Social studies teachers' knowledge, experience and instructions regarding global education

Global education aims to promote necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes in order for students to co-exist in the new World in which political, social, and economical borders rapidly diminish and different nations and cultures are able to communicate with each other faster than ever. Another purpose of global education is to provide students with both local and universal values, which would give them an opportunity to make informed and effective decisions as citizens. Since one of the crucial roles of social studies is also to help students to become informed and effective citizens, global education and social studies education strongly attached to each other. Education received at early ages crucially influences one's knowledge, experience, and values in his/her later life. Therefore, social studies education curriculum and instructions at elementary level should be constructed as it could provide both national and universal values to meet students' needs as global citizens. Hence the role of social studies teachers become significant in defining the concept of global citizenship and infusing global perspective in education. This study employs phenomenology as a method to discover social studies teachers' perceptions of global education and its elements. It also tries to examine the participants' knowledge, experience, and in classroom activities regarding infusing global perspective into social studies education. Within the purposeful sampling the researchers used maximum variation sampling method in order to select participants. The participants were 4 social studies teachers who were employed in 4 different public schools during spring semester in 2012-2013 school year. The researchers has conducted 4 semi-structured individual interviews with the participants. Moreover, in order to increase the trustworthiness of the study, the researchers has observed the social studies teachers in their classrooms. In order to code and categorize the data, qualitative data analysis software, NVivo 10 was used. Also, inductive data analysis method was employed to analyze the data of this study. Keywords: Global education, the social studies, curriculum, social studies teachers, teacher education