6.2.2.1.1 The Interview Study (Study 1). To examine the participating university tutors’ attitudes towards dealing with global, local, and intercultural issues, they were asked to describe their feelings concerning their incorporation, talk about the frequency of their inclusion and the importance of dealing with such topics in language classes. Based on these aspects, they seem to have reasonably positive attitudes towards dealing with global content in their classes: they have mainly positive feelings towards addressing global, local, and intercultural issues in class, they deal with them quite frequently and they find these topics important. This seems to be imperative in implementing GCED, as it has been suggested in the literature (Bauermeister & Diefenbacher, 2015; Guo, 2014; Longview Foundation, 2008; Merryfield, 2000), teacher trainers have an important role in setting an example to their students when it comes to nurturing global citizens. Even if they are not integrating global citizenship as a topic explicitly in their lessons, by infusing their courses with the global perspective, they are passing on important values to the next generations and providing prospective teachers with examples to follow.

 

6.2.2.1.2 The Questionnaire Study (Study 4). The results of the statistical test also revealed reasonably positive attitudes towards the integration of global content into language development classes. The type of global content and whether it is the tutor or the students who initiate the discussion about a topic largely influence their feelings about dealing with an issue. The results suggest that tutors prefer dealing with intercultural issues the most and that they relate to dealing with local content differently than to dealing with global or intercultural content. The lower scores awarded to the extent to which they prefer dealing with local issues may be in connection with the answer given to research question 2.1: the fact that tutors do not like dealing with them as much as with global or intercultural issues may account for the fact that they tend not to integrate such a large variety of local issues into their classes. This has also been corroborated by their answers given to the question of how frequently they deal with different types of global content. From the results, it became evident that tutors deal significantly less frequently with controversial or local issues or current public affairs than with intercultural or global issues. Regarding the importance of dealing with global content, the tutors’ answers to the Likert scale questions prove how differently they think about global or intercultural and local or controversial issues: although the scores given to all four types of content were above 4 (important), the tutors scored the importance of dealing with intercultural or global topics significantly higher than that of local or controversial issues.