Environmental attitude of pre-service elementary and secondary school teachers

The natural environment has been undergoing large scale degradation due to rapidly increasing urbanisation and industrialisation and some of it is irreversible in nature. It is being felt that environmental education through improving environmental awareness and developing environmental friendly attitude among society could be a possible way out to stop further degradation and improve on the existing conditions. Teachers play a vital role in such large scale initiatives as they train the young students in the class room as well as disseminate knowledge to the society. The purpose of this study is to study and compare the pre-service elementary and secondary school teachers on their attitude towards environment. The main objectives are to study and compare the pre-service elementary and secondary school teachers’ attitude towards environment and to study the difference between the male and female Pre-service teachers’ attitude towards environment. The sample consists of 200 pre-service elementary and secondary school teachers of Kolkata and South 24-Parganas. “Environmental Pollution Attitude Scale (EPAS)” was used. The total attitude toward environment scores of all individual teachers falling under each category i.e. pre-service elementary and secondary school were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis to find out the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, skewness, using SPSS software. Pre-service elementary and secondary school teachers differ significantly at p < 0.05 level in their attitude towards environment. This could be attributed to the fact that the basic qualification is different for elementary and secondary school teacher training course. Elementary and secondary school teacher training programme require 10+2 and bachelor degree respectively. Thus, the results indicate that levels of teacher education courses have an influence on their levels of environmental attitude. Therefore, the major recommendations are focused on improving the attitude towards environment, of both categories pre-service elementary as well as secondary school level. To meet this gap, it is mandatory that environmental education must be made as a compulsory subject at D. El. Ed, and B. Ed. level by incorporating environmental science or education as essential subject in the syllabi.