Investigating Turkish Pre-Service Primary Teachers' Environmental Moral Reasoning Patterns on Environmental Dilemmas

Introduction

Today we are living in a world where we are facing serious environmental problems. Human pressure on nature has accelerated the impact of climate change and its associated factors including desertification, deforestation, droughts, and water salinity (Karmaoui, 2019). Moreover, the demand for energy, food, water, and agricultural land has increased (Karmaoui, 2019; Minucci & Karmaoui, 2016). This high demand also threatens climate change adaptation strategies and sustainability efforts (Chelleri, Minucci, Ruiz & Karmaoui, 2014). The concept of ‘sustainability’ has become part of the environmental education agenda since the 1990s (Tilbury, 1995). The need of providing a balance between economic development and environmental conservation created a necessity of including sustainability in the environmental education agenda (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Another report ‘the Rio Earth Summit's Agenda 21 calls for promoting sustainable development through education (UN Conference on Environment and Development [UNCED], 1992). Consequently, sustainable development has become a guiding concept in environmental education (Bonnet, 1999).

While there is no commonly accepted definition of environmental education, it can be defined as providing means to the individuals to gain knowledge about the environment, to get essential skills and attitudes for protecting and improving the environment (North American Association for Environmental Education [NAAEE], 2004). Thus, environmental education can be assumed as a response to the effort of achieving environmental protection and improvement (Loughland, Reid, Walker & Petocz, 2003). Moreover, there is an ongoing effort to raise environmentally literate citizens who are informed about environmental problems and ready to make informed decisions (NAAEE, 2004). If so, this assumes teachers are already well equipped to raise future citizens and today’s students as environmentally literate by having the necessary understanding, skills, and attitudes towards the environment and environmental problems (Desjean-Perrotta, 2013). With this respect, higher education institutions that teachers are raised have gained importance. Higher education institutions are recognized as places where possible links between environmental awareness and learning opportunities for students are established (Tilbury, 2004). UNESCO also explicitly recognized the significant role of formal and higher education for providing means to establish sustainable development efforts. In this report, raising active and knowledgeable citizens who are informed in making decisions about complex, economic, social, and environmental issues is emphasized (UNESCO, 2002). On the other hand, making informed decisions require morality aspect (Sadler, 2004). Kortenkamp and Moore (2001) argue that environmental education exploring the relationship between humans and nature should include the morality aspect. Values and morality are considered to be important in environmental education (Tilbury, 1995). This is also consistent with Zeidler and Schafer’s (1984) findings which reported that that college students provided higher levels of moral reasoning on environmental issues. With this respect, moral reasoning comes to the fore.