Turkish Student Science Teachers' Conceptions of Sustainable Development: A phenomenography

Abstract

In creating a society whose citizens have sustainable lifestyles, education for sustainable development (ESD) plays a key role. However, the concept of sustainable development (SD) has developed independently from the input of educators; therefore, ESD presents current teachers with many challenges. At this point, understanding how stakeholders in the education sector (school students, student teachers, and teachers) view SD is of great importance. We selected a sample of 113 Turkish student science teachers from this body of stakeholders and distributed a questionnaire to them that included two separate sections. In the first section, questions regarding personal information such as gender, age, and year group were asked, whereas the meaning of SD was the focus of the second part. A phenomenographic approach was used to analyse student teachers' descriptions of SD. The results showed that student teachers had a variety of ideas about SD that could be collected under headings such as environment, technology, society, economy, politics, energy, and education. In addition, we thought that gender, context-based issues, and informal experiences might be responsible for the variety of the responses.