Abstract
AN INVESTIGATION OF PRE-SERVICE CLASSROOM TEACHERS’ CURIOSITY ABOUT HISTORY
Research in education indicates that curiosity has two dimensions as perceptional and epistemic. Perceptional curiosity manifests itself through sense organs while epistemic curiosity is often based on knowledge. The current study, based on the question “May different knowledge forms generate different curiosities if curiosity stems from knowledge?”, focused on the curiosity about the discipline of history with a unique knowledge structure and examined the history topics that pre-service classroom teachers were curious about, along with teachers’ motives for being curious about these topics. Various inferences on the (dimensions of) curiosity about history were aimed at, based on the mentioned examinations, in the current study. In the current research, designed as a case study, pre-service teachers’ views were collected via a form prepared through inspiration from 5Ws and 1H technique and basic elements of history. This form aimed to reveal pre-service teachers’ curiosity about historical persons, events, time, and places and the motives for their curiosity.The current study was conducted through views of 196 pre-service teachers who attended 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years at the Department of Classroom Teaching, Abant Izzet Baysal University, in the fall of 2013-2014 academic years. Pre-service teachers’ curiosity about historical persons, events, time, and placeswas descriptively analyzed. Their motives for curiosity were content-analyzed to present various inferences on different dimensions of curiosity about history. Thus, when pre-service teachers’ motives for curiosity about history were examined, it was observed that those historically important were wondered about more. When the dimensions other than the historical importance were examined within motives for curiosity about history, it was observed that curiosity about history may include affective dimensions such as empathy, sympathy, and antipathy; media or social environment may be effective; and inadequate knowledge and conflicts within the existing knowledge may bring about curiosity about history. Based on these inferences, a classification of curiosity about history was included at the end of the current study.
Keywords
Curiosity about history, pre-service classroom teachers, history education
