Perceptions of social studies teacher candidates on alternative teaching techniques

Alternative teaching tecniques are student-centered techniques that make gaining a variety of knowledge, skills and values on any subject eaiser to students. Undoubtedly, the most imporant task in the use of these techniques in the Social Studies course belongs to teachers and teacher candidates. The aim of this study is to elicit the perceptions of Social Studies teacher candidates on alternative teaching techniques. This study used phenomenologial approach, one of the methods of qualitative methotology. The participant of the study consisted of 40 social studies teacher canditates (10 students from each freshman, sophomore, junior and senior grades), studied in Kastamonu University, Faculty of Education in the spring semester of 2018-2019 academic year. A structured interview form was employed to get perceptions of participants on alternative teaching techniques. Firstly, a question pool fit to serve aim and sub-problems was made. Then these questions were examined and narrowed down by three social studies education experts. In order to improve the validity, reliability and practicacility of the from the pilot study was done with 30 social studies teacher candidates. At last, the final version of the from was done according to the feedbacks. The collected were analyzed with content analysis. The results of the study showed that social studies teacher candidates do not have complete knowledge on alternative teaching techniques. It is observed that teacher candidates' understanding of alternative teaching techniques are gradually decreased from sophomore and they have similar misconceptions. This situation suggests the possibility that teacher candidates may use these alternative teaching techniques on a limited scale or not in their courses in the future.