Social studies preservice teachers opinions and attitudes towards environmental education

Thanks to social studies, which mainly includes citizenship education, individuals who are sensitive and responsible for the environment can be educated. Developing a positive attitude and behavior towards the environment can be achieved through the training provided. The attitudes and opinions of teacher candidates, who will be the teachers of the future and who will train effective citizens, about the environment constitute a step in terms of environmental education competence. The research was created using the convergent parallel design method, which is one of the mixed methods in which quantitative and qualitative data collection methods are used together. For the quantitative data, the sample of the study consists of 225 teacher candidates studying in the Social Studies Education Department of the 2019-2020 academic year. For the qualitative data, the working group of the research consists of a total of 8 teacher candidates selected on a voluntary basis, one male and one female from each grade level, studying at the Department of Social Studies Education in the 2019-2020 academic year at Akdeniz University. In the quantitative part of the research, the scale of affective tendencies towards the environment in obtaining the data; In the qualitative part, a semi-structured interview form was used in order to reveal the opinions of teacher candidates about environmental education. The analysis of the quantitative data was done with the SPSS 22.00 package program, and the analysis of the qualitative data was made using content analysis. In the study, it was found that social studies teacher candidates' affective tendencies towards environment are at a good level; It has been determined that the affective tendencies of pre-service teachers show a difference in favor of female teacher candidates and those who are interested in the environment.