Investigation of the objectives and content of 6th grade Social studies syllabus in terms of democratic values and identification of teachers' opinions

The purpose of this research is to analyze the aims and content of the 6th grade Social Studies Program in terms of democratic values and to discover the opinions of teacher's on this subject. For this purpose, first of all, document analysis was conducted on the syllabus of 6th grade Social Studies. Then semi-structured interviews were done by the researcher with 7 "Social Studies" teachers having at least 5 years of experience in public or private schools. The data in this research was attained by the basic qualitative research in parallel with document analysis and interview. The document analysis, it revealed that aims and content of the 6th Grade Syllabus are related to the concept of democracy and democratic values with 1st and 6th Units of the course book in particular. However; it was found out that the rest of the units (5 in total) did not give much attention to those concepts. And as a result of the semi-structured interviews, some participants indicated that the outcomes of the syllabus were not sufficient enough to represent the democratic values and that there were insufficiencies those values are abstract ones. And some stated the necessity to enrich the aims and content on democracy and democratic values and to increase the weekly hours of the course hours. İn addition, findings of the study revealed that; democratic values should be included in all of the units of the course book rather than restricting them to the themes of "Individual and Society" and "Active Citizenship".