Investigation of pre-service preschool teachers' understanding of ecology concepts

The aim of this study is to examine preschool teacher candidates' understanding of concepts related to ecology. Today, with the increase in environmental problems, ecological literacy is critical for individuals to understand their relationship with nature and to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. In this context, it is necessary to reveal how pre-service teachers perceive the concepts of ecology in order to increase the quality of environmental education practices. A case study, which is one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the study. The data were collected through the word association test and the drawing-writing technique. These techniques are effective methods in terms of revealing the mental models of individuals and analyzing conceptual connections. The study group of the research consists of 58 pre-service teachers enrolled in the Preschool Education program of Kastamonu University in the spring semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The data were analyzed through content analysis. The findings show that pre-service teachers' knowledge of ecological concepts is mostly superficial, and they perceive some basic concepts incompletely or incorrectly. In addition, although it is seen that some pre-service teachers include the nature-human relationship in their drawings, it has been observed that the vast majority of them do not take into account the human element and reflect the relationships between ecosystem elements in an incomplete and superficial way. The results of the research reveal that environmental education should be handled in a more holistic, applied and interaction-based manner with nature in preschool teacher training programs. In this context, it is recommended to diversify and increase the programs aimed at improving the ecological awareness of pre-service teachers.