Preschool Teachers' Metaphoric Perceptions of the Concept of "Environment": A Longitudinal Analysis

Abstract

The study attempts to identify the perceptions of preschool pre-service teachers who take the environmental education in early childhood course about the concept of the environment through metaphor analysis. A phenomenological design, one of the most common qualitative designs, was employed in the study. The study group consists of 70 pre-service teachers in the first measurement and 49 pre-service teachers in the final measurement, who took the environmental education in early childhood course in the third year of the education faculty of a public university in the Turkey in the 2021-2022 academic year. The study was designed as a longitudinal study since the data was administrated to the participants in two stages: before they began the early childhood environmental education course (first measurement) and after they completed it (second measurement). To assess the participants' metaphors for the concept of "environment", participants were asked to complete the sentence “I think the environment...... like, because.......”. Content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used to analyze the data. As a result of the research, it was determined that pre-school teacher candidates produced 48 metaphors in the first measurement and 34 metaphors in the second measurement for the concept of "environment". In the research, it was determined that the metaphors produced in the first measurement and the second measurement formed 19 categories and 12 of them were common. In the second measurement, different from the first measurement, the new categories created are 7 categories: obscurity, valuable, sensitivity, inclusive, coordination, guidance and responsibility.