Patriotism and Global Citizenship as Values: A Research on Social Studies Teacher Candidates

Abstract

The ultimate aim of teaching Social Studies is to raise good citizens. However, raising “good” citizens has become a more complicated issue since the continuous change in social dynamics demands continual revisions on curriculums. Beyond the question of “Should the children be raised as patriot individuals?” a growing number of studies conducted on Education Science concentrate on the notion of Global Citizenship. The purpose of Social Studies’ education process is not bringing up students who are isolated from society and are blind patriots. Then the question arises, what type of citizenship should be developed within the education system? This research aims to put forward the notion of global citizenship and patriotism as each of them is a value within the Social Studies course that has the mission of bringing up good citizens. The research is the model case study. The data about patriotism is collected through the scale that are developed by Schatz, Staub and Levine (1999) which is called, Patriotism Attitude Scale (PAS), on the other side, the data about global citizenship is collected through the scale developed by Morais and Ogden (2011) which is called Global Citizen Scale (GCS) collected from the participants. The research study group consist of 144 Social Studies teacher candidates who are from two different state universities, who are in their senior grade. The research data includes quantitative and qualitative data. In the analysis of the quantitative data, a computer-aided statistic program is used and in the analysis of qualitative data, content-analysis method was used. The research’s conclusion shows that the participants prefer patriotism over global citizenship and constructive patriotism against blind patriotism.

Keywords: Social Studies, Values Education, Patriotism, Global Citizenship