1.1 Motivation
Water conservation should be put into practice by everyone. However, people’s alienation from nature seems to result in neglect and damage to the natural resource, including water. To enhance people’s intentions of water conservation, environmental attitudes, contributing to the formation of behaviors, is therefore an important emphasis in environmental education for all, including enhancement in people’s environmental awareness, responsibility and values and beliefs. Particularly, people’s emotional connection with natural environment is believed to be an important factor to pro-environmental attitudes (Berenguer, 2007), and are believed to be aroused through storytelling (Johnson, 2011). Due to the effect of perspective-taking, people reading a story come to realize and feel for the lead character by taking the character's perspective.
Likewise, one’s feelings may be aroused toward an object through a story with a personified object as the lead character. Moreover, the feelings for natural objects would mediate to the natural environment as a whole (Berenguer, 2007). Hence, present study proposes using storytelling with personified natural object as the lead character, to induce people’s emotions toward the natural environment to which the object belongs. This is the concept of Object View Story (OVS), to guide people’s comprehension of environmental issues from an object’s view. In present study, OVS construction method is introduced and practiced in the field of water environmental issues, while it is wished to have more applications on general environmental topics for environmental education purposes in the future.
1.2 Background
Problems and needs in Water Environmental Education. Water conservation is a universal issue that the responsibility should be assumed by everyone (Parker and Sams, 2015). When usable water is limited, water consumers should feel their responsibilities to maintain a sustainable water environment. However, modern people seems ignorant of their misappropriation of water resource due to alienation to the nature. People’s unawareness of their impacts on nature may cause serious water environment damages.
For these reasons, it is a difficult but essential matter in water environmental education to raise people’s awareness of their involvement of environmental changes (denoted by
“environmental awareness” in this study) as well as their responsibilities to protect the water environment (denoted by “environmental responsibility”). To “close the gap”
between human and nature, studies has proposed the importance of emotional connection in people to the natural environment. In other words, affective factors have received more attention in environmental education, rather than traditional approach stressing on knowledge. Comparing to expository words, storytelling is found an effective strategy to trigger emotions in readers, as they project their sensation on the lead character due to perspective-taking. Therefore, present study aims to enhance people’s sense of their involvement in water environmental issues, by inducing people’s emotional connection toward nature through the introduced mean of storytelling.
Insufficient Research on Designing Stories for Environmental Education. There have been cases using storybooks to instruct in environmental education. However, published research in this field remain deficient, and most of them target at effects on children, not at adults or general people. Moreover, among enormous forms of stories, few studies
environmental education, as well as how to design a story which is effective to induce readers’ emotions for the nature. It is valuable to develop a designing method of stories for supporting interested educators or authors to create effective storybooks for environmental education purposes.
Story comprehension from Different Perspectives. Many storybooks display environmental problems from human standpoint via a human lead character. Readers are guided to learn the featuring environmental issues through the human character’s opinions and feelings. In this case, empathy and emotions aroused would probably point to the human character rather than the natural environment. In contrast, taking the perspective of a natural object is predicted to raise higher empathy for “nature” than taking human perspective. This idea is the foundation of OVS. For raising people’s awareness of their negative impacts on certain natural object, stories may adopt OVS approach to narrate the experience of the suffering natural object from its view. Readers are predicted to perceive those feelings of the object character, and further interpret that such way of human use on the object would lead to similar effects on natural objects in reality. Based on this comprehension, readers are expected to reflect on the way they use the referent natural object, and further get inspired to protect the object, mediated from the intention to protect the object character in the story.
In summary, for general people today, increasing emotional connection with nature, which would further improve pro-environmental attitudes, is an important matter of environmental education. Before successfully enhance the connection with nature, we propose to induce emotional connection with “natural objects” first, based on Berenguer’s findings (2007) that these emotions toward natural objects would mediate to the natural environment as a whole. To achieve this, storytelling of “an object’s experience” is
predicted to induce emotions toward the object due to perspective-taking. Hence, the concept of OVS and its construction method is developed.
1.3 Research Goal
The overall goal of this research is to develop a form of storytelling that narrates from an object’s view to enhance people’s emotional connection with the natural environment and further stimulate one’s changes in pro-environmental attitudes (including environmental awareness, responsibility, and values and beliefs). Objective View Story (OVS) is thus developed, which proposes using a personified object as the lead character to symbolize factual environmental issues from the object’s view. This reverse approach provides readers to examine human behaviors standing in the position of the environment. In brief, OVS is expected to achieve the following objectives: (1) to successfully transmit the featuring environmental issue content to readers by narrating from an object’s view, (2) to induce changes in environmental attitudes by arousing reader’s emotions toward the object character.
An audio picture book, entitled WaterBob, were created as a practice of OVS, and was used to investigate the effects of OVS, and this approach is wished to be applied to more environmental topics in the future, becoming a reference of story design for environmental education for general people.
1.4 Research Questions
Based on the objectives of an OVS, the following research questions are set to verify its effects in comprehension and attitude changes regarding environmental issues:
Q1: Do readers realize the environmental issue content through OVS?
Q2: Does OVS induce environmental attitude changes?
In Q1, we want to validate if the introduced OVS construction method works to create a story through which the readers are indeed able to comprehend the symbolized environmental issue. In Q2, we would like to verify one’s changes of environmental attitudes after reading OVS, regarding environmental awareness, responsibility, and values and beliefs.