Pre-Service Teachers' Reflections of Their Concerns about Social, Environmental and Global Problems via Drawing Cartoons

The present study aimed to determine the viewpoints of student teachers at a state university in Turkey about the most important social, environmental, and global problems. For this purpose, one of the qualitative research methods, the art-based research method was adopted. The participants' cartoon drawings were utilized as the data collecting tools along with face to face interviews on describing their cartoons verbally. In the study, participant students were invited to draw cartoons about the social, environmental and global issues that they were concerned about most in November 2019, during the fall semester of 2019-2020 academic year. Findings of the research illustrated that the student teachers were affected by the current events and media reports about the social, environmental and global issues. In addition, the cartoon drawings of the participant students helped them reveal their creative and critical thinking skills, decision making ability, perception and evaluation power, environmental literacy, empathy, observation and visual literacy skills. Moreover, the present study demonstrated that when the student teachers were encouraged and were provided with sufficient freedom, they could reflect their creative and critical thinking skills via drawing thematic cartoons.