Environmental Education through Documentaries: Assessing Learning Outcomes of a General Environmental Studies Course
Shu-Chiu Liu 1 *
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1 Institute of Education, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, TAIWAN* Corresponding Author

Abstract

The use of film as supplementary materials in the classroom has become common for higher education teachers of environmental studies. It is, however, rare that film is incorporated as the primary instructional medium. This paper reports a case study on a documentary film-based environmental studies course which sought to engage students in exploring and reflecting on a wide range of locally significant environment issues. While film is the focus of the course, post-film reflective discussion is an integral part in order to help students identify and clarity their thoughts and ideas. A pre and post survey and post-instruction interviews were carried out with two cohorts of university students for the purpose of evaluating this course. The results suggest that, using documentaries to repeatedly expose students to real issues, the course proved to be beneficial to developing students’ perspective-taking and critical thinking abilities and sense of relevance, which collectively leads to a more pro-environmental disposition.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, 2018, Volume 14, Issue 4, 1371-1381

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/83653

Publication date: 19 Jan 2018

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