The Design and Implementation of a Teacher Training Program for Improving Teachers’ Disaster Literacy: Interdisciplinary Disaster Education Program (Idep)

Abstract

The interdisciplinary aspect of natural disasters requires their correlation with more than one discipline and orientation for understanding and teaching the inevitable nature of disasters. This study aimed to design a teacher training program called the Interdisciplinary Disaster Education Program (IDEP) and reveal its effect on improving teachers' natural disaster literacy. Furthermore, teachers' opinions about program were examined. The mixed-method design was used in the study. The study participants consisted of 36 teachers (science, classroom, and social studies teachers) working on different subjects. Data were obtained using the Natural Disaster Literacy Scale and the survey for the IDEP. The data collected from the scale were analyzed using two-way mixed ANOVA. The qualitative data collected from the survey were subjected to content analysis. The results indicated that the IDEP statistically improved teachers' natural disaster literacy. Moreover, the survey results highlighted that different instructional activities (experiments, modeling, workshops, rock/soil analysis, coding, augmented reality, and STEM applications, etc.) related to natural disasters contributed to a lot of professional and personal knowledge of teachers, particularly disaster management.