Beyond the Behaviorism Embedded in the Hungerford Approach

헝거포드 접근법의 행동주의를 넘어서

My responses to Kim Kyung-Ok's Critique on my critique on the Hungerford approach can be summarized as follows; First, it was argued that possible confusions and misunderstandings around the concept of behavior in REB were mainly caused by Hungerford himself who has used the word in several different ways, from a bunch of overt actions to almost all kinds of responses including cognitive skills, without any clear operational definition of it for more than 20 years. It seems to be needed for future users of the word, 'Behavior' to Prevent unnecessary confusions by providing their operational definition of it. Second, REB is too ambiguous to be a legitimate goal of environmental education and too outcome-oriented to be a meaningful measure for environmental education research. Anyone who accept REB as a goal of EE or a measure for research should clearly suggest procedures and criteria for judging the environmental responsibility of actions under consideration. Third, the Hungerford approach has begun by realizing the limit of a linear traditional behavior change system and has been evolving toward a complex model with dynamic interactions among/between cognitive variables and affective variables. However, it still has one-way structural orientation toward 'Behavior' with no feedbacks. Addition of some feedback processes would make the model more flexible and realistic. Finally, both the Hines model and the Hungeford model were established based on a series of behavioristic studies including three doctoral dissertations equiped with a list of actions which were prejudged to be environmentally responsible by the researchers, not by the learners. What they were primarily interested in was not how mind functions during the learning processes but how learners' behavior can be effectively changed. Considering uncertainty and complexity associated with environmental problems, a great deal of efforts ought to be made toward more context-based and less normative studies applying cognitive psychology and quantitative approaches.