Korean elementary school students' perceptions of relationship with marine organisms

This exploratory study presents a snapshot of sixth grade Korean students’ previous experiences with, their awareness of connectedness to, and their perceptions of valuing marine organisms. The participating students, who were from middle class families living in the urban city of Seoul, demonstrated that they have limited experience with relatively small (but common) organisms such as sea lettuce, plankton, sea worm, and sea anemone. The students revealed a strong connectedness with fish and crab in particular, and their prominent perception of valuing each of these organisms was utilitarian. That is, the Korean students are generally connected to marine organisms through utilitarian perspectives and not through aesthetic perspectives.

This tendency can possibly be explained by the fact that their exposure to marine organisms in the dietary aspect of the culture is strongly utilitarian (i.e., frequently purchasing fish and crab at the supermarket and enjoying various kinds of seafood). The urban students’ relatively low aesthetic perspectives are likely to result from the lack of opportunities to appreciate the beauty of the wildlife in their natural settings. The students live in a heavily urban environment, often in high-rise residential towers, and their day to day lives as young cosmopolitan citizen in modern society is very disconnected from the natural environment. In an attempt to substitute for declines in direct encounters with wildlife in the natural habitats, modern urban society provides increasingly naturalistic exhibits and diverse educational programs at zoos and aquariums. However, the roles of marine aquariums in Korea are more focused on entertainment than education (Kim, 2012), which is likely to have limited impact on the development of the urban students’ aesthetic perspectives. As such, enhancing and emphasizing the role of aquariums as sites for marine environmental education, as they are in North America (Wagner, Becker, & Fulk, 2011), is very worthy of consideration to facilitate the urban students’ connectedness to and more balanced values of marine organisms.

Given that students’ attitudes toward living organisms are influenced by their beliefs, feelings, and experiences (Olson & Kendrick, 2008), educators should provide more balanced cognitive, affective, and behavioral experiences with marine plants and animals. Also developing a sense of connectedness to nature provides a base for developing environmental ethics and should be stressed in environmental education (Snively, 2007) to cultivate environmental literacy, defined by Roth (1992) as an “understanding of nature and interactions between human social systems and other natural systems” (p. 18). In this sense, facilitating awareness of connectedness to marine organisms is essential to increasing children’s ocean literacy, which is critical to establishing desirable human-nature relationships and ultimately a more sustainable understanding of and related advocacy for the Earth.

As this study was conducted with a limited number of urban school students in Korea, the outcomes may not be extrapolated entirely to other case contexts beyond Korea or urban centers but possibly to learners with similar cultural backgrounds. However, we anticipate that our findings may provide a starting point for additional studies and discussions on Asian students’ perceptions of, their connectedness to, and their values of the ocean realm and its inhabitants.