The role of museums in the context of out of school education: Cappadocia Living Heritage Museum example

Museums, which are one of the out-of-school learning areas, have been a much-emphasized learning area recently due to their educational potential and the opportunity to provide an unusual education.Our country has a great potential to provide services in this field with its natural, historical and cultural assets. Especially in recent years museum types, of which we have seen quite different examples around the world, have started to be seen in our country. The main reason for the diversity and different applications in museums is to make museums more attractive for visitors and contribute to the country's economy in terms of tourism income, as well as to increase the number of visitors in the historical and cultural field, to raise awareness of the society in the historical and cultural field and to strengthen the sense of belonging by considering the problems of the national identity uncertainty of the cultural degeneration brought by globalization especially for the new generations. The most important course that serves this purpose at the point of education is the Social Studies course, and museums have the potential to create an important learning area for many target learning areas. Cappadocia Living heritage Museum, which is one of the beautiful examples of non-formal education in our country, is exemplary especially in terms of preserving and keeping alive the Intangible cultural heritage, and carries out a museum activity in line with the content of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Preservation Agreement in 2003. In this context, the aim of the research is to evaluate the museum experiences of the students who receive social studies education and to reveal the contribution of their visit to the museum to create the awareness of intangible cultural heritage, and to observe the effect of an unusual museum experience on students and teachers. This research is a case study with qualitative methods and it is aimed to explain the problems related to human and social life from the part to the whole in the light of the interview notes obtained as a result of the observation, interview and in-formal interviews during the observation.The research was conducted in 1private school providing education in Nevşehir city center and 1 public school providing education in Avanos district and 10 students from each school, a total of 20 students and five teachers, and observation and interview methods were used as the method. To determine the participants in the study, to create a relatively small sample by choosing the appropriate sample from the purposive sampling method, and to try to determine whether there are any common or shared vote cases among the various situations by reflecting the problem studied in this sample to the maximum extent to the diversity of individuals who may be a party, and to determine whether the problem is different according to this variety to reveal the dimensions. Keywords: Out of School Social Studies Education, Living Heritage Museums, Intangible Cultural Heritage Awareness.