The Current Status of Forest Education in K-10 School Levels and Recommendations for the Future Innovative Approach

유치원과 초.중등학교 교과서 내 산림 교육 현황 및 개선 방안

As an effort to realize the results of last two years of study, this study had three distinguished purposes: 1) confirming whether some requests for corrections had been accepted or not 2) making a list of possible errors found in newly written textbooks and asking to fix them, and 3) classifying forest related contents identified in the textbooks according to the 150 topics included in information material, so called Forest IQ 200. Among 94 errors associated trees, forest or forest education, only thirteen of them were found to be fixed according to the request made in previous study of 2008. Especially, most of the fixed errors were identified to be in natural and social science subject textbooks and nothing was found in art and language areas. Total of 1,320 forest related items were found in the textbooks at the level of kindergarten to 10th grade(freshman in highschool). Korean student was expect to have a chance to learn forest related items 1.64 times a week for 10 years(First to 10th grade). Analyzing 1,109 contents in terms of four topic areas of forest education, the forest culture area was found to have most content of 348 including painting and recreation. Some suggestions were made to make school forest education better, and publishing the forest textbook for elementary schools was one of them.