Educating preservice teachers in sustainability: Conceptions, values and attitudes of students and lecturers at the university

Abstract

The university has the ethical, academic, and peremptory responsibility to train education students and future trainers in sustainability. It is also something that lecturers must be prepared to address. Through a pretest-posttest study, we analyze which sustainability values and attitudes preservice teacher acquire when they work with activities on sustainability. A total of 359 students completed the process. At the same time, we analyze the attitudes and knowledge held by the lecturers who carry out these activities in sustainability education. The findings regarding the difficulty students have in integrating the various aspects of sustainability are discussed, as well as the gaps and resistance of the lecturers who design and develop such processes. Future research could be designed in such a way that causal relationships could be established between the type of instructional design, the results obtained, and the conceptions and beliefs of lecturers regarding sustainability.