THE NEW GEOGRAPHY

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The purpose of this paper is to consider how the students in social participation learning to cooperate with the citizen workshop held in 2001 evaluate the practice 6 years later, and to investigate how they make use of their knowledge and attitude and ability learned through the class in their life based on questionnaire and hearing survey.
The results can be summarized as follows:
Firstly, most students impressively remembered this class because they enjoyed both to mingle with many citizens in the process of learning, and to plan the improvement of the station square with their friends.
Secondly, they had acquired various viewpoints to recognize society through mingling with many citizens not only in the workshop but also in their field survey. Furthermore, they adopted the acquired viewpoints to society in their later life.
Thirdly, the students increased their motivation for learning, since many citizens listen to students’ questions and opinions sincerely in the workshop and in the survey. But they did not evaluate their participation in the citizen workshop very high because they had little time to participate directly in the workshop.
Fourthly, their failure experience in the learning process gave them the opportunity to continue to think about community problems afterwards. They found that there were a lot of citizens who did not participate in the workshop and had few interests about the issue of illegal parking in the Shin-Urayasu station square. However, they did not appreciated such situation negatively and have been interested in community problems.
And fifthly, their knowledge and attitude and ability for the social participation they got through the practice were rarely linked to their practical activities in everyday life. This partly depends on analyzing high school students in this research that they have not enough time to spend in their community. In addition, this exemplifies that social participation learning does not necessarily cause students to change in their personal behavior.

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