An Examination of Teachers’ Attitudes Towards the National Park in Their Environment: The Isparta, Denizli Example

Abstract

Environmental education in national parks is equivalent to an open and permanent education process in which individuals and communities become aware of their natural environment and gain a critical and sensitive attitude towards it and the use of its resources. The aim of this study was to examine the attitudes of teachers towards national parks who work in schools near different national parks in terms of different variables. As a work of descriptive research, it was conducted with a total of 167 teachers who worked in schools around Kovada Lake National Park, Kızıldağ National Park, and Honaz Mountain National Park. In the study, an attitude scale with a Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of 0.83 and consisting of 32 items was used for the national parks. The SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences Program) was used to evaluate the data obtained. A T-test and a one-way ANOVA test were used to analyze the data. According to the results obtained, teachers’ attitudes towards the national park did not show a significant difference in terms of their gender, their tenure, the branches they serve, their purpose of visiting the national park, their opinions on the importance attached to the national park, the different schools near the national park, the national park near the schools they worked in, their purpose in visiting the national park previously while they differed significantly according to whether the teachers had visited the national park before.