Sustainable Environment Education in Pre-School Pupils

Abstract

"Sustainable Environmental Education" at early ages is important for creating environmental awareness. When the content of current environmental education curriculums at schools in the North Cyprus is analyzed, it is seen that only the natural environment elements are covered. Whereas environment is divided into two that are natural and the built environment. Besides the recognition and protection of the natural environment, sustainable built elements play an important role. The aim of this study is to identify through measuring the deficiency of preschool children's level of awareness of "sustainable built environment". The study was administered to 134 five year-old preschool children at a private school in the city of Nicosia by using the qualitative approach. During the study, "Interviews" were arranged and 17 questions were asked to the children. The children's level of knowledge on "sustainable built environment" was measured through a pre-test. According to the results obtained, the children are familiar with natural elements such as the trees, animals and water around their environment but are not familiar with basic building elements or related sustainable systems such as wind turbine (25.37%), solar panels (13.43%) and green roof (8.20%). These results show us the the lack of "sustainable built environment education".

Investigation of The Existing Use of Campus Plants: The Case of Namık Kemal University (N.K.U.)

“…Harvey argued that learning environments that provide direct experiences with nature were essential for children, based on their learning habits in the natural environment (Castle, 1996; Cruz-Garcia, Caffi, Zans, & Sanchez-Choy, 2018; Malberg Dyg & Wistoft, 2018; Watkins, Teh, & Fernandez, 2019). Each natural element and phenomenon in nature that the child interact with were found to be effective in the development of relevant attitudes and behaviors (Ozburak, Batırbaygil, & Uzunoglu, 2018;Surbrook, 1997, Yılmaz et al, 2020. While the use of natural plant species is encouraged in other countries, the use of foreign domestic plants is increasing in our country (Corbacı et al, 2019).…”

“…Particularly, use of plants is less prone to ethical problems, therefore, it could contribute to the perception of natural environment and science concepts Sass & Sullivan, 2019;Taşkın, 2005). Similarly, natural environment education provided in preschool could help children to understand their natural environment better and develop a positive attitude towards it (Erdem, 2018;Jansson, Mårtensson, & Gunnarsson, 2018;Ozburak et al, 2018;Smith, 2001).…”