Abstract

FRANCO-MARISCAL, Antonio Joaquín. An exploratory study of an environmental experience: The school stairs, a space for environmental education. Rev. Fac. Cienc. Tecnol. [online]. 2014, n.35, pp.13-37. ISSN 0121-3814.

One of the fundamental goals of environmental education is to provide students with both the knowledge and skills to help them solve and prevent environmental problems. In this way, a research experience in the scope of environmental education is considered in this study, with compulsory secondary education Spanish students (12-17 years old) (N=154) from an urban middle socioeconomic status. The experience aims at increasing environmental awareness among students. The experience was carried out during the third quarter of the 2012-13 year at the secondary school (IES) Juan Ramón Jiménez of Málaga (Spain), and it was divided into three main phases. The required environmental knowledge was given to students in the first phase, in all the subjects. In the second one, students took action by drawing two large murals on the walls of the stairs of the school, where they captured their ideas to represent two opposite environmental situations: a clean and a polluted city. Scientific contents on the murals were complemented with some messages of awareness in different languages, some mathematical calculations, and some information about different international agreements and some poems. Finally, in the third phase of assessment, we valued the level of environmental awareness achieved by students, learning gained, and the interest in this type of activity. The instrument used for the measurement of the different variables was a survey containing ten items with open-ended answer. From the resulting evaluation, it was concluded that the experience was useful to increase environmental awareness in 66% of students, getting that 72% of pupils gained some type of learning about environmental issues, and that 73% of students expressed interest and motivation in their development. We especially noted the awareness created in the students, because they were able to identify the pollution in their city as a main problem, to propose some actions to solve it and to be aware of the influence of this learning in their lives.

Keywords : Environmental education; increasing environmental awareness; environmental learning; secondary education.

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