Practice of Environmental Citizenship Education in Junior High School Science

- Through the Relationships with Diverse Stakeholders -

Abstract

  Global environmental problems have become one of the most important issues in modern society, and cooperation across national boundaries is increasingly required to solve them. However, environmental education tends to treat environmental problems as individual moral issues and does not focus on structural problems in our society. In order to improve this situation, environmental citizenship education is becoming popular in Europe and the United States. It aims to treat environmental problems not only as individual problems but also as social and political issues, and to foster citizens who participate in society and take responsible environmental protection actions. In this study, we implemented environmental citizenship education in which junior high school students, after learning about environmental problems, identified the stakeholders of those problems and made proposals and held negotiations to improve the problems. The results suggest that through a series of learning activities, students' interest in environmental issues, as well as their citizenship to take action toward realistic solutions to the problems, are fostered.