Turkish geography prospective teachers perspective and attitude of sustainable development

Abstract

Today, sustainable development (SD) is an important topic on the worlds agenda guided by aspirations for sustainable future of societies, environments, resources and landscapes. Sustainable development was introduced into geography education in Turkey with the new geography curriculum in 2005. However, it has traditionally been a largely omitted topic in the Turkish educational context including pre-service teacher education programmes. Since geography prospective teachers will be responsible for teaching sustainable development under the new curriculum, it is important to find out their perceptions and what they have been given through pre-service programs concerning sustainable development. Through a questionnaire, this research explored the perceptions of geography prospective teachers and their pre-service experiences concerning sustainable development. The data were collected in 6 geography teacher education programmes (that is the total number of programmes in Turkey) with 122 final year geography prospective teachers. According to the findings, a relatively high number of respondents (30%) seemed to be unaware of the concept of sustainable development. As for the pre-service programmes, which covered a wide range of interrelated issues and dimensions of sustainable development concerns, the data indicate that they are not sufficiently covered in a balanced manner. Additional findings are also presented in details in this paper.