This research is to develop activity worksheets helpful for making students accept historical sites and museums as places for history lessons and have field experiences in depth. The writer came to try to develop field activity sheets which can make p...
This research is to develop activity worksheets helpful for making students accept historical sites and museums as places for history lessons and have field experiences in depth. The writer came to try to develop field activity sheets which can make possible history lessons using story telling for fun and in-depth historic inquiries, particularly history lessons focusing on a certain historic figure’s life as a whole.
To begin with, this study searched into the literature concerning the significance and educational effectiveness of historical imagination and experience study models in order to look into the effect of history lessons using historic figures.
The writer selected Dasan, Jeong Yak-Yong already well known even by school children as historic character and researched the Museum of Silhak (located in Namyangju-si) and the historical sites of Dasan whose purpose is to provide their visitors with the opportunities of learning the abstract ideals of Silhak to try to develop field activity programs centering on historic persons that can be utilized at a variety of study sites including school classes.
The development of field activity programs focusing on historic characters is aimed at making school children break away from such stereo-typed history learning by remembering and memorizing history just as hardened “facts.” That is to say, as if listening to fun old stories, school children will have stronger interest in history, make more meaningful questions, and have experience going back to the historic person’s own period. To make school children use more diversified historical imagination based on such experiences as above is the excellence of history lessons through field experience activities focusing on a certain historic figure.
The field study program is devised for students to break away from their already known fixed ideas about Dasan, Jeong Yak-Yong and Silhak, have fresh viewpoints and look after ‘the true reasons of studying’ sought for by the Silhak scholars. As results of such explorations above, school children will experience ‘learning leading to living’ whereby the students themselves apply what they learned to their lives. Therefore, the field study sheets including well-designed questions, well-selected anecdotes about the historic figures, circulation planning, and the general questions are essential to field experience activities.
The overall learning activities and field experience sheets are divided into listening to and reacting to the anecdotes about the historical sites and the museums, answering to questions, doing critics about the museums, and follow-up activities.
Very vivid and graphic field experience activities that cannot be achieved merely through history text books or stories of historical heroes will be possible through the field activity sheets developed hereby. School children will be able to explore and remember Dasan, come to understand Silhak interpreted from Dasan’s point of view, and furthermore have the occasion to feel the difference from what the Museum of Silhak shows and tells them about Silhak even a little bit.
By using the field activity sheets developed hereby, the teachers and instructors as well will be able to conduct teaching and learning activities centered on school children’s learning by self-exploration and self-Q&A free from the tensions and stresses of historical site explanations and exhibition interpretation.
The method of learning history studied herein can be used and applied on the occasions of school children’s individual field trips to museums as well as at school classes, and it is expected to be further developed into the dimension of life-long education.
Key-words: historical imagination, historic figures, Dasan, Jeong Yak-Yong, the historical sites of Dasan, the Museum of Silhak