The Story of the Ideal Citizen in Turkey: A Narrative Inquiry on the Perspectives of Prospective Social Studies Teachers

Abstract

This study aims at understanding the concept of “ideal citizenship” from the prospective social studies teachers’ perspective. The study was conducted using narrative inquiry methodology. Narrative inquiry is a qualitative methodology that focuses on experiences, meanings and stories in the context of people, events and environments that individuals encounter during their lifetime. In narrative inquiry, the experiences of a person participating in the study are examined and considered as a whole. The participants were selected using a typical case sampling method. Data were collected from fifteen prospective social studies teachers. The participants third and fourth-year college students. Data were collected by using the Citizenship Perception Scale, the Active Citizenship Perception Scale and an open-ended questionnaire about the concept of ideal citizenship. The typical case for each university was determined through the results obtained using the scales and open-ended questionnaire. Each participant was selected providing that he/she had a conception of citizenship similar to the typical narrative of that site. Researchers conducted 2 or 3 semi-structured interviews with each participant. The researcher performed “problem-solution narrative analysis” (environment, person, action, problem and solution) to the data. The results revealed that two different narratives of ideal citizenship exist. The prospective social studies teachers fell into two categories as democratic narrative (DN) and patriotic narrative (PN). According to DN, people fail to internalize democracy in Turkey. DN implies that the ideal citizen is a democratic person who recognizes, cares about and respects for diversity. On the other hand, according to PN, Turkey is surrounded by dangerous countries. Moreover, narrators of the PN highlight that foreign countries have negative thoughts about Turkey. Therefore, for the PN, the ideal citizen needs to control his/her emotions, thoughts and actions by considering the good of their country. The results obtained in the current study showed that the prospective social studies teachers had different and even opposing narratives regarding the terms of problems, actions, places, characters and solutions on citizenship. Based on the results, some recommendations were made for citizenship education and future studies.