Young people's engagement with their school grounds expressed through colour, symbol and lexical associations: a Finnish-British comparative study

This paper reports a comparative study in a Finnish school and a British school of the emotional associations made by 10-11-year-olds with their school grounds. Colour and symbol associations were used as a stimulus for getting students to engage with their school grounds, describe their feelings about them, and produce a lexicon of emotion words'. The lexicon was used by the students in writing descriptive texts explaining place meanings' and place attachments'. In addition to content analysis, sentiment analysis algorithms were used to yield hierarchical representations of the affective content of the texts. The detail of the most frequently used emotion words is reported and similarities and differences between the associations in the two different cultural settings are discussed. The lexicon associated with the school grounds in both schools was largely positive. The educational implications of supporting students in engaging with learning environments are briefly discussed.