NARRATIVE APPROACH TO PROMPT UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TO FEEL SYMPATHY FOR LOCAL RESIDENTS LIVING IN A FARMING VILLAGE

Less favored farming villages have been through fierce competitions to increase the local income to survive in Japan. Mogami town is located in mountainous area of north-east Japan. Rice farming in this area has been suffered from cool summer damage many times. Then farmers in Mogami town have challenged to introduce a new crop “asparagus” in these years after many twists and turns.

To educate fresh university students of agriculture about activities of local residents to revive their farming village, we write a nonfiction story after inquiring surveys about the sequence of events on introducing asparagus production in Mogami, which has just become Mogami’s special products.
The story of Mogami’s asparagus consists of sequential events: repeated cool summer damages in farming, a proposal of a new cultivation method by a researcher of agricultural techniques, the mayor’s objection to introducing asparagus, agricultural cooperative association’s negative attitudes, and some government employees’ cultivation against adverse circumstances supported by stock raising farmers.

Education effects are not only measured by students’ knowledge about the history of introducing asparagus or its production process, but their sympathy for residents who were involved in introducing and producing asparagus. We are focusing on the latter in the article and we arrange two methods for presenting the story. One is that students read silently sentences written down along the story in the classroom, and the other is that students listen to the player’s story telling. The player has many professional experiences of story telling with dialect words to children or persons with the interest.

As a result, we found that the latter presentation method would make students have more sympathy for residents in the story than the former, whereas the former might give much information to students and they could understand the story more.

Shifting to the point of view of students’ personal attitudes, sympathy to local residents is related to experience of enjoyment of listening to story telling in their childhood in both presenting methods and related to custom of reading novels. The level of understanding the contents of the story doesn’t relate to students’ sympathy.

Finally, to examine an alternation of students’ evaluation of Mogami’s asparagus after presenting the story, we inquired its reasonable price. Then we found that presention of the story made the price increase to the 110 % level, but the mechanism of increasing is largely different between the two methods in view of students’ experience of listening to storytelling, reading novels, and level of story understanding.