Social Studies in Out-of-Class Learning Environments: A study on Teacher Candidates’ Views and Awareness

Abstract

This research aimed to investigate the awareness of out-of-class learning environments that can be utilized in social studies courses among both social studies teacher candidates and primary school teacher candidates. Social studies, with its interdisciplinary nature, has the potential to provide a wide array of out-of-class learning opportunities, and we aimed to explore this aspect. In pursuit of this objective, we sought to evaluate the extent of teacher candidates’ familiarity with these learning environments and their ability to establish connections between these settings and the content of the social studies course. In our research we used the descriptive case study which is one of the types of qualitative research methods. In this context, we carried out the qualitative data collection process within the framework of the interview technique through a ‘semi-structured interview form’ for the participating teacher candidates. We analyzed all the collected data using descriptive analysis. As a result of our analyses, we found that teacher candidates from both programs who had taken this course were able to identify a wide range of out-of-class learning environments and that the most common examples they mentioned were ‘museums, libraries, schoolyard, canteens and historical sites/places, excursions and laboratories’. However, we found that both groups had relative difficulty in associating these learning environments with the social studies curriculum and content. When we assessed whether this finding indicated a difference in the extent of the teacher candidates’ own branches and the course hours they had taken, we found that the examples of association of the teacher candidates with less social studies field education were far behind the examples of the social studies teacher candidates. Another significant finding from the research is that the teacher candidates were more capable of offering robust examples of associations related to out-of-class in-school learning environments compared to those associated with out-of-school learning environments.