Teacher Education for Sustainability: The Awareness and Responsibility for Sustainability Problems

The theoretical framework of the present research is based on the socio-psychological model of sustainable behaviour by Juárez-Nájera (2010). For the purposes of this paper, just part of the research is related to personal norms. The paper provides the results of the awareness of consequences and the attribution of responsibility for environmental/ sustainability problems among students of the four Faculties of Teacher Education in four countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia. Research results indicate that students from Croatian and Slovenian Faculties of Teacher Education are characterised by a more pronounced awareness of environmental/sustainability problems than the students from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. The responsibility for environmental/sustainability problems is higher among the students of the Faculty of Teacher Education from Croatia and Serbia than among students from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia. It seems that a country is the major determiner of awareness and responsibility for environmental/sustainability problems. In general, the results of the present research provide significant guidelines for the reflection on the future of initial teacher education for sustainability and need for conducting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research on personal norms and sustainable behaviour.