Dealing with controversial issues in primary school classroom interactions in social studies courses

Abstract

Background

Controversial issues are complex and views on these issues differ due to cultural backgrounds and different perspectives. In social studies education, teachers can use controversial issues to enable students to learn about the society and to prepare them for their role as citizens.

Aims and sample

This study aims to investigate how controversial issues are dealt with in the fourth grade social studies course by focusing on classroom talk. The data for this study comes from 17 h of video recorded fourth grade social studies classroom interaction.

Methods

Conversation analysis was adopted as the methodological framework. Four representative extracts were selected from the data in which the controversial issues were presented and analyzed.

Results

The teacher deals with controversial issues in the social studies course in two ways. In one of them, the teacher introduces the social studies course with controversial issues and then moves on to a specific activity in the course by linking it to these issues, while in the other, the teacher explains the topics in the social studies course and then moves to controversial issues related to these topics. In all extracts, teachers and students express their personal feelings and opinions about controversial issues and refer to authoritative figures and sources that have an important place in their culture to reinforce these opinions.

Conclusions

The results showed that the teacher used controversial issues for pedagogical purposes by using a context-specific interactional resource, such as transitioning between course-specific knowledge and real-life problems, to facilitate student participation.