An Investigation of 8th Grade Students’ Perceptions Of Democratic Values Through Cartoons

Abstract

This study aims to investigate eight grade students’ perceptions of some democratic values through the use of cartoons. The values under examination are equality, justice, freedom and solidarity. Designed as an explorative qualitative study, this work intends to describe and discuss the participants’ perceptions on some values. The study group consists of 60 grade eight students attending to public school in Manisa province in 2014-2015 academic year. At the first phase of the study, all students in the study group were given a matching exercise. Then they were asked to match each cartoon in their worksheets to the relevant democratic value. At the second phase, it was requested from students to associate each given cartoon to relevant democratic value and then interpret and evaluate her/his reasoning behind each association they made. The findings reveal that more than half of the students intermixes the values of justice and equality. They also experienced difficulties in interpreting the cartoons related to freedom. The findings also indicate that students perceive justice as a more important and useful value than equality. Some of them defended that in order to achieve at more fair social life standards, it is necessary to practice positive discrimination against some disadvantaged individuals or groups. Besides, most participants perceived freedom mostly to freedom of thought and freedom of action, while a sizeable group associated the value of equality with sharing, not being greedy, to be contended and congenial. In relation with the value of solidarity, the students emphasized on collaboration, cooperation, helping each other and resisting injustice.