Effects of Contextual Factors on ESD in Teacher Education

Abstract

Education for sustainable development (ESD) guides and empowers educators to reshape their thinking style and move towards a sustainable future. It has attracted a lot of attention and been studied in different perspectives. However, contextual factors have not been studied in relation to sustainable development for teacher education. Therefore, this study aims to find out the possible effects of changing contextual factors on preservice and in-service teachers in terms of sustainable education for their profession. For this purpose, 267 pre-service teachers from four different universities and 50 inservice teachers from 15 different cities participated in the study. Out of 317 participants, 245 stated that contextual factors influence their teaching habits adversely, while 54 reported that they ignored the outer factors. In light of the data gathered, it can be said that the participant teachers were mostly pessimistic about the effect of contextual differences on ESD. Based upon participant statements, a new theory emerged. According to this theory, there are personal (P), institutional (I), stakeholder-related (S), environmental (E) and training-related (T) factors which positively and/or negatively influence ESD in teacher education. In this regard, the new theory was formed with the first letters of the related factors and called P.I.S.E.T. These findings suggest that pre-service teachers should be exposed to various school settings during their practicum and inservice teachers should receive context-related support from the stakeholders to enhance their professional skills and act in line with the principles of ESD.

Do Pre-service Teachers Dance with Wolves? Subject-Specific Teacher Professional Development in A Recent Biodiversity Conservation Issue

“…While learners should always reflect on their experiences and value structure none of these affective experiences are by any means a silver bullet to foster deeper personality change in pre-service and in-service teachers. Like the effect of psychological distance in our study showed, motivation and also learning are contextually bound processes [32]. Therefore, teacher professional development should reflect this and look for specificity instead of general recipes in teacher education.…”

“…This is also the first result with a positive link between a contextual motivation to protect a species and a specific teaching relevant variable. Such personal contextual factors have been suggested as influences of teacher behaviour in ESD [32] but have only scarcely been investigated in prior studies. Moreover, our findings close a gap in prior research, as other studies either concentrated on teacher's protection motivation towards species or on teaching about the species but only few studies investigated the relation between these two perspectives.…”

Sustainable Development in Teacher Education in Terms of Being Solution Oriented and Self-Efficacy

“…The results showed that the students of the Faculty of Agriculture gave more importance to the environment factor, while the students of the Department of Psychology gave more importance to the social aspect of the subject. These findings indicate that students who study agriculture have a pro-environmental attitude while psychology students are more aware of social issues [56]. Based on these findings, a difference can also be expected among prospective teachers of different branches (such as science teacher, social studies teacher) in our country.…”

Lærerstuderendes forestillinger om bæredygtighed og Uddannelse for Bæredygtig Udvikling (UBU)

“…Dette kan siges at vaere problematisk, da der i den internationale forskningslitteratur tydeligt peges på, at grundig forberedelse er nødvendig. Ifølge Evans (2020) er baeredygtighed i laereruddannelsen "a term that is heavily tossed around and often misrepresented" (s. 818), og flere studier viser, at det er udfordrende at få skabt ordentlig UBU-undervisning (Evans, 2019;Mogren & Gericke 2017;Atmaca, 2017), og at det at gennemføre UBU-undervisning kraever saerlige kompetencer og et saerligt engagement, som må forberedes på laereruddannelsen (Frisk og Larson, 2011;Bürgener & Barth 2018).…”