Pre-service teachers' experiences, interests and confidence in teaching Humanities and Social Sciences

With education research focused heavily on literacy, numeracy and STEM, our understanding of HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) is comparatively underdeveloped. HASS disciplines, such as Geography, History and Civics, not only contextualise learning in other disciplines, but are vital to ensuring that society is prepared to face complex social, economic and environmental challenges. There is room for improvement in HASS education for students and teachers alike. This paper examines the HASS education experiences, interest and teaching confidence of 80 pre-service teachers from a regional Australian university. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from a digital survey. Descriptive statistics and thematic analyses were used. Results showed that the pre-service teachers were most interested in Indigenous Culture, Sustainability, Local Community and Global History. Conversely, they were far less interested in Economics and Democracy. Participants' responses were mixed in terms of their previous HASS educational experiences and their confidence to teach HASS concepts.