Social studies teachers' understanding of gender equality and reflected on teaching activities

June 2023, pages 197 Humans are social creatures, and they tend to adapt to society in order to survive in society. They shaped their behavior following the culture in which they lived. Individuals begin to be shaped according to the criteria attributed to their gender by the family and society, starting from the prenatal period. While sex is a biological condition, when girls and boys enter the social space, they assume different gender roles in their social environment. These roles that society imposes on the individual are called gender. It can be affected by the culture's language patterns, stereotypes, and past life experiences. Gender roles start with the attitudes of the family and the immediate environment but can be sustained through education. However, awareness of gender issues can be used to achieve gender equality. This study focuses on social studies teachers, who can be a continuation of gender roles or a tool in achieving equality. The research examines the perception of social studies teachers in the context of gender equality and reflects these understandings on teaching activities (teaching methods and techniques, in-class communication, Etc.). A case study, one of the qualitative methods, was preferred to reveal, examine, explain, and interpret the current situation. In the study, it was planned to select a small sample group of volunteers in order to investigate social studies teachers' understanding of gender in depth. In the volunteers, maximum diversity was tried to be achieved with male and female teachers, teachers from different cities, genders, and age groups. The research conducted interviews with 22 social studies teachers, and observations were carried out with six teachers. The interviews were planned as semi-structured with Seidman's three-way interview technique. Observations continued for 12 weeks. The Researcher's diary, story completion activity, curriculum, and textbook reviews were also added to the data. Findings were written with content analysis by considering the interview, observation data, and documents together, and brother narrative analysis findings of 6 social studies teachers were evaluated separately. The results of the research findings show that social studies teachers define the issue of gender not through equality but through discrimination and agree that there are sexist discourses in many areas of language, from everyday speech to proverbs, from slang to hate speech. Teachers' understanding of gender affects the culture of the environment, the family they establish, and the physical environment they are in more than the family environment in which they are raised. It has been concluded that social studies teachers attach importance to gender equality but cannot reflect it in their teaching activities, that they do not have sufficient knowledge and training on gender equality, that they do not consider themselves sufficient, and that they feel limited and controlled in carrying the subject of gender to the lessons. It is understood that social studies teachers are hopeless about the future of gender equality and that they attach importance to textbooks as materials. Social studies teachers believe that the Istanbul Convention protects women and women's rights and negatively evaluates the convention's cancellation.