The philosophical dispositions of pre-servıce teachers and teacher educators*

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the educational philosophical dispositions of preservice teachers and teacher educators. Voluntary participants were 206 preservice teachers and 32 teacher educators from a faculty of education at a public university in central Turkey. The mean age was 20.2 ± 1.6 for pre-service teachers and it was 33.7 ± 5.9 for teacher educators. Data were gathered during the fall semester of 2014–2015. After permissions were attained from the university institutional review board, each participants completed “The Educational Belief Scale”. The scale consists of 40 items with the following five dimensions: Perennialism, Essentialism, Progressivism, Existentionalism, Reconstructionalism. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients ranged between. 68 and .90 for each subscale in this study. Descriptive statistics and Mann–Whitney U test were used for data analysis. The results showed that the most internalized educational philosophical dispositions were progressivism and existentialism, while the least one was essentialism for both groups. When comparing the mean scores of philosophical dispositions it was found that teacher educators received  higher scores on progressivism and existentialism, while preservice teachers scored  higher  on essentialism (p<.05). As  regarding gender, males were significantly more essentialist in both group, while females were more progressivist for preservice teachers (p<.05).   Key words: Educational philosophy, teacher education, philosophical disposition.