Abstract
Public gardens, parks and botanic gardens attract a large number of international and domestic visitors throughout the world. According to the statistics of the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), there are over 2,000 botanic gardens in the world with around 250 million visitors each year. As one of the most popular informal settings for organized school visits, botanic gardens are ‘living museums’ of plants where students acquire practical biological knowledge, develop horticultural skills, learn to appreciate the natural environment and develop a sense of sustainability (Braund & Reiss, 2006). In other words, they play a significant role in providing the public with an enjoyable way to spend leisure time as well as giving them the opportunity to explore the pleasures of the garden environment, whilst also serving as a site for enhancing public education(Johnson, S. (2004). Learning science at a botanic garden. In M. Braund & M. Reiss (Eds.), Learning science outside the classroom (pp. 75–93). London: Routledge; Sanders, International Journal of Science Education 29(10):1209–1228, 2007; Stewart, K. M. (2003). Learning in a botanic garden: The excursion experiences of school students and their teachers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; Tunnicliffe, Journal of Biological Education 36(1):27–34, 2001 Johnson, 2004; Sanders, 2007; Stewart, 2003; Tunnicliffe, 2001). Recent research has indicated that school educational excursions to informal settings have a positive impact on students’ cognitive learning, affective maturation and social development (DeWitt & Storksdieck, 2008; Rennie, 2007). Every year, in the United Kingdom, each of the 130 or more botanic gardens throughout the country accommodates a substantial number of visiting school groups to support their study of plants and many of these are guided by professional botanic garden educators (BGEs).
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Zhai, J. (2015). Introduction. In: Teaching Science in Out-of-School Settings. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-591-4_1
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