Teacher candidates' perception level of environmental pollutant and their risk factors

It is generally accepted that the environmental education deals with a wide range of environmental experiences, methods and processes. Teaching the subject of the environment should not be considered as an easy task. It should not only cover pure ecology education; but also include the citizenship responsibilities and the problems that are sourced from other interdisciplinary factors. Therefore teachers should have the responsibility to facilitate environmental issues. Hitherto no researcher has undertaken a comprehensive study that focuses on environmental education in teacher training programs. This study aims to detect basic environmental knowledge of Turkish teacher candidate at the onset of their studies. This study has been conducted during in the fall of 2007 with a heterogeneous group of 248 teacher candidates from Education Faculty in Turkey, 82 students chosen from randomly from biology, science and 84 students from classroom teacher departments. To detect respondents' basic knowledge about environmental pollutants we administrated the questionnaire during the 1st month of their last academic year. The results found in this research have shown that teacher candidates possess less pro environmental knowledge. An interpretation of these results is that the teacher candidates do not fully comprehend the underlying ecological and environmental concepts related to environmental issues. Therefore, the design of pre service programs should take into account the characteristic of the student population which are the outcome of their social, cultural, and physical environments, and include all the necessary components for adequately preparing future educators to effectively address the environmental education of their future students. This may reflect into pupils' attitudes during teaching process in primary and secondary schools. Copyright © 2009 IJESE.