Feride the Wren: Teaching Profession for Turkish Language Pre-service Teachers

Abstract

Personal experiences, previous school life, teachers in their close environment, cultural and sociological dynamics in society, and books and movies are some of the factors in the research area of the teaching profession affecting pre-service teachers’ views. Turkish Language pre-service teachers are supposed to deal with literate texts as the requirement of their field. The current research aims to examine how Turkish language pre-service teachers perceive teaching as a profession through their evaluation of The Wren by Reşat Nuri Güntekin, which has been representing the role model and idealist teacher for so long in Turkey. Designed as a qualitative study, the data was gathered from the senior students attending in Turkish Language Education Department at Pamukkale University in two phases in the 2021-2022 academic year. Results suggest a close association between what pre-service teachers think about "being a teacher" and how they perceive themselves as teachers. Results also suggest that preservice teachers idealized a good teacher and take attention to the forming and guiding function of the teacher. Pre-service teachers do not perceive Feride as an ideal teacher and cannot imagine her as their colleague however she is strongly coherent with their profile of a good teacher.

Keywords

• teaching profession
• being a teacher
• the wren
• pre-service teachers

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