Environmental literacy of bachelor of education (B.Ed.) students in Hong Kong

Abstract

Along with the increasing complexity of environmental problems facing our world, there is a pressing need to improve people’s environmental literacy (EL) in order to move towards sustainability, and environmental education (EE) has been widely recognized as a promising tool that could help achieve this outcome. In Hong Kong, the major platform for primary and secondary school students to receive EE is through the General Studies (GS) classes and Liberal Studies (LS) classes respectively. Recently, universities in Hong Kong have stopped offering the programme Bachelor of Education (Liberal Studies) and it was found that not many universities in Hong Kong do provide Bachelor of Education (General Studies) programme. This raises the question of whether Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students who specialized in non- GS and non-LS majors are sufficiently trained to provide instruction and promote EE to their prospective students through the GS/LS lessons. Given that no prior studies have been conducted to investigate the environmental literacy level of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, this study aims to fill this literature gap. This study was conducted through distributing questionnaire surveys to full-time undergraduate students who are currently studying B.Ed. programmes either at The University of Hong Kong or The Education University of Hong Kong. A total of 174 B.Ed. students participated in this study, with 167 valid responses. The questionnaire was devised based on the theme of “plastic waste, pollution and management” as this theme encompasses various environmental concepts which are deemed to be necessary in order to thoroughly assess B.Ed. students’ environmental literacy level. According to the survey results, B.Ed. students’ environmental literacy level was just at the nominal level. Their knowledge on basic environmental terms and concepts were inadequate, where misconceptions were found. Among the 167 B.Ed. students, there were only 16 B.Ed. students whose environmental knowledge scores were considered as acceptable as an educator. Despite the fact that B.Ed. students demonstrated a moderately favorable environmental attitude, and that they generally recognized the need to protect the natural environment, they rarely engaged in actions that is in favor of the environment. Besides, the results also showed that majority of B.Ed. students did not find themselves well-prepared to teach EE, especially, they felt hesitant regarding how to instill future students with positive environmental attitudes and help students to take appropriate environmental actions to cope with the environmental challenges. These findings suggested that environmental education in teacher training programmes are highly insufficient. In light of this, it is recommended that more environmental courses and activities are needed to be embedded into the teacher training programmes in order to enhance B.Ed. students’ environmental literacy level, as the pre-condition to develop students to become an environmentally literate person is that teachers themselves have to be well-informed and showed commitment towards the environment (Tuncer et al., 2009).