Investigation of the Relationships between Individual Innovation and Sustainable Education Beliefs

Sukru Ada

doi:10.3390/su12020447

Abstract

The concept of sustainable education has seven main features: being holistic and interdisciplinary, focusing on values, directing to critical thinking and problem solving, requiring the use of multiple teaching methods, encouraging participatory decision-making, highlighting applicability and locality. The knowledge and beliefs of the people, who will start teaching as a vocation, have an important role for both teachers and students in terms of being in an innovative understanding and attitude. Describing the attitudes of prospective teachers with the potential to raise future generations is important for reviewing teacher training policies. For this purpose, two scales were used in the study. The first one, “The Beliefs for Sustainable Development Education Scale”, consists of 32 items and three sub-factors. The other is the “Individual Innovation Scale”; this 20-item 5-point Likert scale has five sub-dimensions as Innovative, Pioneer, Questioner, Sceptic, and Traditionalist. The data obtained were subjected to correlation and regression statistics and discussed in the light of literature. All in all, it can be seen that there are significant relationships between personal innovativeness and the dimensions of sustainable development education. According to findings, it was observed that as long as the willingness and openness-to-experience of teacher candidates’ taking risk increases in the context of personal innovativeness, their beliefs regarding sustainable development increase concordantly. Teacher candidates can resist change with the concern over whether the current knowledge and efforts will be valuable in the new situation afterwards.

Highlights

Sustainable development arose from the need to leave places to live to the generations because of the rapid consumption of natural resources and the increased damage to the environment brought by the economy that developed after the Industrial Revolution
Countries worldwide do not see the gradual damage to humans and the environment brought by the manufacturing age, in the beginning of the 21st century, they formulated objectives to make the public welfare of the present generation and generations sustainable in terms of the economy and the environment with the question, what kind of a world do we want? The objectives are to eradicate hunger and poverty, reach universal fundamental education, support equality for women and men, decrease the number of infant deaths, improve maternal health, fight contagious diseases, ensure universal sustainability, and cooperate for development [4]
This research was carried out with 527 participants, 342 women and 185 men, who were studying at an education facility and responded appropriately to the questions in the data gathering tools used within the scope of the research

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable development arose from the need to leave places to live to the generations because of the rapid consumption of natural resources and the increased damage to the environment brought by the economy that developed after the Industrial Revolution. In this context; UNESCO has prioritized sustainability ideas and actions [1]. For this purpose, at the Johannesburg United Nations summit of 2002, the years 2005–2014 were declared as a sustainable development-oriented education period [2,4,11,12,13]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion