Social studies textbooks in Turkey in terms of citizenship and human rights: A critical discourse analysis

Abstract

Educational institutions play a significant role in today’s world, where the concepts of democracy and human rights gain more and more importance day by day. Every country aims to provide the qualifications that its citizens believe they should have via educational institutions. While doing this, it can reflect the current ideology of the period into curricula. In Turkey, as a democratic country, the most important course in which the content related to citizenship and human rights is conveyed at the primary level is the social studies course. In this study, it is aimed to examine the situations of including the concepts of human rights and citizenship in social studies textbooks used in Turkey with critical discourse analysis. For this purpose, text analyzes were conducted using Sketch Engine software. The textbooks were compared with the Turkish web pages in terms of the concepts related to citizenship and human rights, and the use of these concepts in the text was evaluated through a critical approach. The results revealed that the selected textbooks touched on some concepts related to human rights and citizenship very superficially; the treatment of some concepts was not compatible with social realities. It was concluded that it could not be sufficient enough to offer courses with such concepts as women's rights, feminism, gender equality, ethnicity, belief, political rights, and multiculturalism.