Pre-service social studies and history teachers’ perceptions of history and their views on purpose of history teaching

The study aims to investigate the perceptions of pre-service teachers who will teach history courses and to learn their views about purposes of history teaching.This research study was conducted with 169 pre-service middle school social studies teachers and 39 pre-service secondary school history teachers. Qualitative research design was used in this study. The data of this study were collected by data collection form including two questions. The results of the study showed that the prospective teachers generally perceive the history as an objective science. It was observed that the students have nationalist-conservative perspective. Also, it was seen that preservice teachers generally emphasize the history as learning from the past and directing to the future in terms of the results regarding the views towards history teaching. Besides this, the pre-service teachers stated that the purpose of history teaching is improving national identity and consciousness. Contrary to this, the pre-service teachers did not mention some purposes of history teaching, such as raising effective citizens, developing democratic perspective, creative thinking, and historical thinking. © Kamla-Raj 2015