Pre-Service Teachers’ Ethical Reasoning about Climate Ethics and Climate Justice

Abstract

The climate crisis is an ethical issue besides being an environmental problem. Therefore, examining pre-service teachers’ ethical reasoning about climate change is crucial since they will educate future global citizens. To achieve this aim, this study probed into pre-service teachers’ reasoning on climate ethics and climate justice by asking them to answer the questions in two different reflections. The participants of the current study were 31 pre-service teachers (10 males, 21 females) who study in the English Language Teaching Program at the Faculty of Education at a private university in Turkey. In the 1st reflection, they identified and justified ethical issues regarding climate change and discuss how they could teach them in their class. The 2nd reflection asked them to discuss climate justice and design an instruction to teach climate justice by using a story and a game. The results suggest identifying and naming the ethical issue as climate justice and asking pre-service teachers to design teaching on stories and games in a structured way to facilitate ethical reasoning.