Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
World Environmental Education Congress (WEEC), Praha, Çek Cumhuriyeti, 14 - 18 Mart 2022, ss.1
Introduction: In a global
crisis that the world fed up with all uncertainities due to COVID-19, young
people are also affected from the brutality of pandemic with several lockdowns
and restrictions. In this sense, the aim of this study is to explore how middle
school students associate COVID-19 pandemic with humans’ interaction with
nature to be able to adjust educational purposes in such an uncertain and
anthropocene world. Thus, the following research question guided the study.
Research Question: How do
middle school students relate COVID-19 pandemic with humans’ relationship with
nature?
Methodology: A qualitative
case study design was used for this specified purpose. Data were collected from middle
school students through semi-structured interviews who live in a city center in
Turkey.
Findings: The results of
content analyses revealed that students viewed COVID-19 pandemic as a time
interval that would allow nature to renew itself in the absence of human
beings. Furthermore, they emphasized how pandemic has created an environment
for the welfare of animals by highlighting the possible decrease in hunting and
increase in biodiversity. Some students thought that nature took its revenge on
humans with the COVID-19, because people despised nature until this time with
deforestation, illegal hunting and trades of animals and exotic animal markets.
Conclusion &
Recommendations: These findings denoted that students are able to associate
pandemic with the humans’ interaction with nature by emphasizing the specific environmental
problems that humans lead. At this
point, in order students to be able to make deeper associations between
multidimensional global crisis like pandemics and humans’ interaction with
nature and to make them think comprehensively, subjects such as reasons of emergence
of pandemics and its relation with environmental problems should be included in
curricula to show students how humans impact on planet and how these systems
are linked with each other from multiple aspects.
Keywords: COVID-19, human-nature relationship,
middle-school students