The Character Educators of Future: What Do They Know? What Do They Need?

Abstract

Providing the wholistic development of individual in terms of personal and psychological characteristics guiding our actions with educational processes forms “the character education”. Teachers as an important figure in this process should be aware of character education and what they are responsible for. To achieve this, teacher education should include the essentials of character education and prepare teachers for their inevitable role within their professional life. This study aimed to reveal what the pre-service primary school teachers know about character education and what their needs through their education for becoming a character educator are. The participants were pre-service teachers from primary school education department in Cukurova University. The data was collected with an open ended quesitonnaire and analyzed using content analysis. According to findings, it is obvious that pre-service teachers are mostly aware of the importance and content of character education and they see what their future roles are. They came up with many recommendations for teachers and teacher education. This study is thought to be beneficial in terms of revealing the situation within pre-service teachers regarding character education awareness and also helping teacher educators to see what pre-service teachers need to be efficient character educators. Keywords: Character education; pre-service teacher; teacher education