With the importance of life-saving safety on the rise since 2014, when major accidents continued to occur everywhere in Korea, the movement to re-examine and strengthen safety education has grown. Accordingly, the government is reinforcing safety educ...
With the importance of life-saving safety on the rise since 2014, when major accidents continued to occur everywhere in Korea, the movement to re-examine and strengthen safety education has grown. Accordingly, the government is reinforcing safety education through full support and various policy announcements. In particular, it intends to implement this education in the curriculum with “Seven Standards for School Safety Education” and to enhance it through the subject matter educations so that it can be systematically operated in the field of school.
Since human factors account for a large part of the occurrence of accidents, it is considered very important to cultivate human beings with a sense of safety with the help of systematic and continuous education for realization of the safe society. Despite of the government’s measures to strengthen safety education, however, various types of dangers from small-scale accidents in everyday life to mass disasters continue to happen, and the appearance of new types of disasters with threats also causes harm to people. This has led people to raise awareness about the effectiveness of school safety education up to date which aims to help understanding safety-related knowledge and develop appropriate responses to dangerous situations, and further, cultivate the attitude necessary for danger prevention. In modern society with growing uncertainty as to dangers, the paradigm of safety education has expanded to developing risk sensitivity that judges and recognizes risks sensitively, and the need to consider the present conditions of safety education and adapt to changes has increased.
Though safety education is a mandatory course in schools, many point out that its standardized content based on the teacher-centered and knowledge delivery typed classes reduce interest in the education and it is difficult to apply the content to actual situations. Therefore, it was judged that safety education that considers distinct characteristics of the areas where students face dangerous situations most and the context to raise the effectiveness of the education from the aspect of content and that the class should be organized based on direct participation and experience by students to increase its effect. Additionally, it was considered important to educate students to develop their risk sensitivity with the beginning of recognition of risk elements that could be regarded minor in everyday life.
So far, there has been little interest in safety education and its necessity has not been recognized hugely in the subject geography, but this subject is expected to play an important role considering that it can help students think contextually in a variety of daily dangerous situations and give them safety education based on the content suitable for spatial characteristics.
To find an effective safety education in geography classes, “place” was established as a link that connects geography class with safety education, and a place-based community mapping utilization class was designed and applied to the school education field. The students who took part in a safety-themed project class with community mapping as a tool identified risk and safety factors by visiting familiar places and actively participated in creating and utilizing maps to solve risks as the community problems. It was found that they objectively explored safety knowledge and countermeasures and experienced lots of changes after the group activity.
First, it was identified that the community mapping community led the students to have a positive change in their safety consciousness. To understand their cognitive changes, pre- and post- imaginary mapping activity was conducted, and the analysis result showed that their ability to figure out which factors cause risks and exactly where dangerous places are improved.
In addition, the designed community mapping utilization class was found to reflect the areas for improvement in the current safety education―student participation, actuality, distinct characteristics of the area―and its effectiveness was proven as the students were able to achieve the goals that safety education aims. Educational effects such as improvement in citizenship proven through the interviews with the students who participated in the class and the analysis of their self-evaluation demonstrated the potentiality of safety education in geography classes and its values.