• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.117-138
• /
• 2000

This study is, from the view point of constructive social studies which is the foundation of the 7th curriculum, to explore whether there is any viable program and to investigate it by which students, using photo resources in social studies, can organize their knowledge in the way of self-directed thinking. The main results are as follows: If it is a principle of knowledge construction process of constructive social studies that individual construction (cognitive construction) develops into communal construction(social construction) and yet communal construction develops itself, interacting with individual construction, it will be meet the objectives of social studies. In social studies, photos are a powerful communication tool. communicating with photos enables to invoke not only the visual aspects but also invisible aspects of social phenomena from photos. It, therefore, can help develop thinking power through inquiry learning, which is one of the emphasis of the 7th curriculum. Having analyzed photo resources appeared on the regional textbooks in elementary social studies, they have been appeared that even though the importance and amount of space photo resources occupy per page is big with regard to total resources, most of the photos failed to lad to self-directed thinking but just assistant material in stead. Besides, there appeared some problems with the title, variety, size, position, tone of color, visibility of the photos, and further with the combination of the photos. Developing of photo resources for constructive social studies is to overcome some problems inherent in current text books and to reflect the theoretical background of the 7th curriculum. To develop the sort of photo that can realize the point just mentioned, it would be highly preferable to provide photo database to facilitate study with homepage through web-based interaction. To take advantage of constructive photo resources, the instruction is strategized in four stages, intuition, conflict, accommodation, and equilibration stage. With the advancement of the era of image culture, curriculum developers are required to develop dynamic, multidimensional digital photos rather than static photos when develop text books.