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To fight the stigma attached to wild animals, we designed an environmental education lesson for urban pupils to enhance their understanding of and to transform their perceptions of wild animals. To assess the outcomes of our lesson, we designed pre- and post-lesson drawing assessments based on qualitative research methods. We recruited 27 urban pupils from a public elementary school in Taipei city as participants. From the pre-lesson drawing assessment, we identified four types of stigma. We compared the participants' drawings before and after the lesson and constructed four types of destigmatized perceptions of wild animals. The reflection on stigma attached to wild animals and our subsequent practice of eliminating stigma may serve as a means of improving the human-wild animal relationship and enhance our conservation efforts in a posthuman perspective.

In this study, we assessed how 34 young adult participants in an environmental education (EE) program from 2011 to 2014 constructed their learning outcomes through interviews and the exploration of autobiographical memory functions (AMFs) regarding program experiences. We articulated a variety of directive, social, and self AMFs, including the achievement of the top five typical objectives of EE, increase in positive social norms through reminiscing and sharing memories, and attainment of diverse personal growth. We also constructed the relationship of these outcomes with the ultimate objective of EE. This method can presumably be used to emergently construct outcomes for evaluating emancipatory EE programs, which are on the request of tackling wicked environmental problems.

Nature‐based school field trips gained policy support from China governments. However, in a highly exam‐oriented education system, schools might be unwilling to implement such activities which they believe are merely fun journeys and useless for knowledge acquisition.We designed an experiential learning field trip to a local mangrove reserve for third graders and assessed how it changed their mental models about the mangrove ecosystem through pre‐ and post‐drawings.We analysed and scored the paired drawings through a rubric developed based on grounded theory coding procedures, used paired t‐tests to examine the changes, and qualitatively interpreted three example pairs from three groups divided by pre‐drawing scores. We deemed that participants' mental models improved, reflecting better knowledge about the mangrove ecosystem.We suggest that the notion of mental models of the environment is relevant to the needs of both formal schools and environmental organizations.By demonstrating a relatively successful nature‐based school field trip case involving pupils from China, we hope that formal schools of this country in the exam‐oriented educational context could utilize it as a justification and vicarious experience to participate in or implement such trips. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews a wide range of literature applicable to understanding why and how hobbyists learn. Of particular importance appear to be theories such as situated learning and communities of practice, but insights from the cognitive sciences related to expertise, motivation, and interest also emerged as important. The boundaries between formal and informal education continue to breakdown, making the need to understand and address the needs of learners of all ages, across multiple settings and situations more important than ever. Learning is becoming increasingly "on-demand", mediated by "colleagues" and initiated in order to solve learner-defined needs and interests (as opposed to the historical condition of prescribed, sequential curricula defined by nameless, faceless experts). Hobbyists afford learning researchers important opportunities to build a better understanding of interest-driven, persistent, contextually relevant, lifelong learning.

To fight the stigma attached to wild animals, we designed an environmental education lesson for urban pupils to enhance their understanding of and to transform their perceptions of wild animals. To assess the outcomes of our lesson, we designed pre- and post-lesson drawing assessments based on qualitative research methods. We recruited 27 urban pupils from a public elementary school in Taipei city as participants. From the pre-lesson drawing assessment, we identified four types of stigma. We compared the participants' drawings before and after the lesson and constructed four types of destigmatized perceptions of wild animals. The reflection on stigma attached to wild animals and our subsequent practice of eliminating stigma may serve as a means of improving the human-wild animal relationship and enhance our conservation efforts in a posthuman perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]