ABSTRACT. With its history dating back to the Open Education movement in the early 20th Century, the Project approach include education applications supporting children's development in multiple ways, especially with its emphasis on research. Starting from this point of view, the purpose of this study is to outline the prominent features of the Project approach and to illustrate how educators can apply this approach within the scope of the Turkish Ministry of National Education's Preschool Education Program 2013 in Turkey. To this end, the main problems observed in the preschool education field in Turkey is briefly discussed and then overlapping areas of focus between the Project approach and official preschool education program in Turkey are shown. Then, basic features and phases of Project approach are outlined based on the works of Lilian G. Katz, Judy Harris Helm and Sylvia Katz. Finally, the phases of implementing The Inquiries of Dendrologists Project that took place in a publicly funded preschool is described using visual samples of activities in different phases of the project. The project was implemented with children who live in disadvantaged life conditions. As the project implementation shows, the Project approach offers flexible planning tools, therefore, it can be adapted as an effective teaching and learning approach to support preschoolers' development in Turkish Education System.
The aim of this research is to describe the attitudes of preschool and primary school teachers towards multicultural education based on various demographic variables. This study is part of a quantitative research that used the relational survey model. The convenience sampling was used and 550 teacher candidates in preschool and primary school teacher education participated in this study from a public university in Central Anatolian Region during the 2015-2016 term. The research instrument consisted of "Multicultural Attitude Scale for Teacher Candidates" and a General Information Form which included of 22 demographic questions. The data analysis included the validity and reliability, and normality tests for the data collection tool Non-parametric tests including Kruskall Wallis, Mann Whitney U and Spearman correlation analyzes were performed with the collected data. As a result of the study, the attitudes towards multicultural education were found to be more positive than the average. Teacher candidates showed significant differences in their attitudes towards multicultural education based on their gender, mother's educational status, participation in gender or multicultural studies, having different cultural experiences and experiences of discrimination due to any differences. At the same time, a positive relationships were found between the frequency of teacher candidates' non-school activities, the presence of friends from different groups and their attitudes towards multicultural education.
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