Development, implementation and evaluation of human rights education program with works of children's literature

Explanatory sequential design from among the mixed method study patterns was used in this study carried out for developing, applying and evaluating Human's Rights Education Program via Works of Children's Literature (HREPWCL) aimed at teacher candidates for an effective human rights education. Non-equivalent pre-test post-test control group semi-experimental pattern was used for the quantitative dimension of the study. A total of 62 classroom teacher candidates who are continuing their second year of education at Gaziantep University Classroom Teaching Department comprised the study group for the experimental procedures. One of the two classes that these students are enrolled in was appointed randomly as the experiment group and the other as the control group. HREPWCL was applied on the experiment group during the study, whereas no experimental procedure was applied on the control group. Human's Rights Education Competence Evaluation Form via Works of Children's Literature (CEF) and Human Rights Education Attitude Scale (HREAS) were applied as pre-test and post-test on the experiment and control groups. While Program Effectiveness Evaluation Form (PEEF) was applied as semi-structured interview at the end of the program only on 14 students selected from among the experiment group students in accordance with the criteria sampling method from among the purposive sampling methods. Whereas the evaluation of the data acquired from CEF was carried out by way of the Human Rights Education via Works of Children's Literature Sufficiency Evaluation Graded Scoring Key (HREWLSER). Quantitative data were analyzed via statistical analyses, while qualitative data were analyzed via content analysis. It was concluded as a result of the study that HREPWCL develops positive attitudes in classroom teacher candidates regarding human rights education, that classroom teacher candidates develop the ability to plan activities with works of children's literature and analyze works of children's literature with regard to human rights. In addition, it was concluded when the findings obtained from interviews carried out with classroom teacher candidates in the experiment group were evaluated that they consider the application process of HREPWCL beneficial and helpful with regard to their professional development; that they consider themselves competent to provide human rights education via works of children's literature at the end of the program. In accordance with the results obtained during the study, it can be suggested to increase the competence of classroom teacher candidates for an effective human rights education, carrying out integration studies to incorporate children's literature course with human rights education and to provide in-service trainings to classroom teachers who are already working in cooperation with universities.