The study addresses what the authors describe as an urgent need in teacher education: preparing graduates with the knowledge, skills, and ethical dispositions required to confront pressing global challenges, particularly climate change. Teacher education programmes have traditionally treated sustainability as the domain of geography, biology, or environmental science courses, leaving mathematics largely untouched. But mathematics is deeply implicated in how climate information is produced, communicated, and contested. Rising temperature curves, carbon budget calculations, probability estimates of extreme weather events, and statistical summaries of biodiversity loss are all mathematical artefacts. A teacher who cannot help students read these artefacts critically leaves them ill-equipped to navigate public discourse about the climate.

To probe this gap, the researchers designed media-based learning activities within the undergraduate programme. Prospective teachers of mathematics engaged with climate-related media and then participated in structured reflection and dialogue focused on pedagogical approaches for integrating climate literacy into mathematics teaching. The method is deceptively simple: rather than lecturing future teachers about sustainability, the programme asked them to encounter media representations of the climate emergency, reflect in writing on what they saw, and discuss in groups how such material might be turned into mathematics lessons. The researchers then applied discourse analysis to the prospective teachers’ written reflections and group discussions, examining how the participants made sense of the climate emergency and of their roles as future educators.

The findings point to three powerful psychological and social mechanisms at work. First, the media-based reflections fostered shared attention. When a group of future teachers engages with the same piece of climate media, they develop a common object of focus, which makes collective discussion possible in a way that abstract lectures rarely achieve. Second, the activities produced emotional engagement. Climate media, by its nature, tends to evoke affective responses, and the study found that these responses were not obstacles to learning but resources for it, animating the prospective teachers’ sense that the issue mattered to them personally. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the reflections cultivated a sense of collective responsibility. Participants came to see responding to the climate emergency not as someone else’s job but as part of what it means to be a mathematics educator.

Beyond these mechanisms, the analysis revealed that participants articulated genuine shifts in perspective and envisaged concrete changes to their future mathematics teaching practices. The researchers organised these envisioned changes into three thematic areas, each of which maps onto a distinct strand of mathematical capability. The first theme is raising awareness of climate change through cultivating data literacy. Climate science rests on data: time series of global temperatures, measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, records of sea level rise, and inventories of greenhouse gas emissions. A mathematics teacher who equips students to interpret graphs, understand rates of change, and evaluate the reliability of data sources is, in effect, teaching climate awareness through the mathematics curriculum itself.

The second theme involves teaching environmental sustainability through mathematical modelling. Modelling is a cornerstone of both school mathematics reform and climate science. When students build a simple model of population growth, resource consumption, or carbon accumulation, they experience firsthand how mathematical assumptions translate into projections about the future. The prospective teachers in the study came to see modelling not merely as an abstract technique for satisfying curriculum requirements but as a vehicle through which students can explore sustainability questions, test scenarios, and appreciate the consequences of different policy and behavioural choices. This reframing turns the mathematics classroom into a space where environmental futures are not just described but actively explored.

The third theme centres on fostering critical evaluation of quantitative information and representations. This may be the most distinctive contribution of mathematics education to climate literacy. Public debates about climate change are saturated with numbers, charts, and statistics, and these can be manipulated, cherry-picked, or misleadingly scaled. A line graph with a truncated axis can make a steep warming trend look gentle; a percentage change without an absolute baseline can exaggerate or minimise an effect. The prospective teachers recognised that teaching students to interrogate such representations, to ask who produced a figure, how it was calculated, and what it leaves out, is a form of civic education that mathematics is uniquely positioned to deliver. Critical data literacy, in this view, is a defence against both misinformation and despair.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is its use of discourse analysis as the primary analytical lens. Rather than measuring climate literacy with a before-and-after test, the researchers examined the language prospective teachers used in their written reflections and group discussions, tracking how their sense-making evolved. Discourse analysis is well suited to capturing the subtle ways in which people negotiate identity and responsibility. When a future teacher shifts from describing climate change as a global problem to describing what she would do in her own classroom, that linguistic shift marks a genuine reorientation of professional identity, something a standardised questionnaire might miss entirely.

The broader significance of the work lies in its argument about pedagogy. Media-based reflective pedagogies, the authors suggest, can support the development of climate literacy by strengthening prospective teachers’ capacity for critical reflection on sustainability issues and their pedagogical implications. This positions media not as a distraction from rigorous mathematics teaching but as a catalyst for it. News reports, documentary footage, and data visualisations provide authentic contexts that give mathematical content meaning, while the structured reflection ensures that emotional responses are channelled into professional planning rather than left as free-floating anxiety. The approach also aligns with international calls to embed education for sustainable development across teacher preparation, rather than confining it to specialist courses.

The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with ethical approval granted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee, and it was fully supported by the Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Fund. Its implications extend well beyond Hong Kong. Mathematics teacher educators around the world face the same challenge: a generation of students who will live through intensifying climate impacts, taught by teachers who may feel that climate change belongs to someone else’s subject. This research offers a concrete, replicable pathway forward, one in which the humble tools of the mathematics classroom, graphs, models, and critical questions about numbers, become instruments of climate understanding. As the climate emergency deepens, the study suggests, the question is no longer whether mathematics teachers should engage with it, but how quickly teacher education programmes can prepare them to do so well.

Subject of Research: Media-based reflection activities for developing climate literacy among prospective mathematics teachers

Article Title: Media-based reflections to foster climate literacy in mathematics teacher education

Article References: Media-based reflections to foster climate literacy in mathematics teacher education. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09162-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09162-z

Keywords: climate literacy, mathematics education, teacher education, media-based reflection, prospective teachers, data literacy, mathematical modelling, sustainability education, discourse analysis, critical evaluation, Hong Kong, environmental sustainability

The research team, led by Juan Miguel Salazar-Partida, Antonio Burgos-García, Mónica Márquez-Pinedo, and Purificación Pérez-García, surveyed 1,117 students enrolled in undergraduate teacher education programs. Of these, 816 were studying at eight Spanish universities affiliated with Andalusian institutions including the Universidad de Granada and Universidad de Sevilla, while 301 were enrolled at the Universidad de Guadalajara and the Escuela Normal Superior de Jalisco in Mexico. Most participants were women, reflecting the well-documented feminization of the teaching workforce, and roughly two-thirds were between 17 and 20 years old. Students came from Early Childhood, Primary, General, Indigenous, and Secondary Education degree tracks, and about 58 percent reported an urban background.

To capture the ethical dimension of professional formation, the researchers used a 49-item questionnaire assessing professional teaching ethics across six analytical axes: teaching vocation, personal-professional principles, ethical commitment to teaching, responsibility for student training, ethics as an evaluative component, and processes for evaluating teaching ethics. Responses were recorded on a four-point Likert-type scale. The instrument demonstrated strong psychometric properties, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .859 to .946 across the six axes and reaching .969 for the full questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis conducted on a subsample of 818 participants produced favorable fit indices, including a Comparative Fit Index of .959 and a root mean square error of approximation of .038, supporting the six-factor structure used in subsequent analyses.

The methodological heart of the study lies in its dual use of unsupervised machine learning. Rather than relying on a single clustering technique, the team applied both K-Means and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) to standardized scores across the six axes. K-Means partitions data by minimizing distances to cluster centroids, while GMM allows for more flexible, probabilistically overlapping groupings by modeling the data as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Candidate solutions with two to six clusters were compared using internal validation indices such as the Silhouette coefficient, the Calinski-Harabasz index, the Davies-Bouldin index, and the Dunn index for K-Means, and the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria for GMM. Because the validation criteria did not converge on a single best solution, the researchers retained a three-cluster solution as a descriptive representation, acknowledging a two-cluster alternative as plausible.

The resulting profiles followed a consistent ordinal pattern in both approaches. The higher-endorsement profile, comprising 855 participants under K-Means and 497 under GMM, showed positive standardized means across all six axes, with the strongest scores appearing in evaluative dimensions of teaching ethics. The moderate-endorsement profile occupied an intermediate position, with slightly negative scores under K-Means and a more nuanced mixed pattern under GMM, where vocation and personal-professional principles were marginally positive while evaluative components were slightly negative. A lower-endorsement configuration also emerged in both solutions, though with important caveats: under K-Means it contained only 13 participants, or about 1.2 percent of the sample, and its recovery across resampling analyses was inconsistent, leading the authors to treat it as an exploratory low-prevalence response pattern rather than a stable population subgroup.

Stability testing reinforced this caution. The K-Means solution showed high agreement across repeated 80 percent subsamples, with a mean Adjusted Rand Index of .956, but greater sensitivity to initialization. The GMM solution proved remarkably stable, with a mean Adjusted Rand Index of .997 across repeated initializations, although it became more sensitive as covariance regularization increased. Dimensionality-reduction visualizations using t-SNE and principal component analysis, the latter explaining 83.6 percent of the variance in two dimensions, provided descriptive confirmation of the ordered but overlapping structure of the profiles. The authors emphasize that these visualizations serve as interpretive aids rather than formal validation criteria.

Beyond the profiles themselves, the study examined whether membership varied across sociodemographic, academic, and institutional characteristics using chi-square tests with Cramér’s V as a measure of association, corrected for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate procedure. Five contextual variables emerged as significant in both clustering approaches: gender, Indigenous-group membership, degree program, institution, and country. Access grade was significant only under K-Means, while academic year was significant only under GMM. Age group, urban or rural environment, and high-school type showed no significant associations in either solution. The authors stress that these are exploratory associations, not causal determinants, but they suggest that ethical-professional orientations are shaped, at least in part, by the educational and sociocultural contexts in which future teachers are trained.

The findings arrive at a moment of renewed international attention to teacher ethics. Earlier surveys of higher education found that only about 9 percent of teacher education curricula included courses with professional ethics content, a figure that underscored how often ethics has been marginalized in favor of subject instruction and pedagogical technique. The past several years have seen a counter-movement, marked by the publication of major handbooks on teacher ethos and values education and by systematic reviews of ethics in teacher preparation. The present study adds empirical weight to that shift by showing that ethical-professional dispositions vary measurably among students entering the profession, and that this variation cannot be assumed away by the belief that teaching attracts people who are good by nature.

The researchers frame their contribution within an applied, relational understanding of professional teaching ethics, drawing on the Ibero-American tradition of ética profesional docente and the framework of Torquemada and Loredo. Within this view, ethics is expressed not only in abstract moral reasoning but in vocational orientation, respectful conduct, professional commitment, responsibility toward students, and openness to evaluation. The identified profiles, the authors argue, are not moral classifications of individual students but empirical configurations of self-reported values, dispositions, attitudes, and commitments. This distinction matters: the study did not directly assess ethical reasoning, moral judgment, or observed conduct, and its cross-sectional, self-report design precludes causal or developmental conclusions.

The practical implications are nonetheless significant. If roughly a quarter to nearly half of future teachers, depending on the clustering method, fall into moderate or lower-endorsement profiles, then teacher education programs cannot treat ethics as an incidental by-product of training. The authors call for explicit, structured integration of ethical content into initial teacher education, grounded in the sociocultural realities of professional practice and attentive to the diversity of students’ starting points. They also point toward future research using longitudinal designs, qualitative interviews, and extensions linking professional ethics to deontological standards and competence-based frameworks for civic and democratic participation. As education systems worldwide grapple with teacher shortages, quality, and public trust, this study offers a data-driven reminder that the ethical formation of teachers is not automatic, and that building it deliberately may be one of the most consequential investments a teacher education program can make.

Subject of Research: Ethical-professional profiles of prospective teachers in undergraduate education degree programs in Spain and Mexico

Article Title: Analysis of professional teaching ethics among prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs

Article References: Salazar-Partida, J. M., Burgos-García, A., Márquez-Pinedo, M., & Pérez-García, P. (2026). Analysis of professional teaching ethics among prospective teachers enrolled in undergraduate education degree programs. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45525. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45525

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45525

Keywords: teacher ethics, prospective teachers, teacher education, K-Means clustering, Gaussian Mixture Models, professional values, teaching vocation, ethical commitment, Spain, Mexico, Heliyon, machine learning