Examination of Prospective Teachers’ Perceptions of Homeland: A Phenomenological Study

Abstract

Homeland can be described as the territory in which people who are bound to each other with several ties and have common values. Homeland is one of the most valuable heritages which has been left to us from former generations, and will be left to future generations. There are great responsibilities on us, families, education and especially our teachers as an important element of education to protect and transfer it to future generations. The reason is that patriotism begins in the family and continues in educational environments. An examination of the renewed primary and secondary education programs in terms of general objectives and contents revealed that there is a conscious effort for children to gain such values as consciousness of and love for the homeland, and patriotism in especially social sciences and geography classes. Therefore, perceptions of homeland of prospective teachers who will raise future generations are important. The purpose of this research is to study perceptions of prospective teachers regarding the concept of homeland. The population of the study consists of 157 prospective classroom teachers, 98 of whom are females and 59 males, who were being educated in three different departments (social studies, Turkish and classroom teaching) in the Fall semester of 2017-2018 Academic Year. Phenomenology, a qualitative research method, has been employed in the research. The views and thoughts of the target population regarding the concept of active citizenship have been collected by use of an interview form which consists of a single sentence. The data collected were analyzed by the technique of content analysis. According to the findings of the research, the prospective social studies teachers came up with 28, prospective classroom teachers came up with 27 and prospective Turkish teachers came up with 28 valid metaphors about the concept of homeland, which makes a total of 83 different metaphors. In addition, the participants’ most preferred metaphors about the concept were the metaphors of mother, home, family, house and earth.