Teacher Candidates’ Opinions about the Use of Museums as Educational Environments in Social Studies Lessons

The aim of this study is to determine the opinions of teacher candidates regarding the use of museums in social studies lessons as an educational environment. The study group of the research was determined through purposeful sampling method. The study group consists of 114 teacher candidates studying in the social sciences teaching department at the education faculty of a public university during the 2019-2020 academic year. In this case study, a personal information form and an open-ended question form developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools. The data obtained from the answers given by teacher candidates to the data collection tools were analysed by using content analysis method. When the research results were examined in general, it was seen that Social Studies Teacher Candidates mostly explained the benefits that using museums as an educational environment were “ensuring permanent learning”, “enabling students to learn better by seeing/living” and “providing information about the past”. According to another result obtained from the research, Social Studies Teacher Candidates based the problems that they might face while using museums as an educational environment on “the possibility that students may give harm to historical documents and objects”, “financial impossibilities” and “difficult to control the classroom”