closer to nature and to oneself (p. 74). A lovely natural setting is a preference for some people. However, the challenge is using such a setting to create a more effective learning environment. In my own research on adults' residential learning experiences, comments like Lisa's sent me hunting for answers that led me to studies in environmental psychology, a field which has done much to increase our understanding of how the natural setting shapes our behavior and well-being (Grill, 2003). In what follows, I will present a small slice of the knowledge base on natural settings and make suggestions for how to improve adult learning experiences. The Restorative Experience The kind of natural environment that Lisa experienced on her weekend retreat would be labeled by environmental psychologists as restorative. According to psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (1989), whose work has significantly shaped this area of research, such environments are identified by four characteristics: a) being away in other words, a setting that is physically or psychologically different from one that is typically experienced; b) extent, meaning a setting that is rich and coherent enough to sustain a person's interest and the sense of being away; c) fascination, or effortless attention which can come from objects in the environment or processes related to making sense of the environment; and d) compatibility;, which is the match between a person's purposes and inclinations within an environment and the demands and resources of the environment itself. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it