Investigation of the relationships between individual innovation and sustainable education beliefs

Abstract

The concept of sustainable education has seven main features: being holistic and interdisciplinary, focusing on values, directing to critical thinking and problem solving, requiring the use of multiple teaching methods, encouraging participatory decision-making, highlighting applicability and locality. The knowledge and beliefs of the people, who will start teaching as a vocation, have an important role for both teachers and students in terms of being in an innovative understanding and attitude. Describing the attitudes of prospective teachers with the potential to raise future generations is important for reviewing teacher training policies. For this purpose, two scales were used in the study. The first one, "The Beliefs for Sustainable Development Education Scale", consists of 32 items and three sub-factors. The other is the "Individual Innovation Scale"; this 20-item 5-point Likert scale has five sub-dimensions as Innovative, Pioneer, Questioner, Sceptic, and Traditionalist. The data obtained were subjected to correlation and regression statistics and discussed in the light of literature. All in all, it can be seen that there are significant relationships between personal innovativeness and the dimensions of sustainable development education. According to findings, it was observed that as long as the willingness and openness-to-experience of teacher candidates' taking risk increases in the context of personal innovativeness, their beliefs regarding sustainable development increase concordantly. Teacher candidates can resist change with the concern over whether the current knowledge and efforts will be valuable in the new situation afterwards.