Special education teachers' views on teaching earthquake safety skills

The aim of this study is to examine the opinions of special education teachers working in schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education about the effectiveness of teaching earthquake safety skills (ESS) to individuals with special needs. The study is important in terms of understanding to what extent special education teachers have knowledge about earthquake safety skills, to what extent they teach these skills to individuals with special needs, which methods or techniques are used while teaching the skills, which measurement tools or techniques are used at the end of the training, and what suggestions they make about earthquake safety skills to be organized for individuals with special needs. Case study, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. Within the scope of the research, 16 special education teachers working in public schools in Diyarbakır province in the 2023-2024 academic year were interviewed using semi-structured interview technique. While selecting these teachers, typical case sampling, a subtype of purposive sampling, was used and attention was paid to gender equality in the selection of participants. The interviews were recorded with an Android device with voice recording feature and the findings were analyzed by content analysis method. According to the findings obtained as a result of the research, according to the teachers, teaching ESS for individuals with special needs is essential and this education should be started in early childhood. Teachers mostly pay attention to the developmental level of the student in the selection of methods/techniques, use the modeling technique the most while teaching, and use the criterion-dependent measurement tool the most while evaluating ESS teaching. Teachers find in-service training activities on ESS content only theoretical, find the content on ESS in textbooks insufficient and do not find the existing content applicable. Teachers think that there are insufficient activities for ESS in schools. Finally, while teachers stated that the most common problem encountered in teaching ESS is that the student's level of disability is not suitable for the teaching in question, they stated that the problems encountered while teaching ESS can be solved mostly by increasing family-teacher cooperation. As a result of these findings, the study contributed to the literature with suggestions for practice and future research.