Education faculty students’ tendencies and beliefs about the teacher's role in education: A case study in a Turkish University

This study aims at determining the tendencies of teacher candidates in a Turkish university concerning static (institutional) versus innovative (democratic and global) teacher roles, along with the relation between these roles and explanatory variables. The study covers 419 teacher candidates from the Turkish, mathematics, humanities, sciences and class teaching areas.The results of the study show that the teacher candidates are sensitive towards democratic and global teacher roles while they are undecided about static institutional roles. The explanatory variables such as education, levels of parental income and gender are found to be significant in affecting the teacher candidates’ responses. The findings related to the areas of specialisation indicate that teacher training programmes in Turkey are not successful in harmonising the attitudes of the teacher candidates towards their profession. Hence, it may be deduced that teacher training programmes are in need of restructuring to harmonise the attitudes of teacher candidates in an individualised and flexible way.