Post Earthquake Volunteer Learning That Build Up Caring Learning Communities

From a perspective of moral education, this study has
examined the experiences of a group of college students who
volunteered in disaster areas after the magnitude 9.0 Earthquake,
which struck the Northeastern region of Japan in March, 2011. The
research, utilizing the method of grounded theory, has uncovered that
most of the students have gone through positive changes in their
development of moral and social characters, such as attaining deeper
sense of empathy and caring personalities. The study expresses, in
identifying the nature of those transformations, that the importance of
volunteer work should strongly be recognized by the colleges and
universities in Japan, in fulfilling their public responsibility of creating
and building learning communities that are responsible and caring.

• Naoki Okamura

• Moral development
• moral education
• service learning
• volunteer learning.

[1] Michel Quinn Patton, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods.
Thousand Oaks, California, Sage Publications, Inc., 2002, pp.124-127.
[2] Patton. p.235.
[3] Ibid., p.342.
[4] Ibid., pp.555–566.
[5] David Gerard,“What Makes a Volunteer?”New Society 8, 1985, pp.
236–38., Penner, Louis A. and Marcia A. Finkelstein. “Dispositional and
Structural Determinants of Volunteerism.” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 74-2, 1998, p.525–37.
[6] Thoits, Peggy A. and Hewitt, Lyndi N.,“Volunteer Work and Well-Being”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior. vol. 42, June, 2001, pp.115–31.
[7] Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian,“Converting: Stages of
Religious Change,” in Religious Conversion, Christopher Lamb & M.
Darrol Bryant, Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and
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[8] Ibid., p.26.
[9] James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith.San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
[10] Ibid.
[11] John Rietschlin, “Voluntary Association Membership and Psychological
Distress.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 39, 1998, pp. 348–55.
[12] Van Willigen, Marieke. 1998. “Doing Good, Feeling Better: The Effect of
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presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological
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[13] Thoits, Peggy A. and Hewitt, Lyndi N.,“Volunteer Work and Well-Being”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior. vol 42, June, 2001, p.118.