Drawing Life: Spontaneous Biophilic Imagery in Children's Responses to an Open-Ended Prompt - A Pilot Study from Blue Blocks Montessori School

This paper explores the biophilic imagery response in children's drawings when given an openended prompt: "Draw a place where life can exist." This work is grounded in the biophilia hypothesis and the framework of the biophilic expression in children. The study tries to see if, in the absence of adult instruction or environmental priming, children would gravitate towards nature-oriented imagery. 81 children across three age groups participated in a single art session with a drawing task at the Blue Blocks Montessori School, Hyderabad. The three age groups were 6-8 years (n = 51), 9-12 years (n = 17), and 13-16 years (n = 8), and 5 more participants could not be assigned to an age group due to missing age records. Each drawing was coded using a prebuilt observer sheet across 5 element categories, i.e., vegetation, water, animals and living creatures, sky and light, human-made or built environments. 77.5% of the drawings, i.e., 62 out of 80 were classified as strongly biophilic which exceeds the 60% threshold mentioned in the pre-registration. Vegetation and plants-76.5% drawings, and sky/light elements-67.9% drawings were the most widespread categories observed. The mean total biophilic element count shows a directional decrease with a score of 6.20 for the 6-8 years group, 4.76 for the 9-12 years group, and 3.62 for the 13-16 years group. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that with urbanization and social conditioning, spontaneous biophilic orientation gets suppressed. 87.7% of the drawings have some type of a built environment, but never as a primary source, more like a small embedded feature in predominantly nature-covered scenarios. Inter-rater reliability was established for 27.2% of the samples, i.e., 22 of the drawings which yielded a 95.7% agreement on the overall results and classification of the biophilic element correlation (r = 0.989). The results suggest that in an early default cognitive-imaginative frame, biophilic orientation is predominant in children which slowly decreases with an increase in age.