Transformative Learning and Pedagogical Approaches in Education for Sustainable Development: Are Initial Teacher Education Programmes in England and Turkey Ready for Creating Agents of Change for Sustainability?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review in pdf file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
The importance of ESD against other documents has been highlighted
A broader range of citations has been included
Checks have been made to referencing style
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The study submitted seeks to analyze the pedagogical aspects linked to ESD, understood from a transformative (non-transmissive) approach, in initial teacher education based on research evidence from England and Turkey. To this end, it analyzes a selection of research reports and documents to identify both opportunities and challenges for teachers in the field of ESD.
Section 1 and subsection 1.1. are of special interest for an optimal conceptual and methodological contextualization of ESD, which can be used in other research works developed from this perspective. Likewise, the comparative proposal between the selected countries is well justified (lines 45-56).
However, in order to achieve greater impact and quality of the manuscript, the following improvements are recommended for future submission of the manuscript:
1. It is necessary to rewrite the study bringing it in line with international scientific research standards. For this purpose, it is necessary to include a "method" section that adequately clarifies the corpus of documents analyzed (including the inclusion and exclusion criteria applied and its robustness); continues with the analysis technique used (if it is a qualitative content analysis, please state this in the report); continues with the description and research procedure; and ends with the data analysis performed (type of coding and qualitative categorization performed). Although this information is found very partially in the text, its application and specification is necessary to reach a satisfactory degree of methodological rigor.
2. The description and interpretation of the qualitative results must be evidenced, with greater systematicity, by means of textual samples that support the interpretations made.
3. Please expand the "discussion and conclusions" section, and contrast the results obtained, in more detail, with others published in similar (abundant) research.
Author Response
- The article has been re-written to include more details of approaches towards document analysis. There is more detail on the methods section. This includes examples of coding analysis and a more rigorous analysis of the documents,
- More textual examples are included and the results section has been developed with highlighting examples in more detail.
- The discussion and conclusions sections have been expanded
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Although the manuscript is well contextualised in a potentially interesting research problem, it continues to be seriously lacking in methodological rigour.
In this new version, it is stated that a qualitative content analysis with aprioristic themes / categories (contradictorily, emergent according to Table 4) has been conducted, but nothing is said about the validity and reliability of this research approach. The type of coding carried out is not detailed either, although it can be intuited in Table 4. In this sense, the procedure applied appears very weak for a journal indexed in SCOPUS (Q1) and JCR (Q2). Therefore, The study still does not meet the international standards of scientific research described in the first review report.
Finally, the discussion does not really compare the results obtained with others achieved in the incorporated studies (rather, they are only summarised).
Author Response
In response to the second reviewer, the following changes have been made:
- More detail is given on the validity of the evidence, namely the documents which have been used to review the programmes.
- Much more detail has been provided on the coding and methodology for using the documents which provide the main evidence for the article
- Additional material is added in the discussions section with inclusion of new section on comparing the evidence from Turkey and England.
- Further references have been included to support the evidence.
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you for considering my suggestions and recommendations. However, I am sorry to report, again, the limitations identified in this study:
(a) Although the usual procedure in qualitative content analysis is described: coding (again, the type of coding performed is not specified, although it is intuited), assignment of codes to categories and assignment of categories to aprioristic themes (Table 4), and it is clarified which were the units of analysis, it is not specified which were the recording units.
b) The statement in lines 305-307 is not true. Qualitative studies, even when they are linked to the field of interpretation and representations, must be guaranteed to be solid and scientifically rigorous. Precisely to avoid the absence of methodological rigor and the subjectivity of the researcher, it is very important, as in quantitative approaches, to guarantee its reliability and validity. The triangulation of results in this report is more theoretical than real. Since it is too late to demonstrate an optimal degree of agreement by calculating Fleiss' Kappa, Cohen's Kappa, Krippendorff's alpha or Kendall's W concordance coefficient, a higher degree of description is suggested.
c) Please include the limitations of the study at the end of the manuscript and not before the results.
Author Response
(a) Greater clarity has been provided about coding
b) More material has been added to address area of reliability and validity with more detail on case studies to show the connection between the key themes identified and the evidence to support them. This means there is greater detail of description of the case studies, their methodology and themes.
c) The limitations section has been moved.
Round 4
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for addressing my suggestions, whose purpose is to increase the quality and impact of this manuscript. An effort to address my issues is identified.
As last remarks (may be considered minor), it would be relevant that the content included in Table 1 (aprioristic themes for the deductive coding performed) were more consistent with Table 4 (sample for data analysis) and with the integrated relationship of lines 279-306, since the incorporation of emergent themes contradicts the methodological procedure of the deductive approach. The reader may wonder about the reasons for this inconsistency. Please elaborate on this aspect.
Validity and reliability in coding. There is still a need to provide empirical evidence on this aspect of qualitative research, beyond the descriptive statement of compliance.
Limitations. This paragraph continues to appear before the results, before the discussion and conclusions of the study.
Author Response
1. Changes have been made to table 1 with accompanying narrative to show consistency in use of themes for the purposes of coding
2. Validity and reliability in coding. Details of evidence analysed is provided in more detail here listing the documents that been reviewed.
3. Limitations. This paragraph has been moved to the end of the article just before the final paragraph.
