Arts-based culture and cultural heritage education in social studies course

Social studies is a course that formally supports individuals' processes of socialization and acquiring citizenship competencies. Internalizing the culture of the society to which an individual belongs plays a crucial role in the process of socialization and in the acquisition of citizenship competencies. Accordingly, in the social studies course, the teaching of culture and cultural heritage is carried out through content designed in accordance with students' meaning-making frameworks and levels of comprehension. In this process, which aims for students to recognize and make sense of the cultural heritage of the society in which they live, to develop a sense of responsibility for its preservation by internalizing this heritage, to contribute to the intergenerational transmission of shared values, and to assume an active role in ensuring cultural continuity, various teaching–learning approaches, strategies, methods, and techniques can be employed. Among these, making use of art may occupy a distinctive place, as art functions as an element, bearer, and transmitter of culture. Art's relationship with society, its power to develop and transmit culture, and its role as an educational tool indicate the importance of its use in the social studies course. The use of art in the teaching of culture and cultural heritage topics in the social studies course may be made possible through arts-based education. The purpose of this study is to develop lesson plans incorporating arts-based activities for use in the teaching of culture and cultural heritage topics in the fourth-grade social studies course at the primary school level, and to examine the effects of arts-based activities on students' academic achievement, sensitivity to cultural heritage, participation in the social studies course, and beliefs toward the social studies course, as well as to evaluate the quality of the arts-based activities through qualitative data collected during the process. For this purpose, the study adopted an embedded experimental design, one of the mixed research methods. In the study, priority was given to the quantitative component, qualitative data were embedded within the quantitative data, and were used to explain the results obtained from the quantitative findings. The study was conducted in three main phases during which quantitative and qualitative data were collected, and the stages of the ASSURE instructional design model were integrated into these phases. In the first phase, qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interview forms from study groups consisting of students, teachers, and experts in the fields of subject matter and fine arts education, with the aim of preparing for the quasi-experimental intervention process and developing arts-based activities. In the second phase, with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness and quality of the arts-based activities, the study was conducted with two experimental groups, two control groups, and the teacher of one of the experimental groups. In the other experimental group, the implementation was carried out by the researcher. In the second phase, the common heritage academic achievement test, the cultural heritage sensitivity scale, the social studies course participation scale, the social studies course belief scale, and student, teacher, and researcher journals constituted the data collection instruments. The third phase comprises the qualitative component in which views on the effectiveness and quality of the arts-based activities were obtained following the experimental procedure. The data for this phase were obtained from the experimental group students, the classroom teacher who implemented the intervention in one of the experimental groups, and the researcher who carried out the implementation in the other experimental group. As data collection instruments, a focus group interview form for the experimental group students and interview forms for the researcher and the teacher in the experimental groups were used. The qualitative data from the first phase were subjected to descriptive analysis. In the analysis of the quantitative data from the second phase, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), paired-samples t-test, independent samples t-test, and Pearson correlation analysis were employed. The qualitative data from the second and third phases were analyzed using both descriptive analysis and content analysis. SPSS 29.0 was used for the analysis of the quantitative data, and MAXQDA 24 was utilized for the analysis of the qualitative data. The quantitative findings obtained from the study indicate that arts-based activities have significant and positive effects on students' academic achievement in culture and cultural heritage topics, their sensitivity to cultural heritage, their participation in the social studies course, and their beliefs toward the social studies course. These results were consistent with the qualitative findings collected during the second and third phases. The results regarding the quality of the arts-based activities revealed that the lessons were perceived as enjoyable, entertaining, instructive, and exciting; that the activities were considered enjoyable, entertaining, instructive, exciting, and imagination-enhancing; and that the reasons for favoring the activities included their being entertaining, instructive, and based on active participation, their association with the homeland, their ability to evoke a sense of the past, as well as students' appreciation of music, drama, cutting and pasting, and drawing. Moreover, it was determined that while engaging in arts-based activities, students reflected on the past and on how to carry out the activities, and reported feeling happy, good, excited, knowledgeable, as if they were in the past, and curious. Based on the results of the study, it is recommended that arts-based educational activities, whose effectiveness and quality have been demonstrated, be used by classroom teachers in the teaching of culture and cultural heritage topics in the school social studies course.