The Development of Values Education in the Turkish High School Geography Curriculum

Abstract

In addition to providing knowledge and skills to individuals in the educational process, it is also aimed to attainment value and attitude. In this context, today, values are included in the curriculum of many countries around the world as a curriculum component. The aim of this research is to examine the geography course curriculum (GCC) applied in Turkey from the Republic to the present day with the dimension of values education. In this study, which is a qualitative research, descriptive content analysis method was used. All GCC’s applied from 1924 to the present day constitute the universe of research. Since the entire research universe has been reached, no sample selection has been made. All GCC’s that make up the research universe have been subjected to descriptive analysis. According to the results of the analysis, the research findings were presented in three periods: 1924-1971, 1971-2005 and 2005-2021. Accordingly, the GCC’s applied between 1924 and 1971 do not include any content related to values education, while the GCC’s applied between 1971-2005 included values implicitly in the general teaching purposes, and in the period 2005-2021, a curriculum element of values was included in the GCC. With the 2017 GCC, values were relationship with attainment, unit and class level for the first time. As a result, in the last half century, GCC’s have shown slow but continuous development in terms of values education, but there are some problems in practice.