Effects of the Emotional Environmental Education Salovey through Educational Theatre on Elementary School Students' Environmental Literacy

교육 연극을 활용한 감성 중심 환경교육이 초등학생의 환경 소양에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influences of environmental education program through educational theatre on student's environmental literacy of 5th graders in an elementary school in Seoul. The students were divided into an experimental group and a control group. Then, the experimental group had the emotion-centered environmental education program using educational theatre, and the control group had the regular education process, which is a general lecture about the environment. The SPSS 12.0 program was used to analyze the results. The major result of the study was as follows. First, the researcher was able to develop and apply professor-learning model for the environment education using the educational theatre by abstracting and recreating environment-related contents from the 5th grade curriculum. Second, the study has showed that applying the emotion-centered program using the education theatre for the environment education certainly contributes to the improvement of the environment knowledge of the elementary students. Third, the emotion-centered environment education program has influenced evenly on the elements of the environment knowledge divided by the four goal levels of the environment education. Finally, the higher the student's emotional quotient is, the more improvement of the environment knowledge the student gets when using the emotion-centered environment education program using the education theatre. In conclusion, the emotion-centered environment education program using the education theatre is a usable method to the elementary schools, and has a positive effect on increasing the environment knowledge of 5th grade students. In the time of requiring the diverse environment education methods, this program is worth to try as a new education method. Therefore, it is necessary to research more on the professor-learning activities related to this study.