Study of Reflections on University Fieldwork Courses: The Characteristics of Learning Content of Students Who Visited Disaster-Affected Areas

While learning opportunities dealing with communities have been increasing in Japan in recent years, learning itself has not been subjected to significant analysis. In this study, we converted into text data the reflection sheets of a total of 1,305 students who were enrolled in the community fieldwork course required for all first-year students at Miyagi University, a public university, from 2017 to 2019, and used quantitative text analysis to analyze the data. The results suggested that the students acquired knowledge that could not be obtained from pre-learning by visiting the communities, encountering locals, and interviewing local company personnel. In particular, those who visited tsunami-affected municipalities along the coast came into contact with the realities of tsunami damage and manifested discoveries with regard to the community’s activities before and after the disaster, such as the residents’ daily lives and industries.