Ceren Karadeniz

The Views of Prospective Classroom Teachers on Cultural Heritage-themed Museum Education Course

ABSTRACT Culture as a complex unity comprised of knowledge, beliefs, art, ethics and customs collectively relates to the acquired skills by individuals as the members of one larger community. By virtue of this feature, museums have been specialized as informal educational settings aiding the teaching of tangible and intangible heritage. Museum education serves a long list of purposes ranging from familiarizing with one’s own culture and recognizing other cultures through a multidimensional and tolerant perspective and better internalizing intercultural similarities and differences in addition to effectively bolstering the awareness on preserving cultural assets. This research was carried out to demonstrate the views of prospective classroom teachers, having studied “cultural heritage” -themed Museum Education Course, in Ankara University Department of Classroom Teaching, on the implementation of museums in cultural heritage education; and to monitor skills of concerned participants in utilizing museums for educational purposes during their in-service teaching experiences.