2021 Volume 62 Issue 2 Pages 475-483
In recent years, floods due to the overflow of rivers have occurred with more frequency. It is thus meaningful and timely to consider how to teach disaster prevention education with regard to river floods, from the perspective of building a sustainable society. Rivers not only carry the risk of disaster, but also bring the blessings of water supply and the formation of alluvial plains inhabited by humans from past civilizations to present day. Such is the duality of nature. Therefore, in this research, we developed a learning program for the fifth grade of elementary school that allows the students to grasp the duality of nature from the transition of the river environment and the history of human activities, using the Yasu River in Shiga Prefecture, which is a familiar area, as a theme. The learning program included various topics, such as capturing natural disasters in the Yasu River basin through model experiments and understanding people’s lives through water utilization and hydraulic control from the remnants of the Yayoi period. For the children who received this learning program, we asked them to write an image map drawn before and after the lesson, and we compared the contents to assess the lesson’s effectiveness. The results revealed that the children were indeed able to recognize the blessings and dangers of the river after the lesson. From this research, we were thus able to show this learning program, which is composed from the viewpoint of curriculum management centered on science, embodies “Education on safety including disaster prevention (cross-curricular on contemporary educational issues)”. At the same time, we were able to show that the learning program was in line with the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).
