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The study delves into the perspectives of pre-service science teachers in Sweden regarding science education and how these perspectives influence their learning process to teach science. By utilizing visions of scientific literacy and curriculum emphases as an analytical framework, interviews were conducted to gain insights into how pre-service teachers reflect on what is essential to teach in science and how they approach it. Thereby, the present study contributes to the knowledge of science teacher education regarding how pre-service science teachers` perspectives on science education guide their future teaching. The study found that the pre-service teachers described science education primarily in terms of learning scientific facts and concepts. Being able to make use of scientific facts for everyday issues was also part of their goal of teaching. Scientific engagement in relation to society and taking action were absent in their talk about scientific literacy and future teaching plans. The findings are discussed in terms of implications for research and teacher education and underscore that teacher education is central to the students’ perspectives. Those perspectives are important to foster scientific literacy of the pupils who are engaged in society.

This study has two related aims; to investigate the perspectives of pre-service science teachers from Türkiye and Sweden on scientific literacy including what content is relevant and important and how these perspectives might be related to their future teaching practices. Utilizing the framework of Visions of Scientific Literacy and Curriculum Emphases by Roberts (1998, 2007), the research conducts a comparative analysis to give an overview of how pre-service teachers privilege specific contents that they attributed to science education in terms of “why to teach science” according to their perspectives. The findings reveal that participants from both countries referred to the curriculum emphases, Everyday Coping (EC) and Correct Explanation (CE), as the most important reasons to teach science, whereas Scientific Skills Development (SSD) and Science, Technology, and Decision (STD) were notably underemphasized in both contexts. However, the study also revealed differences in the perspectives of pre-service science teachers. For the pre-service teachers from Türkiye, teaching science was important to deal with daily life issues, whereas the ones from Sweden privileged more scientific facts and processes. Furthermore, participants from both countries problematized science teacher education but in different ways, including teaching evolution, having too few or too many subject courses in the teacher education. This cross-cultural comparison provides insights into how scientific literacy is promoted within diverse educational environments; the results help to reflect on what may be included and excluded in science teacher education and inform possible future improvements within science teacher education.

Scientific literacy (SL) is a widely recognized goal of science education, yet its meaning and purpose are interpreted differently across contexts. This study compares how SL is conceptualized and related to future teaching in elementary science teacher education curricula in Türkiye and Sweden. A pragmatic discourse analysis was conducted on national guidelines and university curriculum documents. The analysis reveals two distinct discourses: the Disciplinary discourse, dominant in the Turkish documents, and the Integrative discourse, foregrounded in the Swedish documents. The Disciplinary discourse presents SL as an explicit and separate body of knowledge, emphasizing subject mastery and preparing pre-service teachers to teach this knowledge. In contrast, the Integrative discourse frames SL as embedded in teaching practices that connect science with sustainability, democracy, and critical engagement with socioscientific issues. The comparison underscores how curriculum and teaching traditions and policy frameworks guide teacher education.