2.1 The Role of Emotional Connections in Environmental Education
The dominant approach of environmental education relying on increment of
“knowledge” has been found ineffective to drive pro-environmental behaviors (Kollmuss
& Agyeman, 2002). Rather, people’s beliefs, feelings, and experiences, regarding environment, are even more important factors than fact and knowledge to affect environmental attitudes (Pooley and O’Connor, 2000). Affective domain learning has therefore received more and more attention in environmental education. For the purpose of improving people’s connection to nature and thus stimulate their environmental awareness, i.e., “knowing of the impact of human behavior on the environment” defined by Kollmuss & Agyeman (2002), and willingness for pro-environmental actions, studies has emphasized the importance of emotional connections to the natural environment.
Emotions take a role in positive concern and behavior to the environment (Gifford, 2014).
As Hadzigeorgiou and Skoumios (2013) noted, students’ awareness of the natural environment is more likely raised as they perceive being involved with it. Lumber et al (2017) also suggests that emotional attachment should be one factor to focus for researchers interested in stimulating nature affinity and its associated advantages. Besides,
“empathy”, usually refers to comprehension of other people’s cognitive and affective mental states, is also considered an element of concern in strengthening one’s connection to natural environment when it comes to perspective-taking with “natural objects”.
Empathy for natural objects will increase helping behaviors and attitudes toward nature as a whole (Berenguer, 2007).
2.2 Storytelling as an Instructional Tool in Environmental Education
Research has shown that beliefs about numerous science topics, including environmental topics, may be affected through narratives (Dahlstrom and Ho, 2012).
Storytelling is based on a pedagogy in which distinctions between fact and fiction vanish (Hadzigeorgiou and Skoumios, 2013). Comparing to expository words, fictional narratives may be a more appropriate approach for science and environmental education because it’s more accessible, and more suitable for mediating human involvement with the world (Gough, 1993). For these reasons, storytelling is useful in instructions for non-experts for subjects including environmental education (Dahlstrom, 2014).
People reading a fiction appears to simulate social experience, both cognitive and emotional perception, illustrated the story (Mar et al, 2005). Stories provide the chances for readers to perceive effects similar as that of a real-world experience in cases that direct experience in the actual world is impossible. A reader sympathizes with the characters in the story to experience their encounters as if it was the reader’s own experience, through taking the perspective of the characters (Bal and Veltkamp, 2013). A fictitious experience is constructed in reader along the plot though projection on recognized character’s emotions and thoughts, which leads to an examination and reinterpretation on certain values (Kao, 2011) and thus appears possible to shifts one’s attitudes or viewpoints to the world. That story experience may become more realistic as real experience by transportation, i.e. the absorption in stories including emotional involvement and cognitive attention (Green and Brock, 2000). In the aspect of emotions, emotional perception will be affected by reading stories (Johnson, 2011). People is predicted to become more empathic when they are emotionally transported into a fiction based on transportation theory (Bal and Veltkamp, 2013). Bal and Veltkamp’s experiments found that empathic skills of readers who had read a fiction significantly changed over one week
and, in particular, higher emotional transportation results in greater enhancement in empathic skills. This conclusion appears to support the finding of Johnson (2011) that higher affective empathy for story characters was aroused in participants who were more transported into the story.
In sum, above studies are optimistic about the performance of storytelling as an educational method for enhancing people’s pro-environmental mentality. Since alienation of modern people from natural environment is considered one key to environmental damages (Pulkki et al., 2017), and that the loss of interactions with nature changes people’s emotions toward nature (inclusive of their affinity to, interest in, and love of nature) and even willingness for natural protection (Soga and Gaston, 2016), storytelling seems to play an important role in building people’s emotional connection to nature for its capability to fill the experience loss with nature. A crucial question would be that
“what kind of stories help raise environmental awareness?” (Hadzigeorgiou and Skoumios, 2013) when it comes to storytelling as a mean of environmental education. For enhancing environmental awareness, Hadzigeorgiou and Skoumios (2013) pointed that significance in relation to human life should be fully held in stories centering around nature issues.
2.3 Perspective-taking and Effects of Personification of Objects
Due to perspective-taking, readers fathom story characters’ thoughts, affection, and intentions reading a story to infer their actions and reactions (Bal and Veltkamp, 2013).
This effect of perspective-taking may also be applicable to characters of “objects”.
Rompay et al (2014) found in their experiments that people would generate abstract animated meanings for inanimate objects when they took the perspective of those objects and simulate their sensation. Moreover, “stimulating people to take an inside perspective in relation to designed objects (e.g., a car ad telling consumers to imagine driving the car) might contribute to the formation of an emotional connection” (Rompay et al, 2014).
Benefiting from perspective-taking, emotional attachments to nature may be built through the anthropomorphizing, i.e. personification, of nature (Lumber et al, 2017). Tam et al (2013) also suggests that a sense of connection will be initiated to the personified entity, and therefore motivates protective behavior to nature. In contrast, storytelling from human standpoint (via a human lead character), may guide readers to learn the issues content through projection on the human character, resulting in that feelings or empathy aroused would probably points to the human character rather than the displayed natural issue and environment. In conclusion, for environmental education purposes, storytelling using personified natural object as the lead character appears to be one probable approach to raise readers’ emotional connection with the environment, and even motivation of protection.
2.4 Summary
In summary, current challenges in water environmental education include people’s detachment with nature. In this case, emotional connection with nature is highlighted for improving people’s awareness of human impacts, sense of responsibility of water conservation, as well as desirable values and beliefs toward the water environment. Also, the affection aroused toward natural environment is proved possible to be transmitted from the emotions toward the natural objects involved. Furthermore, storytelling has been found a promising strategy in environmental education for not only its accessibility in content for general people, but also, regarding emotional arousal, its capability to create fictitious experience and emotional sensation in reader due to perspective-taking with story characters. Perspective-taking is also applicable to objects, so that emotions toward natural objects may be induced through reading storytelling with a natural object as the lead character, that is, a story from a natural object’s view. These researches contribute the idea of OVS: a story reflecting water environmental issues with a personified natural object as the lead character, guiding readers to comprehend the content from an object’s view. Readers are expected to produce emotion connection with the object character, thus the symbolized natural object character, and finally the whole natural environment.