IAG-IASPEI 2017

Presentation information

Oral

IASPEI Symposia » S23. Geoscience and society

[S23-2] Geoscience and society II

Thu. Aug 3, 2017 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM Room 402 (Kobe International Conference Center 4F, Room 402)

Chairs: Satoko Oki (Keio University) , Fushin Lee (Kyoto University)

5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

[S23-2-02] Extension of school education for disaster prevention actions over households –a case study of Mashima Elementary School-

Takao Iinuma1, Satoko Oki2, Risa Yamazaki2, Shun Tagami3 (1.Keio University, Graduate School of Media and Governance, 2.Keio University, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, 3.Keio University, Faculty of Policy Management)

After Great East Japan earthquake, the significance of education for disaster prevention is confirmed further and improvement of current education is highly required at every school. On the other hand, countermeasures against disaster at each household depend on the awareness of parents and so the level of preparedness resulted in large variation compared to that of schools. This represents a severe problem for protecting children's lives because they spend more time at home than at a school. Therefore, education for disaster prevention at school should be designed to have effects over school kids' parents.
This research will discuss a case study of Mashima Elementary School, located in Nagano prefecture. At this school, disaster prevention education was carried out in the means of action research beginning in July 2015 and going into the academic year of 2016. The practice aimed at not only empowering children to save their own lives, but for them to influence their families in taking preventive measures. In particular, the practice consisted of delivering disaster prevention lectures once or twice a year, distributing newsletters every month, and using the newsletters to facilitate monthly disaster prevention classes. As a result, the execution rate of people taking actions such as securing their furniture, significantly increased from approximately 10% to 50%.
This study also indicates its academic significance as it reveals a crucial point of consideration in analyzing results of continuously conducted quantitative research on the same subjects of research. Furthermore, through these interviews carried out on guardians, 20 different factors that may serve as catalysts in encouraging people to actively take part in disaster prevention activities, were discovered. It proved that when empowering people to take action, simply threatening them of risks related to earthquakes is insufficient, but that the effects of these catalysts must be optimized.