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All Content © Bushfire CRC 2007

Bushfire CRC > Education > Current Students - Research Projects > Program C Students > The socio-cognitive construction of bushfire risk

Briony Towers PhD, UTas

Educating Children About Bushfire Risk and Mitigation

The need to better educate the public about bushfire risk and mitigation has been recognised and schools have been identified as a major resource for pursuing this objective. However, effective utilisation of this resource requires consideration of two important issues. Firstly, as children develop, their perspectives on causality and prevention undergo systematic age-related changes. Secondly, children’s perspectives on causality and prevention are acquired through interaction with different elements of the social context - family, friends, and teachers - and the constituent influence of each element changes as children develop.

Research in a variety of areas, including health education and road safety education, has shown that when the content of a safety message is sensitive to age-related changes in perspective and the delivery of the message capitalises on the prevailing influence within the social context, the child’s ability to understand and assimilate that message is significantly enhanced and the adoption of preventative strategies increases.

This project will examine age-related changes in children’s understand of causality and prevention as applied to the bushfire context. It will also examine the role of parents, friends, and teachers in the development this understanding. The outcome will be a framework within which bushfire management agencies can design and deliver school-based bushfire education programs that accommodate age-related changes in children’s perspectives and capitalise on prevailing elements within their social context, thus increasing opportunities for understanding bushfire risk and, by extension, increasing the likelihood that mitigation strategies will be adopted.


Project Link: C4 Risk communication

Excerpt

Read an excerpt of the above video, reprinted from Fire Australia magazine, along with summaries of research by other Bushfire CRC PhD students here.

Briony Towers

Briony Towers 2

POSTERS

Briony Towers
Bushfire risk perception: Perspectives of children [pdf 154.4 kb]


Briony Towers, Doug Paton, Kevin Ronan
Educating children about bushfire risk management and mitigation. [pdf 93.3 kb]


Program C - Briony Towers.pdf
Children and Youth: An untapped resource in the development of resilient communities [pdf 236.1 kb]


What do children understand about bushfire risk?
Research Poster, Bushfire CRC / AFAC Conference, Hobart, September 2007 [pdf 87.5 kb]


Article

Read the article "Children's perceptions of bushfire risk" by Briony Towers, first published in the Spring 2008/09 edition of Fire Australia magazine, now posted online as one of many Bushfire CRC News Features.

Children - Picturev