Search results

Educational institutions play a significant role in today's world, where the concepts of democracy and human rights gain more and more importance day by day. Every country aims to provide the qualifications that its citizens believe they should have via educational institutions. While doing this, it can reflect the current ideology of the period into curricula. In Turkey, as a democratic country, the most important course in which the content related to citizenship and human rights is conveyed at the primary level is the social studies course. In this study, it is aimed to examine the situations of including the concepts of human rights and citizenship in social studies textbooks used in Turkey with critical discourse analysis. For this purpose, text analyzes were conducted using Sketch Engine software. The textbooks were compared with the Turkish web pages in terms of the concepts related to citizenship and human rights, and the use of these concepts in the text was evaluated through a critical approach. The results revealed that the selected textbooks touched on some concepts related to human rights and citizenship very superficially; the treatment of some concepts was not compatible with social realities. It was concluded that it could not be sufficient enough to offer courses with such concepts as women's rights, feminism, gender equality, ethnicity, belief, political rights, and multiculturalism.

The aim of this study is to obtain information about the awareness of social studies teacher candidates about the refugee problem in Turkey. In this regard, a group of teacher candidates are asked their opinion on the subject of refugees in Turkey and as to how they perceive the problem. Interview method is used in the study for data collection. The obtained data is subjected to content analysis via Nvivo 8 software package. As a result of the study, it is observed that the participants residing in provinces with high refugee population have a more negative attitude towards refugees, whereas the ones in areas with no refugee population have a more positive attitude towards them. It is also observed that, in general, teacher candidates do not pay any special effort to acquire information about the subject.

Today, with the possibilities brought by technology, it is seen that the data needed in almost every area of life is presented by using various visual tools. One of these tools is graphics. Graphs are tools that are used effectively in interpreting the data presented to us and in the visualization of more than one data group that has a relationship. One of the most important objectives of the social studies course, which is created by the content obtained from different social science fields, is to help students learn to read and prepare tables, graphics, and diagrams. The case study design, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in this study. The research group of the study consists of 50 senior teacher candidates studying in the social studies teaching program in a state university in the 2021-22 academic year. In the study, the data were collected through an achievement test that included three graphic reading and two graphic preparation questions developed by the researchers. In addition, an interview form consisting of two questions was used in the study to determine the difficulties faced by the students while reading and preparing graphics. It has been determined that both female and male social studies teacher candidates in the study group can read graphics containing few data but cannot read relatively complex graphics containing many data groups and have difficulty showing two or more data groups using any graphics. It was seen that the graphic reading skills of male students were slightly better than female students, and the graphic drawing skills of female students were slightly better than male students. In addition, it was concluded in the study that, as revealed in previous studies, the graphic reading levels of the students were generally moderate, they could not compare the data with each other or from a theoretical point of view, and they could read mostly the graphics prepared at the primary level.