DIGITAL APPROACHES TO SAFETY EDUCATION IN PRIMARY TEACHER TRAINING FOR SUSTAINABLE REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The article reveals the significance of digital approaches to safety education in the professional training of future primary school teachers in the context of sustainable regional development. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that modern safety education can no longer be limited to the acquisition of separate rules of behaviour, instructions, or response algorithms. It covers the physical, psychological, social, informational, and digital dimensions of a safe educational environment and requires preparing teachers to act under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and crisis situations. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the role of digital technologies in developing future primary school teachers’ readiness to organize safety education and to identify pedagogically appropriate approaches to their use in professional training. The study analyzes current scientific approaches to the digitalization of education, innovative learning technologies, teachers’ digital competence, a safe educational environment, and sustainable regional development. It is shown that a primary school teacher should be ready not only to provide pupils with knowledge about safe behaviour, but also to design a safe educational environment, recognize potential risks, organize preventive work, act in crisis situations, support children under stress, and use digital tools responsibly. The main digital approaches to the safety training of future teachers are identified, including scenario-based digital simulations, gamified tasks, learning analytics, digital platforms, multimedia resources, and artificial intelligence tools. It is emphasized that the effectiveness of digitalization in safety education depends not on the number of technologies used, but on the quality of pedagogical design, ethical use, accessibility, age sensitivity, and the connection of learning tasks with real professional situations in primary school. A model of digital safety training for future teachers is generalized, including normative-conceptual, procedural-scenario, analytical-reflective, and regional-practical levels. It is concluded that such training is an important resource for sustainable regional development, as it contributes to the formation of human capital, a culture of prevention, community resilience, and the readiness of educational systems to act in response to contemporary challenges.