Inquiry on Storytelling for the Web-Based Environmental Learning Environment

The purpose of this study is to investigate story telling-retelling as a learning strategy to facilitate meaningful learning on environmental education in web-based learning environments. Because story telling is a way of making meaning of the individual and social life, it can build a richer context so that learners can enhance environmental ethics through indirect experience. For the purpose this study develops a learning environment via computer networks, which enables learners to understand the natural world and to build environmental awareness with storytelling at the elementary level. It was designed for facilitating narrative inquiry with individual and collaborative learning through online activities. From the theoretical and practical review, this study suggests design strategies for building a cyber learning environment with story telling. Introduction There are some aspects of human experience that cannot be revealed with traditional scientific thinking, socalled logical exposition. Narrative inquiry has been considered as an alternative mode of thinking and learning. Narrative inquiry is a way of understanding, organizing and communicating experience as stories, lived and told. Within the inquiry field, we live out stories, tell stories of those experiences, and modify them by retelling and reliving them. Because stories form the intellectual and practical nourishment of oral cultures, and to the extent that our modern literate culture retains oral practices, narrative continues to play a vital role in teaching and learning (McEwan, and Egan, 1995). It is not just a manner of speaking but foundational to learning as a whole. Through storytelling individuals can learn to express themselves and make sense of the external world. Narrative inquiry, as a way of making sense of a human’s life and world, has been studied in various approaches. For example, Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to narrative inquiry as a research method to understand teachers’ knowledge and to enhance teaching abilities. They believe that experience happens narratively, so educational experience should be studied narratively. McEwan and Egan (1995) consider some implications of narrative in the practice of teaching and learning. Teachers can use narrative as fundamental to represent contents and to communicate with students . Students can use narrative as critical to express their thinking and learning, and to explore the connection between the self and the world. Storytelling as a particular form of narrative inquiry will bring to the fore special features of individuals ’ thinking that have tended to be somewhat neglected in more traditional studies . Storytelling has been considered as a mode of experience in a variety of academic areas, such as, arts, literature, and even science. When science attempts to understand the story of the universe, storytelling is one important way to recognize, interpret, and construct interaction between human and nature, especially for building environmental ethics. Nowadays many nations institutionalize regulations related to environmental conditions for the preservation of the natural environment. Some other efforts have also been made to enlighten people on environmental awareness and ethics. Historically environmental education spent an inordinate amount of time teaching facts and principles to memorize. This kind of learning is important for learners to understand environmental conditions, but if the learning is limited to only the fact learning, they can do little with science (Ellis, 2002). Beyond this, learners need to know how nature functions, and how it is related to human life. Storytelling can be a positive way to achieve this kind of learning. Based upon current educational trends, this study developed a cyber learning environment via the Internet and the world wide web, that enables learners to understand natural conditions, to articulate concepts and theories, and then to build environmental awareness with storytelling methods at the elementary level. In this study, the learning environment was designed for individual and collaborative learning through online activities. Teachers can be on-line tutors to support learning processes, and learners can be story-tellers to foster deeper understanding about the environment.