Lesson Practice of “Easing dilemmas” and Critical Realism: New Pedagogy Drawn from Disaster Prevention Education

<p> In terms of pedagogical problems in a rapidly changing world, including standardization, scientific rationalism or instrumentalism and the interdisciplinary approach as a background, the paper focuses on one form of lesson practice and explores the possibility of establishing a pedagogy that can work together with indeterminacy or uncertainty by grasping its significance and originality based on philosophical resources from critical realism as its framework. A series of lessons, collectively entitled “Easing dilemmas,” has been originally designed as part of disaster prevention education. It aims to foster students' attitudes toward living together with nature beyond human knowledge in a disaster prevention education program by collaborating with others and using the necessary and available knowledge and technological resources to face the indeterminate reality that may be unbearable to deal with in the ordinary way due to its complicatedly entangled underlying factors.</p><p> Critical realism was originated and established by Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). This idea has been inaugurated as a realist scientific philosophy and then developed and extended toward a philosophy of social science, practical philosophy and ethics, and interdisciplinarity. The researchers applied critical realism to interpret lessons of “Easing dilemmas.” Critical realism was used because it interprets social phenomena as structured with multiple layers, being emergent, and complex with various causal structures and mechanisms: all common properties of a dilemma.</p><p> Following the problem statement in the introductory section, the second section highlights the interpretation of the outline of critical realism and the three frameworks used as interpretive tools to grasp “Easing dilemmas” lesson practices: basic critical realism (BCR), the transformational model of education for sustainable development (TMESD), and the MELD scheme. In the third section, the researchers reported the details of lesson practices in “Easing dilemmas” and showcased comments from students and teachers. In the fourth section, they explained how the lesson was designed in association with related previous works. Finally, in the fifth section, the researchers interpreted the results based on BCR, TMESD, and the MELD scheme.</p><p> The results revealed three characteristics of lesson practice of “Easing dilemmas.” First, from the perspective of BCR, “Easing dilemmas” was found to be a practice based on the indeterminacy or uncertainty of reality as its premise. Second, the thinking process in practice brings about metacognition, as it can be likened to the three learning processes that compose TMESD. Third, from the perspective of the MELD scheme, the possibility that the practice itself can be taken as a social practice was revealed. Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that what opens up the arena of the practice like “Easing dilemmas” will precisely become the new pedagogy that may serve as a discipline that gets to the heart of complicated and difficult reality.</p>