10:45 AM - 11:10 AM
[O03-04] In-service and Pre-service Teacher Training to Promote School Safety from Natural Disasters: Connecting Geosciences with Practical Disaster Risk Reduction
★Invited Papers
Keywords:school safety from natural disasters, teacher training, in-service teacher training
Generally, disaster education is focused on teaching practical skills to avoid risks of natural hazards and to respond to the impact. Yasuhiro Suzuki (2007) suggested that disaster education should include basics of natural disasters in addition to the existing practical skills study. The basics involve causal structure of natural disasters including geoscientific processes, and it is thought to guide understanding of the reasons why the practices should be tackled and to guide appropriate efforts. Cooperation between the basics and practical skills in disaster education is necessary.
Seiji Suwa (2015), who was a teacher at Maiko High School and the director of the environmental disaster department, points out that it is necessary for schoolteachers to practice disaster education in cooperation with specialists of disaster sciences. He also calls for the specialists to be engaged in TOT (Training of Trainers) in disaster education.
The supreme court decision of the Okawa Elementary School tsunami compensation case has indicated that schools ensure safety from disasters by taking damages beyond prediction into considerations even if it is not projected on existing hazard maps.
It is necessary to consider the hazard map released by public institutions as a "scientifically-based guideline" and to read the map appropriately, considering that it may exceed expectations. The key to the reading of hazard maps is the "topography", which is highly indexable as a land condition. Therefore, the authors have proposed a "hazard map three-step reading method based on topography" (Murayama et al., 2021).
The first step is to read exactly what is drawn on the hazard map, the second step is to read the relationship between the hazard map and the topography together with the experience, memory, topographic map, and geomorphological map, and the third step is to think about unexpected risks based on the assumed conditions of the hazard map and topography. The authors have developed and released an online course for schoolteachers based on this three-step reading method (http://drredu-collabo.sakura.ne.jp/online).
Yamagata University has started " Introduction to School-based Disaster Education and Management: Guidance for Pre-service Teachers" (2 credits) since 2015, and has made it a compulsory subject of the under-graduate teacher training course since 2017. In addition to the practical content of school safety from disasters, 8 of the 15 classes offered are geoscientific content including topography and maps, and 4 of these are by experts from the Yamagata Local Meteorological Observatory. Furthermore, at the Professional School of Education of Yamagata University, which was established in 2009, "School Safety and Disaster Education" was offered as a compulsory subject from the beginning, and multiple classes were also applied to the earth science content.
In the under-graduate teacher training course, classes related to school safety including disaster risk reduction are compulsory since 2019. Earth science researchers enrolled in universities with a teacher training course should be actively involved in this compulsory subject. In addition to giving classes directly to children and students at school, we should provide easy-to-understand training and class support that is useful for disaster education for schoolteachers.