An Investigation of Pre-Service Teachers' Perception of Historical Time Through The Time Tables

Abstract

Perception of historical time is shaped through the development of individuals. Individual's perception of time directly affects his/her view and interpretation of historical events. It is crucial to investigate how pre-service teachers perceive the historical time. Such an investigation becomes even more crucial for the pre-service primary teachers who teach history as a whole and with a holistic perspective. In this study, a pre-service teacher's perception of historical time was investigated through the readings of a€œtime tablesa€ prepared by this teacher candidate. For this purpose, a cluster of 56 first year pre-service primary teachers from the University of Gaziantep was chosen for the study. They were asked to prepare time tables for the events that they thought were important. Following this, they were also applied a questionnaire with 11 open-ended items on the topic they chose for the time tables. This study adopts a qualitative approach with a descriptive purpose. The data obtained from the questionnaires will be analyzed along with the time tables developed by the teacher candidates. Acording to finds it's seen students have made time tables to different time forms oppossite to linner-metric time of Modernism. Its seen students have used lineer and cyclica and with ups and downs and intermediate-forms in their time tables. As the participants tended to express the historical processes in accord with their own understandings, they adopted different ways and languages in the prepared time tables.