Changing stigma on wild animals: a qualitative assessment of urban pupils’ pre- and post-lesson drawings

Abstract

To fight the stigma attached to wild animals, we designed an environmental education lesson for urban pupils to enhance their understanding of and to transform their perceptions of wild animals. To assess the outcomes of our lesson, we designed pre- and post-lesson drawing assessments based on qualitative research methods. We recruited 27 urban pupils from a public elementary school in Taipei city as participants. From the pre-lesson drawing assessment, we identified four types of stigma. We compared the participants’ drawings before and after the lesson and constructed four types of destigmatized perceptions of wild animals. The reflection on stigma attached to wild animals and our subsequent practice of eliminating stigma may serve as a means of improving the human-wild animal relationship and enhance our conservation efforts in a posthuman perspective.

Keywords:

• Stigma
• wild animals
• drawing
• qualitative evaluation
• urban pupils

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participating pupils, as well as Mr. Han-Chung Chang and Mr. Guei-Bin Liu for providing help during the study, Mr. Ke-Heng Chen, Mr. Yu-Chia Chen, Ms. Hsuan-Hung Hua, Mr. Yung-Ching Chung, and Mr. Jung-Ching Chu for organizing the teaching group and implementing the lesson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The concept of ‘behavioral intention’ is focused on what a person plans to do in the future, whereas the meaning of ‘behavior’ insists on what a person has done. Since our participants had enacted their actual human-wild animal interactions by their drawings or enacted their conceived human-wild animal interactions in their drawings, rather than drew behaviors that they planned to perform in the future, we assume that these interactions are behaviors rather than behavioral intentions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Grant 108-2511-H-002-014-.

Notes on contributors

Meng Wu

Meng Wu (M.Sc.) is a Ph.D. student at School of Forestry and Resource Conservation, National Taiwan University. His research focuses on designing and evaluating environmental education programs.

Tzu-Chi Yuan

Tzu-Chi Yuan is an undergraduate student at Department of Entomology, National Taiwan University. Her research interests include entomology, arachnology, and environmental education.

Chi-Chang Liu

Chi-Chang Liu (Ph.D.) is an Assistant Professor at School of Forestry and Resource Conservation, National Taiwan University. His research focuses on learning motivations, processes, and outcomes in diverse environmental education programs.