Action research through art: Social studies in early childhood

Early childhood social studies education prepares children for global citizenship by providing them with democratic values and social skills. Social studies is a field in which children learn from experience in their daily lives and sometimes gain awareness through planned learning processes. Through action research methods, this study aims to equip early childhood children with knowledge and awareness in areas such as poverty, family differences, and special needs. During the course of the research process, researchers collected data using a variety of approaches, including observations of children, interviews with teachers, researcher diaries, comments from other members of the school staff, and the opinions of the validity committee. The collected data were analyzed in two stages. In the first stage, the inductive analysis method was used to determine the focus group and identify the problems. The previous themes guided the use of deductive analysis in the action plan process. In this context, the study’s main participants were 15 children in need of intervention and their teachers. As a result of the intervention applied to children through collaborative action research, great changes emerged in children’s perceptions of the differences in their environment.