Environmental literacy of teachers in initial training in Early childhood and Primary Education

Abstract

Citizenry's environmental literacy has become a necessity in view of the serious eco-social crisis in which we find ourselves. To achieve this, it is essential to train teachers at the basic levels of education so that they can guide science teaching towards awareness of the socioenvironmental problems of our world and promote responsible behaviour from a critical, reflective, active and resilient perspective. These behaviours should include individual and collective actions aimed at mitigating the problems, but also at fostering adaptation to a possible future context of degrowth. This work has two objectives: 1) To describe the environmental literacy of teachers in three dimensions: a) knowledge and skills, b) attitudes and emotions, and c) environmental behaviours; 2) To advance in the identification of possible trends in relation to these dimensions. Both objectives aim to propose an in-depth review of teacher training in order to address the challenges of improving the environmental literacy of future teachers. The Environmental Dimensions Questionnaire (EDQ) was used with 162 prospective early childhood and primary school future teachers. The statistical analysis carried out allows us to characterise the participants at an ecocentric level (medium level of environmental knowledge and behaviour and high level of attitudes) and to detect some trends in some of the dimensions studied.