Geography and Religious Education: “Our Soul Geography” in Turkish Religious Education
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Abstract
Religious education (Religious Culture and Ethics Knowledge, the RCEK) curriculum was last updated in 2018 in Türkiye. With this update, important changes occurred in the aims and content of the curriculum. One of them is the addition of a unit called “Our Soul Geography”, which was not included in the previous curricula. Research on curricula contributes to the curriculum development. In this context, the research question is “What is the learning-teaching process of the “Our Soul Geography” in Religious Culture and Ethics Knowledge?” The term “Our Soul Geography” denotes places where Islamic culture has existed from Hijaz to Andalusia. The research was designed according to the case study, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The study group of the research consists of five teachers who teach at the 9th grade. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data. The curriculum and the textbooks were also analysed. An analysis of the textbooks finds that they contain conflicting information, use irrelevant pictures and have limited number of activities. Participating teachers, on the other hand, pointed out that the unit included too much information, that the unit was usually skipped, that they used various learning-teaching methods and techniques and that the students were uninterested in the unit. In this context, they pointed out that it would be more appropriate to distribute the unit under different units rather than teaching it as a whole.
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