Characteristics of Educational Activities

Practical experience is the key word of the environment and disaster mitigation course. The followings are the characteristic activities of the course.

Lessons by the Guest Teachers

Many teachers are invited to school to talk about their experiences during and after the disaster. Teachers are from universities, police station, fire station, life-line related companies, the city government, the prefecture government, the volunteer organization and so on. Through this activity we hear the stories of the disaster, preserve them, and put them on the Home Page. Their precious stories make the students realize the importance of human lives and help to each other, which is the energy to facilitate the citizen-centered disaster mitigation.

Studies Outside of the School

The students visit the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute, Museum of Nature and Human Activities, Hokudan Cho Earthquake Memorial Park. They walk around the disaster area to interview the citizens. They stay one night two days at Kobe Fire Academy to learn the fundamental skills of extinguishing fires, rescuing people, and collecting information. They take part in the disaster mitigation training held by the prefecture, the city and the regional ward. They go to the Rokko Mountains to investigate the faults, the dangerous streams of debris flow, and the raised bed rivers, which were the causes of the floods in Kobe.

Problem Solving Study

While studying the disaster mitigation, the students are not only given lectures to get the knowledge but also given the problems, or they set the tasks by themselves and they solve them by the students themselves or by the cooperation with the other students. For example, in the study of "the disaster management of a virtual community", the students set the population, the industry and the geographic characters of the community, and made a "Disaster Management Manual". In another activity, the students study the relationship between some typical disasters which took place in Japan and the lows which were adopted after the disasters. They made a newspaper of the heavy floods in Kobe area and used this newspaper to teach the pupils in an elementary school. The aim of these activities is to have the students master the attitude and the technique of life-long education. Once the students master the cycle of the life-long education (see the chart 2), they can continue learning in their long life.

Computer Study

The students use the computers to make a report, to give a presentation, and to get information by internet. Through this activity the students master the fundamental skills of computers and gain necessary knowledge of the information society.

Disaster Mitigation Education with the Pupils of the Elementary School nearby

Maiko High School is in corporation with an elementary school to do the disaster mitigation education. The students make a regional map with the 3rd year pupils. We don't call this map "Hazard Map" but we call it "Safety Map" because we believe that people don't feel like living in the town full of dangerous information. On the other hand, they become serious to the disaster mitigation of the community if the map is full of the places they like and are proud of.

The students talk about their experiences of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster to the 4th and 6th year pupils. Miko High School students were 1st or 2nd year pupils those days. Their experiences were hard and tough and serious but they didn't have good vocabulary to express their experiences. Now they use the high school students' language to tell the experiences of the small children. To teach the mechanism of the earthquake and the importance of preparedness they use the "Wall Newspaper". To the 5th year pupils the high school students show the experiment of the flood and teach the history of the heavy flood in Kobe by the newspaper they made.

The pupils learn something about the disaster mitigation and they are sure to talk about what they learned at school to their family members at home. While listening to the children's story, the parents may be interested in the disaster mitigation and then, the regional disaster mitigation may start.

Events of Disaster Mitigation

Every January 17th a memorial event for the victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji disaster is held at Maiko High School. It will be held annually as the main event of Maiko High School. The purposes of the event are the collection, the arrangement and the transmission of the experiences of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster and the construction of the base center of the disaster mitigation education. "The record collection" is published. It will be used as the teaching materials of both Maiko High School and other schools. In addition, we would like to inform the world of the experiences of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster. The students of the environment and disaster mitigation course work as the staffs. They will be engaged in planning workshops, requesting lecturers, coordinating workshops, publishing record collections, and so on.

Schools must do the training of evacuation twice a year. The ordinary training are that after the fire alarm rings, the students evacuate to the school ground. The students seem less motivated and so they are not so serious in this training. At Maiko High School the conventional training of evacuation is changed into the new training with the disaster mitigation study at classroom or the lectures of disaster mitigation at school gym.

Presentation outside of the School

The teachers and the students are often invited to the seminars or the workshops outside of the school. We utilize these opportunity for both the advertisement of the course and the spread of the disaster mitigation education.

International Exchange with Nepal

NSET-Nepal helped us a lot to send the students of Maiko High School to let them have the international exchange with the students in Nepal. We learned a lot from the experiences staying in the rural part of Nepal, talking with the children, the teachers and the villagers. NSET-Nepal also gave us good opportunity to learn the school safety program they are doing in Nepal. What they are doing in Nepal is, in short, the construction of the culture of disaster mitigation. One of our lessons of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster is the importance of the citizen-centered disaster mitigation. We found the similarity in both activities.

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