| Blazer to the Rescue! The role of puppetry in enhancing fire prevention and preparedness for young children (2006) | |||||||||||||||
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| Public education has repeatedly been shown as a cost-effective means to reduce the cost and impact of hazardous events on human lives. There is considerable overseas literature on the educational value of puppet-mediated educational intervention in public safety programs. However, effective and useful formal evaluation of its use in the context of fire safety education was found to be very limited internationally and reports of Australian experience of these kinds of interventions are negligible. This paper reports on a 12 month research study, funded by Emergency Management Australia, through its 2002 Grant in Aid scheme (Project 12/2002). The study was of a fire safety educational puppet show based on the Year 1 Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS) Fire Ed program, and presented to early childhood students (P - 3) in Queensland. An independent evaluator attended all the performances to observe the students' reactions. He then accompanied them to their classrooms after the performance to discuss their reactions and returned four to six weeks later to discuss fire safety with the students and to assess the impact of the performance on their longer-term understanding of fire safety issues. The study found that the puppetry performance served to enhance student knowledge of fire safety by providing new knowledge, reinforcing previously learned knowledge and providing a new context in which they could rehearse their knowledge. The study also emphasised the importance of humour in teaching students about potentially disastrous situations. A serendipitous finding was that while younger students (those in pre-school and years one and two) focused primarily on the fire safety message, by Year 3, many students considered that they `knew it all' and expressed greater interes in the medium of puppetry than in the fire safety message. From this it was concluded that while constant reinforcement of safety messages is essential, we must guard against `fire safety fatigue' that may lead to complacency. | |||||||||||||||
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