Abstract
TEACHER CANDIDATE’S PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN THEIR PICTORIAL REPRESENTATIONS
One of the most effective ways for students to express themselves in teaching environments are artistic activities and pictorial representations. Pictorial representation is a criterion that helps recognize person beside this pictorial representation is also important since it is a representation tool that allows reflecting person’s intelligence, personality, qualifications and their inner world. In this context the study aimed to reveal teacher candidates’ perceptions of social networks through their pictorial representations and their written expressions based on their pictorial representations. Art based inquiry was used in the process of data analysis. The study was carried out with 92 teacher candidates on education faculty. The research data were collected via teacher candidates’ drawings that were expected to reflect their perceptions of social networks and their written ideas about what they depicted in their drawings. Content analysis was applied for the analysis and interpretation of the data. As a result of the research teacher candidates’ views on social networks divided into two sub-themes as usage purpose of social networks and the impact of social networks. Most of the teacher candidates use social networks in order to communicate and they believe that social network usage leads addiction. Another result reached at the research is that most of the teacher candidates use smartphones to access social networks and the most used social network application is Facebook.
Keywords
Social networks, pictorial representation, teacher candidates
