e-Kafkas Eğitim Araştırmaları Dergisi (Dec 2022)
Democracy or Not: Attitude Of Discussion As A Pathway Toward Ideological Challenge In Education Settings
Abstract
A healthy democratic culture depends heavily on consensus based on rational and free discussion. Since there are students from different families in terms of socio-economic level, gender, culture, ethnic group, belief group and worldview in an average class, the school is considered as a reflection of the society. Learning how to discuss a topic together at school is an important civic skill in their daily and prospective life. So maintaining and sustaining democracy will require certain habits of mind. In order for citizens to adopt democratic values, they need to learn to argue and discuss, thus improve their decision-making and critical thinking skills. Therefore, discussion is both a democratic civic skill and teaching method. It is a skill which is acquired rather than described as innate. Democratic discussion requires students to be experienced. It has been observed that social studies stakeholders are generally keep their distance toward discussion. It can be argued that the reason for this situation is due to negative attitudes towards certain conditions of the discussion. When the relevant studies are examined, it has been observed that there are few studies carried out on the discussion attitudes of teacher candidates in the context of social studies. It is observed that pre-service teachers have both positive and negative attitudes towards discussion. On the other hand, the number of studies examining secondary school students' attitudes towards discussion is limited. Current study aims to examine the attitudes of three participant groups (student, teacher and pre-serive teacher) towards discussion. The survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was used. The sample of the study consists of 269 students, 617 teacher candidates and 167 teacher, a total of 1053 participants, determined by the convenience sampling method. In order to collect data, the argumentative attitude scale developed by Infante and Rancer (1982) as 20 items and adapted into Turkish as 10 items by Turunç, Eser and Dinç (2018) and a personal information form developed by the researchers were used. Frequency and percentage distributions regarding the demographic characteristics of students, pre-service teachers and teachers, as well as the argumentative attitudes of the participants were determined according to the independent variables. The research shows that although teachers, students and prospective teachers have positive attitudes, they also have various concerns towards discussion. Related results denote that teachers, students, and pre-service teachers have conflicting feelings (Infante & Rancer, 1982) about discussion. In the light of the results in addition to ensuring the participation of teachers, students and pre-service teachers it is recommended to examine those in carefully prepared and conducted discussions beside conflicting emotions with process-based qualitative research.
