Relationship between Proactivity and Personal Pedagogical Knowledge in ESD among Pre-service Teachers: Sub-sampling on Social Media Usage and Subject Discipline

Abstract Personal Pedagogical Knowledge (PPK), one of the elementary factors of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), explains how teacher personality influences his/her unique way of teaching. It is an inevitable part of the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Pre-service teachers, who are participating in the knowledge management program for sustainable development, should possess strengthened or organized PPK. The curriculum of Teacher Education should have been reconfigured to conceptualize PPK as a lens to observe various teaching competences needed for sustainability. The personality of a teacher is considered right only when he/she organizes his/her behavior in a proactive way. It means the teacher should develop an ability to be in patience on the right path even though the situation is unfavorable. Proactivity organizes PPK that means the teacher personality is strong enough to make gradual changes in the unfavorable situation and turn it into favorable. This study aims at examining the relationship between Pro-activity and PPK among pre-service teachers based on their social media usage and subject discipline in the context of ESD. The major objectives are as follows: (1) to find out the extent of Proactivity and PPK among pre-service teachers in the context of ESD and (2) to find out the relationship between Proactivity and PPK among pre-service teachers. The study adopted a normative survey method by sampling 60 pre-service teachers from science and arts/humanities discipline. The sample is also categorized based on whether the pre-service teachers are users or not users of social media for propagating sustainability. Major findings are as follows: (1) there are significant pairwise differences in the Proactivity and PPK scores of high, average and low levels in the context of sustainability among pre-service teachers; (2) pre-service teachers using social media and those from arts/humanities discipline are exhibiting high levels of Proactivity and PPK than those who are not using social media and those from Science Education; and (3) there is a substantial relationship between Proactivity and PPK among pre-service teachers in whole and relevant sub-samples based on social media usage and subject-discipline regarding ESD.