Evaluation of the Concept of Democracy from the Perspective of Teacher Candidates

Abstract

Democracy should not be considered briefly on the basis of government or state; because democracy is also a way of life. Democracy is a political system in state administration based on the idea that sovereign rights belong to the people. Democracy, which is handled by different people and different thought systems, has given very different meanings. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the concept of democracy from the perspective of teacher candidates. In order to reveal how the concept of democracy is understood by teacher candidates, the phenomenology design, which is one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the research. The study group of the research consists of 50 social studies teacher candidates studying at the Faculty of Education at Fırat and Alparslan Universities in the 2022-2023 academic year. The opinions of the pre-service teachers were taken with a semi-structured interview form consisting of open-ended questions. The obtained data were analyzed by using qualitative data analysis technique. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis was performed. The NVivo program was used in the analysis of the data and in the creation of the models. As a result of the research, it was seen that social studies teacher candidates have different perceptions about the concept of democracy and they justify this situation differently from each other.