Using Historical Stories to Teach Tolerance: The Experiences of Turkish Eighth-Grade Students

This study's primary purpose is to investigate the ways in which eighth-grade students responded to a story told to them in a history lesson, which was intended to teach them tolerance. The author used a qualitative approach to gather data in this study. First, he researched the literature dealing with the importance of storytelling in education. Second, he used a semistructured interview to elicit the attitudes of twenty randomly chosen eighth-grade students, both toward the story itself and toward the activities based on the story. The author conducted the research in May 2005 in a primary school in the city of Trabzon, Turkey. The compiled data revealed the following results: the use of stories can make history lessons interesting and enjoyable; by listening to this story, students recognized that people with different religions and ethnicities can live together peacefully; the story influenced students' ideas about people from different cultural backgrounds in a positive way; and students recognized that tolerance is important if people are to live together.