The Place of Contemporary Religious Issues in Religious Culture and Ethics Courses: an Evaluation According To Teachers' Views

Abstract

Depending on the changing time and renewed conditions, the needs and expectations of the society diversity, so that searches emerge in many areas of life. This situation is also reflected in the religious field. People constantly feel the need to reconsider religious provisions according to their lives, within the framework of changing conditions depending on time and conditions. Considering Islam specifically, it is seen that interpretations and jurisprudence are made by competent institutions in the areas where innovations and transformations take place, and the said need is tried to be met in this way. One of the areas where innovations and transformations in Turkey are handled from a religious perspective, depending on current conditions, are schools and the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge courses taught here. As a matter of fact, the fourth unit of this course in the 12th Grade of Secondary Education is titled "Contemporary Religious Issues". Some situations and events that are encountered in daily life and which are questioned and answered in terms of religious judgment are discussed and processed in this unit. In this study, it is aimed to examine and evaluate the general structure, content and processing of the Current Religious Issues unit in the learning-teaching process from the perspective of Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge teachers. The study was designed in accordance with the case study pattern, one of the qualitative research methods. In this direction, the unit of Contemporary Religious Issues and the teaching of this unit in the lessons have been accepted as a situation that can be the subject of research. Semi-structured interview technique was used to collect data. In this context, 9 participants with different gender, school type, seniority and education status were identified and online interviews were conducted with them after obtaining the necessary ethics committee permissions. These recorded interviews were first transcribed and then tried to be analyzed by the researchers through content analysis. The analysis of the data was carried out in two separate steps, first reaching the codes and then generating themes from these codes. At the end of the data analysis process, 5 themes emerged in the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge teacher's views on the unit and the topics covered in this unit. These themes are: Need, current value of content, teacher efficacy, use of methods and materials, and problems encountered. All the teachers who participated in the research within the framework of the first theme stated that it is a necessity to deal with the religious provisions and explanations of the current issues within the scope of this course. In the second theme, where the current value of the content is discussed, the teachers found the topics of this unit to be related to the current, but stated that this relationship was not sufficient. In addition to this, they made suggestions to take into account the topics such as e-commerce and metaverse, which are increasing in value and frequently questioned by students. In the third theme, where the teachers evaluated their own competencies, the view that this competency was below their own expectations came to the fore. In the fourth theme, in which the methods and materials used in the teaching of the related unit are discussed, it has been determined that the teachers cannot exceed the classical methods, especially the lecture and question-answer, and include method diversity. In the use of materials, on the other hand, it was observed that the facilities of the schools were mainly used, and material development and production did not occur. Lastly, the problems encountered are that this unit is the penultimate unit of the 12th grade, where students are close to graduation, and the acquisitions related to current issues are not reflected in daily life as a habit. The themes obtained were handled and discussed as findings titles, and then they were concluded and various suggestions were developed on the subject.