Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Teachers have an important role in promoting environmental sustainability to their students. To train primary student teachers to teach sustainability, a ‘sustainability cluster’ of courses were conducted (introduction for sustainability, integrative teaching designing, computer integration in teaching, and practice teaching of integrative sustainable unite) in Oranim College of Education. This study explored the question does learning and teaching sustainability in the ‘sustainability cluster’ revile a change in students’ feeling about their knowledge and understanding of sustainability concept and environmental topics? Thirty-three primary student teachers in their second year participated in a pre-post intervention study that conducted in a mixed method. The subjective knowledge (i.e. what the participants feel they know) of 13 sustainability concepts and environmental topics was investigated with a close-ended and open-ended questionnaire. In the pre-test the students reported a low to moderate subjective knowledge that significantly raised in the post-test. However, the qualitative analysis revealed that the learning didn’t lead to deep understanding and part of the misconceptions remained stable. The improvement of subjective knowledge score after learning, provides the understanding that it is important to teach sustainability to all student teachers. In contrast to that, the findings of misconception in environmental topics and sustainability concept after learning, require seeking of teaching strategy that will lead to scientific understanding.