Abstract:

In the process of including individuals with disabilities in general education classes, the attitudes of peers who show typical development also play a critical role. Therefore, the content of the texts written for all students should represent the world we live in and reflect the original stories through the depiction of appropriate characters and visuals. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate how much, at what level, and how individuals with disabilities are represented in Turkish textbooks. Primary and middle school (1st-8th grade) Turkish textbooks published by the Ministry of National Education have been used from the 2019-2020 academic year were examined. For this reason, this study is a qualitative research in which document analysis is administered and the qualitative data collection and evaluation methods are used. All texts related to individuals with disabilities were approximately 2.3% of the texts in all books, and the visual contents related to individuals with disabilities were approximately 3% of the visual contents in all books. The findings of this study indicated that the content related to special needs has a very low percentage compared to the whole content. Suggestions for future enhancements were discussed.

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