Teaching profession from the perspective of teachers in 1970s: Oral historical study

The systems of education are the teaching programs that they build in their own bodies to educate their citizens to build the future of country and to make people good citizens. The purpose of these programs is to provide their citizens' education and development and to provide qualified labour force for society and the country. The aim of this study is to examine the living conditions of the teachers who worked in 1970s, the reason of choosing this profession, entry requirements for this profession, kind of the schools they graduated from and the view of the public to teaching profession with their own expressions. And with this examination we hope that new generation of teacher candidates can reach the information and experiences about history of this profession. Thus, teacher candidates, who will shed light on the current and next generations, can take lessons from what happened in the past and with this lessons they can develop in profession and move towards becoming an ideal teacher. Data of the research are collected from verbal lectures. In this study, 20 teachers were interviewed. In the study, to obtain the teaching profession in the 1970s and the data of people performing this profession, the method of oral history was used. Semi-structured interview questions were asked to our interviewers for collecting data and some visual materials such as the answers received and photographs of our interviewers were used. During the interview, voice recording was made with permission of our teachers and then these records were resolved. The results obtained in this study can be expressed as follows: In the 1970s, significant experiences related to the teaching profession were conveyed from the expressions of the teachers who graduated from three different schools such as Teacher Schools, Educational Institutes, Higher Teacher Schools. These experiences include information on teacher and the student quality, professional problems and the information concerning solutions for these problems. For this reason, these experiences, which have been introduced in the course of the development of the teaching profession in the 1970's, can be benefited for studies on teacher training, professional problems, professional development.