Examination of french secondary school history-geography teaching programmes

Abstract

French and Turkish societies have been in intense interaction in every field since the Ottoman Empire period. For this reason, it is important for the future of both countries that the republics of Turkey and France follow and interact with each other in the field of education as in every field. Because France has had important effects on the shaping of the Turkish education system. In this context, the developments in the field of education in France should be closely followed. In addition, the developments in France after the French Revolution of 1789 have influenced all societies on issues such as human rights and democracy and helped the concept of citizen to have its current meaning. For this reason, it is important to examine the current situation of disciplines such as Social Studies, which are directly related to human and social life, in France. However, when the relevant national literature was analyzed, it was found that there are very few studies on this subject. This situation was seen as an important gap in the national literature and it was thought that a study on the History-Geography course, which is taught in France as an equivalent of the Social Studies course, would make an important contribution to the literature. With this in mind, it was aimed to examine the History-Geography Course Curriculum being implemented in secondary schools in France. The research is a qualitative study and document analysis method was used. Descriptive analysis method was preferred in analyzing the data. As a result of the research, it was seen that the curriculum being taught in secondary schools in France consists of three parts as skills, content, learning and teaching process, the content is arranged in the form of themes and subjects, themes and subjects are arranged separately according to grade levels, and there are no target achievements in the curriculum. It has been concluded that the themes and topics related to history in the curriculum are mostly oriented towards France and European societies, considering the multicultural and cosmopolitan structure of France, the curriculum is not multicultural enough for the minority groups in France, and the geography topics are created with a more universal perspective for different regions of the world compared to history topics. In addition, it has been determined that there is no section on evaluation in the curriculum, but it is recommended to use process-oriented evaluations based on performance as well as exams in the learning-teaching process.