Abstract:

This paper aims to reveal prospective social studies teachers’ conceptions of history. The study group consists of 97 prospective social studies teachers studying at a university in southern Turkey in the first half of the 2019-2020 academic year. The participants were randomly selected from each grade level. History is inherently abstract and very extensive. For this reason, the study group’s conceptions of history were examined in three stages in this study. In the first stage, the participants were asked to draw the first five things that came to their minds about history. In the second stage, they were asked to choose a drawing from these five drawings that they most closely identified and associated with history and write down the reasons for choosing that particular drawing. Finally, in the third stage, unstructured interviews were conducted with seven volunteer participants to reveal their reasons for choosing the drawings. The findings obtained as a result of the content analysis showed that the participants’ conceptions of history were collected in 12 different categories. Most of the drawings were about wars and war-related phenomena. The motifs underlying the participants’ conceptions of history were collected in 9 different categories. The study concludes that participants’ conceptions of history are shaped on the basis of historical consciousness and that history is a dynamic process that affects the structure of modern societies.

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