Date

2011-09-19

Author

Güner, Zişan
Olgan, Refika
Çakıroğlu, Jale

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From past to today, environmental problems emerged due to many reasons and have deep influences on nature, various habitats and surely human beings. One of the major causes of these problems is human factor. Humans’ negative effec ts might be sourced from the lack of being sensitive and having positive attitudes towards environment. The environmental attitudes are laid in the foundation from early years (Evans, Brauchle, Haq, Stecker, Wong & Shapiro, 2007). Thus, providing environmental education for young children can have many contributions into their further lives. Therefore, teachers play an important role in order to enhance their awareness related to environmental issues. According to Sosu, McWilliam and Gray (2008), teachers’ perceptions of environmental education could also influence their teaching practices. At this point, this study aimed to describe preschool teachers’ perceptions of environmental education, their practices and experiences in environmental education in terms of methods of teaching, teaching activities, teaching and learning materials, assessment techniques, and possible external factors and their perceptions of the place of environmental education in curriculum from the aspects of subjects and concepts, goals and objectives, specific days and weeks. Findings are thought to be important to gain ideas about preschool teachers’ perceptions of and experiences in environmental education and to inform experts of this field to take an action towards the issue. Phenomenological approach was adopted for this study (Gall, Gall & Borg, 2003) with purposive sampling. Participants of the study were two preschool teachers of six year old children in a public kindergarten. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The pilot study was conducted with another preschool teacher in the same school in order to make sure whether preconstructed interview questions are clear and understandable for teachers. The findings indicated that the teachers have certain perceptions about environmental education in general. Their description of environmental education based on their perceptions about the goals of environmental education. Regarding its content, they generally focused on nature and its protection. One of them focused on environmental problems. They advocated that environmental education is necessary to support children’s development and learning. Their experiences in environmental education are similar in terms of teaching methods and assessment technique and varied in terms of learning materials. For instance, they mentioned that they frequently use observation as teaching method and assessment technique. Regarding learning materials, one of them stated that she uses materials based on observation such as magnifiers and another provided that she frequently used nature-related materials such as pine cone. They emphasized that some external factors such as unplanned events, weather conditions might influence their practices. However, they still found themselves insufficient in implementing environmental education activities. Both teachers perceived curriculum insufficient and not developmentally appropriate in supporting environmental education.

Subject Keywords

Preschool teacher, Perception, Environmental education

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/83068
https://www.academia.edu/2232622/Preschool_teachers_perceptions_of_environmental_education_WCNTSE_2011_

Collections

Department of Educational Sciences, Conference / Seminar