Effects of green outdoor activities in preschool and primary school teachers’ well-being

The aim of this research is to verify the impact that different types of work environments (i.e., green outdoor vs. indoor) and classroom climate have on well-being, in either positive (i.e., satisfaction with life) or negative (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress) terms, in a sample of preschool and primary school teachers. To this end, a comparison between teachers working in schools running frequent green outdoor teaching experiences and those who work almost only indoor was realized. Participants were one hundred and thirty-six teachers (96.3% women; age: M=45.16 years, SD=10.63, age range: 24-64 years.), The following scales were administered online: Satisfaction with Life Scale - SWLS (Diener et al., 1985), Depression Anxiety Stress Scales - DASS 21 (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), Perceived Restorativeness Scale - PRS-11, (Hartig et al., 1991), Affective Qualities of Place (AQP, Perugini et al., 2002), and the Revised School Level Environment Questionnaire (R-SLEQ, Matteucci et al., 2017). We calculated correlations between variables, and four one-way ANOVAs to compare mean differences of AQP, R-SLEQ, SWLS and DASS between “indoor” and “outdoor” teachers, and two moderation models were run on SWLS and DASS. Overall results showed that both green outdoor teaching and a higher affective quality of place are associated to a higher satisfaction with life. Furthermore, a significant moderation effect was found in the interaction between school type and place affective quality, suggesting that a positive place quality is particularly important for enhancing satisfaction with life in “indoor” schools, but not in “outdoor” schools. These outcomes and future developments of the research will be discussed.