Investigation of students' historical empathy experiences in social study course

Historical empathy is the process of students' cognitive and affective engagement with historical characters to better understand their actions, decisions, and experiences and interpret them according to the conditions of the era. Although the importance of historical empathy in education is a controversial subject, it has been observed that the term has been conceptualized with different dimensions in recent studies and it is now considered to be an important skill to be acquired by students. In this study, based on the objective "Realizes the changes in the political, social and cultural fields with the acceptance of Islam by Turks" of the "Culture and Heritage" learning area of Social Studies course, it was aimed to examine students' historical empathy experiences under historical context, perspective taking, and affective connection sub-dimensions through activities prepared with historical evidence. In this context, educational case study, one of the qualitative research methods, was determined as the method of the research. The study group of this research consisted of 6th grade students in a state school in city of Sinop in the 2019-2020 academic year. The data of the study were obtained from participatory observation, written documents obtained from classroom activities and drama activity. Descriptive analysis was used in analyzing the data. As a result of the research, it was found that students mostly empathize through historical context, but some students can achieve a strong historical empathy through perspective taking and affective connection. It was found that students who can take perspective through the historical context have a strong historical context knowledge. When the activities and in-class dialogues were examined, it was observed that very few of the students could achieve historical empathy by establishing affective connections. However, it was observed that some student worksheets have findings regarding presentism and anachronistic thinking, and this situation creates breaks in their historical empathy experiences.