How wetland habitats are perceived by children: consequences for children's education and wetland conservation

Abstract An appreciation of wet habitats is happily being engendered through the now prominent use of pond‐dipping in both formal teaching in primary schools and informal work at field centres and country parks. Yet wetlands (marshes, bogs, swamps, carrs and river meadows) are greatly threatened habitats for which education is not stemming a tide of destruction. Underlying this is a low perception of their value as natural systems by an adult community that regards them as undesirable, dangerous places. This perception may be innate, the product of long evolutionary association with the negative aspects of wetlands such as disease and impenetrability. Or it may arise simply by learned conditioning, ultimately based on common sense but, in the technological world, at least, no longer justified. A test of these hypotheses ‐innate versus conditioned perception ‐was carried out by gathering the views of 183 children aged 6/7 (top infants) and 10/11 (top juniors) in three schools. An innate perception would mean that perception of wetlands was highly negative from the outset and stayed much the same or even improved with age and experience. A conditioned response might be indicated by a view that became more negative with age. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire in which the children chose adjectives they associated with particular animals or habitats and an interview in which they were shown pictures of habitats and asked for their reactions. Perceptions of infants towards bogs and marshes were consistently more positive than those of juniors whilst perceptions of woodlands improved with age. Perceptions of a variety of animals did not change with age and were much as might be expected, lending credibility to the findings concerning habitats. It is concluded that conditioning leads to negative adult perceptions of wetlands. This conditioning may come from literature, television or orally and it is not possible to rank these sources. However, a wealth of evidence does suggest that wetlands are negatively portrayed in junior and adult fiction but more positively in that written for infants. Teachers of juniors may thus have a key role to play in the conservation of wetlands by attempting positively to counteract the insidious influences of sources of misinformation.