Investigation of Social Studies Teachers’ Attitudes towards Democracy and Multicultural Education

Abstract

People from many different cultures have been living together in the world. Accordingly, multiculturalism has brought some problems. Education has a distinctive place in the resolution of these problems. Within this context, it is important to explore social studies teachers’ attitudes towards democracy and multicultural education, which is a significant element of education. The purpose of this study was to reveal social studies teachers’ attitudes towards democracy and multicultural education. In this survey and causal-comparative study, participants were composed of 332 social studies teachers. The data were collected using the “Democracy and Multicultural Education Attitude Scale”, which was developed by Toraman et al. (2015). The analyses involved Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests, frequency (f), percentage (%), and mean scores (X̅). The results revealed that social studies teachers’ attitudes towards democracy and multicultural education were positive. Teachers’ attitudes were positive in the dimension of prejudiced attitude towards multicultural education while they obtained more positive scores in the dimensions of attitude towards multicultural education, attitude towards democracy education, attitude towards democracy, and attitude towards cultural differences. Social studies teachers’ overall attitudes did not differ significantly by their years of experience, educational level, branch, gender, and geographical region of their schools. There were significant differences in teachers’ scores obtained from dimensions of attitude towards democracy education, attitude towards democracy, and attitude towards cultural differences in terms of educational level in favor of teachers with bachelor’s degrees. On the other hand, teachers with 1-5 years of experience had significantly higher scores from the dimension of prejudiced attitude towards multicultural education.