School gardening experience is a program designed to experience various activities including planting, growing, observing and harvesting plants in school gardens or farms. School garden will be multi-functioning place which provides enough space for playing, working, learning and thinking for city children who needs more place to play in. Gardening education within schools are mandatory requirements for enhancing personalities and creativity of students and its importance keep increased. Real acknowledgement and research on use of school gardens, however, is significantly lacking, especially on gardening activities in school garden.
This research, therefore, is to understand people’s acknowledgement on school gardens as taking elementary school teachers, students and parents as samples and, furthermore, to suggest positive direction for managing school gardens. In addition, it is to contribute to design gardening programs on using school gardens and building school gardens within newly structured schools.
This current study has been researched on sample of 254 people including teachers, parents and elementary students to understand their acknowledgements on building and use of elementary school gardens. The result is as following.
Gardening activity within elementary school students has been mostly observed within school gardens and it was followed by inside classrooms, inside school flower beds.
Satisfaction level of elementary school students who participated in gardening activities in school gardens was shown to be “very satisfied, and satisfied”, which shows all teachers, parents and students showed the needs for school garden.
Changes that elementary school students experienced after participating in gardening activities in school gardens was shown to be positive as showing “brighter personality, became mild and soft”.
Elementary schools that have no gardens within their structure stated that they lack space for building school gardens.
Even though they have school garden built, maintaining proper management of crops and plants was shown to be significantly difficult and acquiring necessary funds for building school garden was the next top difficulty.
Therefore, school garden is proved to great educational space for allowing elementary school students to experience and observe gardening activities. Local communities should cooperate to help satisfy the problems that are shown according to this research survey in order to build and manage efficient school gardens. Furthermore, specialized gardeners should cooperate for lasting research and efforts to allow these students great environmental experiences.