The effect of common knowledge construction model applications ın climate justice teaching on students' awareness of environmental ethics and their opinions towards climate justice

As climate crises increase, natural balances are disrupted and the impacts of climate crises affect all countries of the world in different ways. The unfair situation between countries, between causing climate crises and being affected by climate crises has led societies to search for climatic justice. Ethical and just decisions to be taken for climate crises can only be put forward by individuals with climate justice awareness. For this reason, it is important for individuals to receive climatic justice education. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of course contents structured using the common knowledge construction model on students' environmental ethics awareness and climatic justice views. The research was conducted with 6th grade students studying in a public secondary school in Pamukkale district of Denizli province in the second academic semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. Within the scope of the research, there were 20 students in the pilot application group and 20 students in the main application group. Within the scope of this research, qualitative and quantitative data were collected and mixed method was used. As quantitative data, the Environmental Ethics Awareness scale developed by Özer and Keleş (2015) was applied as a pre-test and post-test, and then analyzed with SPSS 27 package program. The qualitative data part of the study consisted of the Climatic Justice Opinion Form consisting of open-ended questions and created by the researchers, and the activity sheets, brochures and application videos for the course obtained from the in-class activities. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. As a result of the research, it was seen that the climatic justice education course contents created using the common knowledge construction model had a positive effect on students' environmental ethics awareness and climatic justice views. The results of the research show that the environmental ethics awareness of individuals who receive climatic justice education has increased and their conceptual awareness of environmental ethics has improved. In addition, the research can be seen to positively affect the awareness of students about what should be done to prevent ethical problems by increasing their awareness of the reason for the emergence of environmental ethics. At the same time, climate justice education positively affected students' views on intra-generational and intergenerational justice, and raised their awareness in these two dimensions.