Citizenship education through high school history in Turkey

Abstract

This research was undertaken to better understand how the teaching of high school history contributes to citizenship education in Turkey. To achieve this goal, we focused on two main research questions. First, what does the history curriculum in Turkey include regarding citizenship education? Second, what do history educators think about contributing to citizenship education? Phenomenology, one of the qualitative research designs, was applied while seeking the answers to these research questions. Data diversity was ensured, and the history curriculum was analyzed in the first stage of the study. In the second stage, using a semi-structured interview protocol, interviews were conducted with history educators as the relevant curriculum implementers and the findings were examined using content analysis. It was found that the relationship between citizenship and history education is mainly centered on national identity construction. History courses promote democratic and global citizenship to a very limited extent, and, for a variety of reasons, the high school history curriculum of Turkey falls short of achieving the objectives of democratic citizenship education.