Abstract
Out-of-school learning has been discussed to be a beneficial tool for teaching science since it allows students to have firsthand experience. Therefore teachers are expected to involve out-of-school activities in their instructional design.
To do that, they should be supported with adequate out-of-school pedagogy in teacher education programs. As the current literature indicates, teacher education programs need a solid curriculum for out-of-school learning.
This study was conducted as part of an Erasmus+ project aimed to develop an out-of-school curriculum for pre-service teachers. To achieve this goal, it is important to understand teacher educators' perspective about out-of-school learning.
In addition to that, we also identified what are the possible challenges and the ways to overcome these challenges during out-of-school activities from teacher educators' perspective. We collected data from 89 teacher educators who currently work in different universities from four different countries (Turkey, Slovakia, Czechia, and Germany).
An online questionnaire was developed and distributed to the participant group simultaneously for the data collection. As a result of the preliminary analysis, we found that teacher educators provided a similar definition for out-of-school learning and envisioned challenges along with the ways of overcoming these challenges similarly; however, there were also some fundamental differences due to logistic and accustomed convenience.
Understanding of these differences across countries would help the science teacher educators to shape their instructional practices to support preservice teachers.