The Relationship between Pre-School Prospective Teachers Attitudes Towards Gender Role and Critical Thinking Disposition

It is known that teachers perpetuate stereotyped gender roles in the classroom knowingly or without being aware of them, and accordingly, teachers’ beliefs and expectations about gender roles affect children s behaviors. Teachers may perform these stereotypes intentionally or unintentionally. teachers has an immense power in creating non-sexist education. It is however prerequisite for teachers to criticize conventional gender point of view and namely, be critical thinker. Thus, teachers can know what to do about gender equality and what steps can be followed to raise children with egalitarian perspective. In this context the main purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between pre-school prospective teachers’ gender roles attitudes and their critical thinking tendencies. For this purpose Gender Role Attitude Scale (Zeyneloğlu, 2008) and the Critical Thinking Tendency Scale (Semerci, 2016) were applied to 512 preschool education prospective teachers. As a result of the research, it was determined that pre-school prospective teachers’ gender roles were equitable and their critical thinking tendencies were high. A positive and significant relationship was found between pre-school prospective teachers’ attitudes towards gender roles and critical thinking tendencies in all dimensions. The main dimension of the gender main role and the critical thinking tendency was moderate and 12.6%.