An Attempt to Introducing Volunteer Activity Experience in Post-Training for Student Teaching

Abstract

  Today, the necessity of volunteer activity experience is strongly claimed in the teacher education and the teacher adoption. Therefore, we introduced two courses in which the volunteer activity can be experienced into the post-training curriculum for student teaching in the Faculty of Education of Kagawa University from 1997. The first course is “the volunteer course of helping the visual handicapped persons and putting into braille” held at the Kagawa Sight-handicapped Person Welfare Center. The second course is “the storytelling volunteer experience course for children” held at the Takamatsu City Library. In this paper, we reported the results of these two courses and the future problems, based on the reports and the questionnaire data of the students enrolled in the courses. It was pointed out that to provide “the knowledge and the information” about the volunteer activity and “the chance” of the participation is important to make a student volunteer activity lively and our two volunteer activity experience courses had a significance with respect to the provision of “the knowledge and the information” and “the chance”. The students enrolled in the courses became to get broad outlook and reconsider their way of life through the experiences in these courses in addition to understanding about the volunteer activity. Our attempt this time is thought to serve as a future reference in case of introducing a volunteer activity to the curriculum in the college and faculty of teacher education in Japan.