Special Education Candidate Teachers’ Metaphors about Social Media

Abstract

Because technology is developing each day and internet is getting easier to access, the types of communication among the people also have a constant alteration. Social media being one of the leads, especially the students undergoing an education frequently use these new communication styles. Studies in this context suggest that students do not use social media only to communicate with each other but also to exchange information, cooperate and share their class materials. In this regard, the perspectives of those who will be teaching students with special needs regarding social media are important to focus on. Therefore, this inquiry aims to identify the approaches of special education candidate teachers about social media courses through metaphors. The phenomenological research design was applied in this study. Participants were chosen from the candidate teachers who studied Special Education Teaching at Sakarya University Education Faculty in 2017 and 2018. The data was collected through the forms which had expressions as “because it is … social media is like … “and content analysis was used to examine this data. The forms were filled by 87 participants and the results show that they have developed 81 different metaphors. Based on the reasons for these metaphors researchers formed 6 categories: life colour, side effect, object, dependency, necessity and waste of time. It was also observed that the perspectives of special education candidate teachers about social media courses were typically positive.