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Ethics education has always been highly prized in our country. While the Grade 1-9 Curriculum emphasizes the integration of ethics education into the other learning areas, it is instead ignored and yielded to core curriculum. Accordingly in 2004 the Ministry of Education issued the “promotion project for character education,” and in 2009 President Ma Ying-jeou proclaimed that the government would launch the “Virtuous Taiwan” campaign. Moral education was therefore revalued. On the other hand, the long-established teaching methods of “core ethical values” have been antiquated, whose traditional cram teaching makes the values easier said than done for students. As a result, ethics are nothing but a slogan, unable to be immersed into students, nor can they involve students in practicing them in everyday life. Based on “experiential learning”, this study applies “experiential education” to research and develop teaching program of character education, and has it be integrated into civics course. With both “respect and concern” and “rational communication”, two civic virtues, as the study index, and through action research, this research examines the learning effects of character education, centering on experiential education, on promoting the two civic virtues of junior high school students. The test subjects of this research are from two groups of students: one is Grade 801 as experimental group and the other Grade 804 as control group. The students in the experimental group are taught with the program of experiential education and instructed by the author, while the students in the control group are taught routinely, and participate the activities of the schoolwide character themes. During the research, I gather study journals, students’ study information, and interview records, and then, according to my study questions, classify, order and analyze them. The results of this research are as follows: Ⅰ、The“respect and concern”program helps students understand themselves better, care for others actively, help the inferior, and show empathy for others. Ⅱ、The“rational communication”program helps students understand the importance of managing emotions, learn listening, and agree to disagree by discussing rationally. Ⅲ、The experiential teaching program is specially designed to meet the class traits, which helps to build class unity and improve class atmosphere. Ⅳ、The experiential teaching activities are close to students’ lives, fun, and helpful to increase the students’ motivation to study. Ⅴ、The experiential teaching places emphasis on careful reflection and on learning from direct experience, makes the learners impressive, and can incorporate what they learn into their lives.
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