Qualitative Study of the Character Education as a New Approach to Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Background and Aim: Educating environmental Character influenced by environmental ethics targets attitude and behavior of the people, pragmatically, in a way that even the law may be affected by its lobbying. Thus, present study aimed to explain the determinants of environmental character education. Materials and Methods: In this qualitative study, main key words were searched in the internal and foreign databases for the purpose of obtaining the themes and determinants of environmental character education. Then, the content analysis of 45 research documents retrieved with a deductive approach was carried out. For this purpose, firstly, the determinants of character education and, in particular, environmental education, were extracted based on the view of each researcher. In the next step, the frequency of the determinants was calculated by SPSS software. Then, the conceptual model of the research was drawn up using the Nvivo software 10. Findings: The total number of determinants of the 45 environmental character education identified by researchers was 60 items. Some of the determinants were emphasized only by one researcher, such as: nature sanctity, strength, leadership skills, religiousness, identification, obedience, and intelligence. The most important determinants identified were respect (48.9%), fairness (42.2%), honesty (35.6%), compassion (33.4%), responsibility (33.4%), perseverance (26.7%), care (24.4%) and discipline (22.2%), empathy (20%), patience (20%). Conclusion: Changing our attitude to the environment, from commodity view to social view will change our behavior. Our model shows that Character Education founds a variety of positive attitudes and behaviors in favor of environment which ensure human well-being in life cycle. Please cite this article as: Abdollarash M, Seif MH, Shobeiri SM, Khaliliy M. Qualitative Study of the Character Education as a New Approach to Environmental Ethics. Bioethics Journal 2017; 7(26): 51-60.