Examining the relationship between preschool teachers'critical thinking tendencies and environmental ethics awareness

Preschool years are a period when children's attitudes and awareness begin to develop. Many environmentally related activities are carried out in pre-school education institutions under different types of activities. Preschool teachers are in a very important position as the preparers of these activities and programs. Preschool teachers' ethical awareness of the environment has the potential to affect their perception and presentation. It is thought that having and using critical thinking skills will be important in developing ethical awareness towards the environment. This study was designed with a quantitative design to examine the relationship between preschool teachers' critical thinking tendencies and their awareness of environmental ethics. In the study, which was planned as a relational survey model, 312 teachers working in the central districts of Adana province were reached by using the easily accessible and snowball sampling method. The data were collected voluntarily in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. Personal Information Form, Critical Thinking Tendencies Scale and Environmental Ethics Awareness Scale were used as data collection tools. All data of the study were transferred to the SPSS 22.0 program, outliers were screened, normality analysis was performed and 296 data were processed. As a result of the correlation and regression analyses, it was concluded that there was a significant positive relationship between preschool teachers' critical thinking tendencies and environmental ethics awareness and that teachers' critical thinking tendencies predicted their environmental ethics awareness. These findings were interpreted and discussed by taking into consideration the literature. Key Words: Critical thinking tendency, environmental ethics, environmental ethics awareness, preschool teacher.