Enhancing Ecoliteracy through Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Proverbs

Proverbs can be regarded as pithy axioms of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which can be useful for sustainability education. By using an exploratory sequential mixed method, we analyzed TEK and ecoliteracy components embedded in rain- and tree-related Korean traditional proverbs, and furthe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2017-07, Vol.9 (7), p.1182
Main Authors: Kim, GoWoon, Vaswani, Rahul, Kang, Wanmo, Nam, Miri, Lee, Dowon
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Axioms
Ecological monitoring
Education
Environmental education
Ethics
Native education
Observational learning
Rainfall
Students
Sustainability
Youth
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Summary:Proverbs can be regarded as pithy axioms of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which can be useful for sustainability education. By using an exploratory sequential mixed method, we analyzed TEK and ecoliteracy components embedded in rain- and tree-related Korean traditional proverbs, and further conducted a survey of university students to gauge their knowledge of the proverbs and draw correlations with their ecoliteracy. We classified 173 rain- and 117 tree-related traditional Korean proverbs and found that most of these were related to factual observations, such as ecological characteristics of tree species and the prediction of rainfall, which indicated people’s understanding of ecological processes and patterns. We also found that students tended to provide correct answers for questions related to TEK-based worldviews, ethics and values, which are important components of ecoliteracy, thereby indicating the usefulness of proverbs in delivering TEK-based worldviews, ethics, and values. Overall, our study reasons that the learning of TEK-related traditional proverbs can be meaningful for enhancing ecoliteracy among urban youth, particularly when this learning is complemented with field-based observational learning within integrated approaches for sustainability education.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su9071182