Qualitative Data Collection and Interpretation : A Turkish Social Studies Lesson

The classroom with its teaching-learning dynamics creates a kind of “embryonic society” in which the micro-policies of collective social knowledge construction and meaning can be re-constructed; therefore, it can be considered as a kind of “mirror” of political culture. Thus, comparative lesson research, which requires indepth classroom observation, has been getting much attention among educational community. On the other hand, there have not been done many studies that represent social studies and civics in particular, in this research tradition. Naturally, this research tradition is based on qualitative research paradigm. Likewise, qualitative research tradition has been getting increasing attention among educational community. Thus, the first purpose of this article is to explain all documentation and pre-interpretation process of this lesson so that it can provide an example for qualitative researchers. The second purpose of this article is to provide an example lesson of political education from Turkey so that educators worldwide can compare one example of social studies education practice in Turkey and with their countries.


Introduction
In a few countries there is a tradition of lesson research at school which is related to teaching or learning styles.But what about representing social studies and civics in particular, in this research strand?Compared to Math, Turkish or English, the PISA subjects, social studies might be regarded as a "minor" subject that it is not worth paying attention.To discuss this issue, it might be useful to activate our social imagination for a moment: Estimate the number of social studies lessons taught, e.g. in a country like Turkey.Social studies courses are taught three lessons a week from grades four to seven in Turkey.According to current statistic provided by the Ministry of National Education there are almost five and half million students from grades four to seven in Turkey and they are taught in more than 200 000 classrooms (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı [Ministry of National Education], 2016).This results in 600 000 social studies lessons a week, 21.6 million lessons a year!If civics topics in a narrower sense attain 10% in the social studies teaching/curriculum, it still means 2 100 000 civics lessons are taught in Turkey/a year.This number could be achieved easily as the role of civic, global perspective and media literacy increasing in social studies education in Turkey (see Ayas, 2015;Çulha-Özbaş & Güryay, 2014;Günel & Pehlivan, 2015;Öcal & Yakar, 2015).Even in a worst case scenario where 50% of the lessons are cancelled due to illness, lack of qualified teachers, and several other reasons the sheer number would remain more than one million which is very powerful.
According to John Dewey (1915) the classroom with its teaching-learning dynamics creates a kind of "embryonic society" in which the micro-policies of collective social knowledge construction and meaning can be re-constructed.As a "mirror of political culture" (Schmidt, 2011) a lesson can reveal the macro dimensions in the micro.Therefore, it is expected that a single social studies lesson recorded from Turkey (Açıkalın, 2014), which we are going to discuss in this article, can reflect not only educational norms and practice but also the civic attitudes, civic culture (Almond & Verba, 1989), and social life of the society in Turkey.

Tradition and State of Art
But do we know what is going on in these classrooms systematically and in detail?Today, as a frame of research, comparative research in the field of democratic citizenship and civic education around the world "seems to undergone an explosion of interest" (Levinson, 2011;Hahn, 2010).However, most studies are limited only with what we would like to call the "hardware" of political education which refers to the conditions of educational policies and educational systems, the "input" of related normative documents, and the "output" of measured student competencies.This limitation to the outer side of political education applies to a far extent to the recent international studies such as: -International Civic and Citizenship Study [ICCS] Kerr, 2008), -Ethnic differences in education and diverging prospects for urban youth in an enlarged Europe [EUDMIGROM], (2008), a comparative investigation in ethnically diverse communities with second-generation migrants and Roma youth, which provides numerous observation related to formal and informal citizenship teaching in Czech, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden and UK.
We have numerous research about intended curriculum (input) on the one hand, and student performance and competencies ("outcome") on the other.In contrast, the so called "software" of citizenship education, the inner side of the teaching-learning-processes within a social studies lesson or in informal learning situations, are neither documented nor interpreted.
Thus, the situation in a minor subject like social studies is far beyond from research in a main subject such as math or the foreign languages.Here, the TIMSS's (The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) (1999) video study established a benchmark for research in all other school subjects.The TIMSS video study provides a comparative study of eighth-grade mathematics and science teaching in seven countries.The study involved videotaping and analysing teaching practices in more than one thousand (!) classrooms (Leung, Graf, & Lopez-Real, 2006).
In subject matter lesson research, there are a few countries in the world, which provide a specific tradition (Hudson & Meyer, 2011).Among them is Germany.Due to its history with a totalitarian Nazi state, this appeal to civics [politische Bildung, in German language] is particular (state of the art: Reinhardt, 2015).Starting in 1980's, in a few so called "video books", a single civics lesson has been documented and reflected with the following order (Gagel, Grammes, & Unger, 1992): -Lesson plan of the teacher (topic: asylum seeking in Germany) -Full verbatim protocol -Stimulated recall3 with a) teacher b) student group -Reflections by leading subject matter educators, which deliver multiple perspectives on the lesson -Experience from use of the lesson document in teacher training, including recommendations for "culture of conversation" regarding such documents.
-In addition to the book, a full video tape (VHS) of the lesson can be obtained.
In Turkey, we could identify only a few published verbatim protocols, so far (See Çoşkun-Keskin, 2007;Kılınç, 2014) and the one we are going to discuss in this article (Açıkalın, 2014).Sevgi Çoşkun-Keskin studied empathy based teaching in social studies classrooms and as a main data collection method for her dissertation study, she video recorded and documented several social studies' lessons.In a more recent master thesis regarding student question asking skills in social studies lessons, Güneş Kılınç also video recorded and documented more than thirty course hour social studies' lessons.
With regard to comparative lesson research in the subject matter field of social studies, the study of Schiffauer, Baumann, Kastoryano, & Vertovec (2002) gives a research paradigm.
As a milestone in research, this study has been published bilingually, there is an English as well as a German edition, so it becomes really accessible for international comparative scientific community in the field.A team of four social scientists spend a whole term/year in a secondary school to take ethnographic field notes, as videography is regarded sceptically as interfering in the field.The study schools were chosen in metropolitan regions in Berlin, London, Paris, and Rotterdam.Two researches from different countries always stayed at one school together; within the research team a constant international exchange about the field notes was organized.As qualitative research methodology, an inspiring mixed method strategy with participant observation, document analysis of guidelines and textbooks, individual and group interviews with headmasters, teachers as well as with students was used.
These observations were summed up to well readable reports and imaginative portraits of the school's citizenship culture.Focus of observation is the performance of so called "Turkish" student/youth in those urban schools.Lesson research in a narrower sense is delivered in the chapter about strategies of argumentation, which differs in the British, Dutch, French and German classroom significantly.This is shown in short scenic documentation and vignettes from student discussion moments in the classroom. 4n Turkey, comparative education became apparent as an academic field just around 1960' (Erdoğan, 2003;Genç-Sel, 2004), although there had been numerous attempts to investigate and observe European educational systems by Turkish educators in the past.Many Turkish educators had been sent to European countries since the late Ottoman and early Republic era to observe schools and interact with international educators (Erdoğan, 2003;Genç-Sel, 2004).Although some of the educators stayed in these countries for months, it seems that they mostly collected information about educational and schools' systems -what we call the 'hardware' of education -of these countries.Although they observed several classrooms and took notes and reported their impressions, all the reports do not seem to be indepth by including what was practiced in the classroom as mostly they were interested in the general structure of educational systems of these countries and wanted to import some parts of these systems.According to Genç-Sel (2004), these attempts of modeling educational systems of other countries have not been able to enrich the educational system in Turkey as the local and cultural aspects were not taken under consideration.
As stated above, there have only been a few lesson protocol studies done to date and even less studies with a comparative perspective.To overcome this deficit of research, the Journal of Social Science Education took an initiative and published a number of themed issues focusing on teaching practice in civic and political education from different parts of the world (see Grammes, 2010;Bruen & Grammes, 2014a, 2014b).This civic social studies lesson that is going to be the focus of this paper was also documented and published in one of these themed issues.
Thus, the first purpose of this article is to provide an example lesson regarding the "software" of political education from Turkey so that educators worldwide can compare one example of civics/political education practice in Turkey and with their countries.In order to do that a social studies lesson about human rights was recorded, fully transcribed, and presented in both Turkish and English versions for the readers (Açıkalın, 2014).The second purpose of this article is to explain all documentation and pre-interpretation process of this lesson so that it can provide an example for qualitative researchers.
Thus, this study might not be a classical comparative education study like the ones cited in the former section.Nevertheless, a fully transcribed lesson, as provided in this study, can reflect not only educational norms and practice but also the civic attitudes, civic culture (Almond & Verba, 1989) of a country and can be a "mirror of political culture" (Schmidt, 2011).Therefore, it is expected that the content of the documented lesson itself would be source of comparisons for educators worldwide.Moreover, we see this lesson research tradition in this paper as an opportunity to describe and discuss the documentation and interpretation process of qualitative research.

How to Conduct Qualitative Lesson Research
There is a three-step research process for qualitative lesson research: -Documentation and archiving (representation of practice, creating data corpus) -Understanding of meaning -Interpretation Documentation and Archiving: In this three-step process, the first step, the re-presentation and documentation of social practices, is completely underestimated or even ignored in educational research.In fact, documentation is not only about "collecting information" as it is sometimes understood but also about observation which is very crucial for qualitative lesson research.Documentation of a full lesson can be done either by observation and field notes/report, voice, stills, or video recording.If possible, video recording is preferred as it allows researcher(s) to see body languages of the teacher and students and may provide clues on the physical and psychological atmosphere of the classroom.
Video recording of a whole lesson session is more complicated than it seems.First of all, the video cam must see the whole classroom, the students, and the teacher.Using more than one camera is a good idea in order to take visual from different angels.Also, all voices must be recorded.Thus, the camera must have the capacity and be located in a suitable spot to get all voices in the classroom.There is new classroom video technology which provides a single microphone not only to the teacher, but to each (!) individual student, making cooperative phases of group work accessible to detailed documentation and interpretation; or allowing the learning process of a single student during a teaching/curriculum unit to be tracked (see Kuno & Ikura, 2014).
After getting good quality (visual and audio) recoding, the next step is the transcription process.Transcription must be done word by word and always requires careful watching and listening several times for precise wording.Visual aids would also help the researcher(s) in the transcription process to identify the students who commented and talked in the classroom and the attitudes of students and the teacher.By viewing the full recorded video many times, researcher(s) could explain students' or teachers' actions such as nodding, smiling, or raising a hand within the brackets.Thus, transcription process must be very thorough.
Archiving qualitative data through a lesson transcript also requires careful organization and planning.Especially, if you have numerous lesson videos and other documents such as classroom observation notes and interviews archiving could be messy.So, all documents must be dated and have indexical information, page numbers, and so on.Also, researchers must find a system to organize all voice and visual recording, and all documents such as lesson/activity plans, classroom observation or other field notes in files or folders so that when they need to reexamine the specific source they can track them back easily.

Understanding of Meaning:
When interpreting qualitative data such as lesson or interview transcripts understanding the exact meaning of the words can sometimes be tricky.Especially, if you need to translate the transcript to another language, providing appropriate meanings of the words becomes much more complicated.Nevertheless, when you read a transcript even in your own language, words may not always provide the exact meaning of the participants.In this case, we may understand what the participant meant by interpreting his/her body language.Another way to make the reader to understand the meaning of what happened in the classroom is to provide contextual information in the details.This is called rich or "thick" description (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) which allows the reader to enter the research context.In this description, additional information like still photos, notes on the blackboard, handouts (learning materials, textbook sources …) and gendered seating plan are necessary to provide for readers.If students should remain anonymous or no "right of picture" is given, a good solution can be a sketch.The researcher must describe the participant's background, school, and classroom context in a very detailed way in order to give the reader as much contextual information as possible, (Lincoln & Guba, 1985;Merriam, 1998;Patton, 2003;Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2013) which may help the reader to understand the meaning in the lesson protocol.
Interpretation: Interpretation of the qualitative data like other processes of qualitative research is a prerequisite rich process.The nature of interpretation remains subjective as long as it is not carefully embedded within an explicit theoretical framework which makes the interpretation process almost always argumentative.No interpretation without making theoretical assumptions is explicit!Nevertheless, researchers / interpreters must be aware and identify their subjectivity in order to increase the trustworthiness of the research (Creswell, 2013;Glesne, 1999;Peshkin, 1988).Peshkin (1988) states that "researchers should systematically identify their subjectivity throughout the course of research" (p.17).
Basically, in reading exactly the same text, two different people may reach completely opposite conclusions.One reason is every person has a different cultural and educational background and personality.We are going to discuss and exemplify how interpretation could be so different in the following sections when presenting the comments of social studies educators about the lesson protocol coming from different parts of the world.Nevertheless, it must be noted that the power of the comments lie in providing evidence that support it from the protocol and it's context.Thus, just reaching a conclusion by quoting the protocol is not sufficient.We also need to provide candid evidence for the conclusion and explain the process and idea behind it.

Criterion of Quality: Documentation
There is no "typical" Turkish civics lesson, and this one that we are discussing definitely is not!Although it is not possible to say this single lesson can "represent" all elements of the Turkish society and educational culture -in fact, a single document/case does not represent anything else as itself -it allows various different ideas and perspectives to be identified from the lesson.Thus, applying a qualitative research method is exploratory, which seems reasonable in this case as our initial purpose is to understand or at least get familiar with the various types and styles of Turkish social studies education practice and civic lesson culture.This single case can be used for exploration and heuristic, creating a hypothesis for further more systematic research.
The following case study of a single civics lesson is explorative.This means, no "regular" research has been done so far, but the necessary steps towards it.The task is to gain/develop questions for further and more systematic research on a broader corpus of lessons.This also can be considered as "qualitative heuristic" research which is based on systematic exploration and discovery in psychological and sociological research (Kleining & Witt, 2000).
The documented lesson was recorded in a 7 th grade Social Studies [Sosyal Bilgiler] classroom.The lesson was videotaped/recorded in March 2013 and two cameras were used for recording.The lesson topic was about human rights which is a core topic in social studies education.The topic has also been part of the school development programs by the Council of Europe and the other organizations' projects in Turkey (Arat, 2007;Council of Europe [CoE], 2011-2014;The European Wergeland Centre, 2014) -thus it can be regarded as a representation of "official knowledge" (Apple, 2000) and therefore of specific relevance.This topic was selected because it is a common topic often associated with social studies and civic education curricula worldwide.Therefore, presenting a social studies lesson with a topic of "human rights" might be easier for teachers and scholars worldwide to follow and understand as the content has a prominent position in world curriculum (see Meyer, Bromley, & Ramirez, 2010).Also, this lesson might be more valuable for teachers and scholars worldwide as it provides an opportunity to show how this universal topic is constructed / taught in a Turkish educational context and allows them to compare this lesson bearing in mind their countries' educational contexts.

Criterion of Research Ethics
Questions concerning research ethics arouse from the very beginning, when you try to get access to the field.The establishing of a stable, trustful relationship between schools, teachers, and a research team requires more than one attempt in most cases, until a mutual agreement for recording is given.A pro-active procedure can be to make the teacher visible as member of the research team, e.g. by including/naming in the authorship.In our case, all commentaries, which we are discussing in the following sections, agree in the admiration of the teacher, Mr. Engin Yolcu, the true hero of our project.All commentaries praise him for his courage to open the doors of his classroom for an international anonymous audience which might be very critical.
As a fundamental ethics rule we completed all the required research permission processes before recording the lesson.First we submitted a detailed research protocol to the school district to obtain research permission.We also obtained written consent from the parents of the students to complete the permission process.Students' faces are unrevealed during video recording.Although we had all the required permissions, we preferred to locate the cameras at the back of the classroom so that cameras did not view students' faces.
Students' identity is also concealed.Pseudonyms are used instead of students' real names, but gender is noted.

Criterion of Quality: Translation
In qualitative research methodology in social and educational science, highly sophisticated systems of notation for the video material have been proposed.Nevertheless, we preferred a simple verbatim protocol first.Lesson study researchers should always keep in mind that this procedure inevitably causes a reduction of the original material anyway!Regarding translation, it is extremely important to validate the transcript (verbatim protocol) in the original language first by a controlling group, before starting the translation process into the target language, English (Bittner & Günther, 2013).It is not at all professional to make a verbatim protocol from a lesson in Turkish directly into English.In order to keep processes of translation transparent for other researchers and for later secondary analysis, the bi-lingual re-presentation of the material is highly recommended, as we did in the Journal of Social Science Education (but it is not the international standard at all!).Translation has to be proofed, counseled, and validated by two native speakers from each of the languages.In our case, the Turkish and English versions of the social studies lesson texts were edited several times by Dr. Jenifer Bruen who has academic degrees in English language teaching and Yasemin Çidem who is a native Turkish speaker and has an undergraduate English teaching degree.Here is an excerpt from the protocol of the lesson.There were also other words used frequently in the transcripts.One of them was "başka?" [What else?].The teacher used this word 42 times in the lesson in order to elicit various answers from his students.As it can be seen from the verbatim protocol (Açıkalın, 2014), the teacher used a question & answer method extensively.Thus, he asked students "başka?" many times.Another extensively used word was "şey" [something/thing].It was used 39 times in this lesson.It is both difficult and easy to translate this word in a sentence.
"Şey" can be used as a substitute word for almost any word in Turkish.Thus, in most cases, "şey" translated as "something" or "thing".But in some cases we had to omit the word from the English translation.More information for the reader about translation or context can always be added within brackets.
To secure quality in translation, the "politics" of translation as invisible/hidden decisions/assumptions must be kept visible.Here, another common trap/mistake in educational research aims at finally "solving" problems of translation.This might be useful in the translation of fiction.In social sciences, it is better to document problems of translation in transparency, giving alternative reading options and the pro and con arguments as well as the final decision about the translation.This can be done by giving the alternative translation in [brackets], footnotes (as not to disturb the reading flow), or even by providing a glossary for readers.5

Outline and Structure of the Lesson
The teacher started the lesson by asking what human rights meant to the students.For most of the lesson the teachers asked the students questions and got answers from them which were shortly evaluated by the teacher again.The key points discussed in the lesson are listed below (Açıkalın, 2014): various human rights such as the "right to settle /shelter", "right to vote and get elected" human rights violations and racial discrimination violence towards women (March 8 -International Women's day) modern colonization (Some students believe that the U.S.A. exploits other countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.) the right to life and how this right can be violated (Wars, blood revenge, assassination, and murder, etc.) the right to receive healthcare, property rights, and the right to travel the right to communicate (Tapping phones illegally: Teacher gave the life of Howard Zinn as an example for that.When Howard Zinn wrote his autobiography, he asked the FBI for his personal file which included all of his telephone conversations and other forms of communication, everything related to his life.) discrimination between rich and poor (Teacher gave example of police searching random teenagers on the street and he suspected that the police specifically chose these boys mostly because of their poor clothing and appearance.) violation of private life (paparazzi shows) According to the TIMSS reference study mentioned above, lesson/teaching style is regarded as the focus of comparative interpretative lesson research.The teacher, Mr. Yolcu, acted/performed a lesson plan mostly focused on lecturing, and he used his notes many times during the lesson.Tentatively, this can be called "teaching as preaching" and could be explained by internal cultural teaching habits.This view of the commentaries would validate a prior characteristics of Turkish lesson/teaching style as "targeted/purposeful presentation of the content knowledge without discussion" (Niermann, 1990, pp. 83.) and as a "method to install the new (knowledge)" (pp.110).In fact, this notion of teaching has been challenged by implementing curriculum reforms and introducing student centered pedagogy in Turkish schools while Turkish teachers are still struggling with this transition (Altinyelken, 2011;Nohl & Somel, 2015).

Dialog: Negotiation of the Commentators
As a next step, we established a second layer of interpretational level: three educators with different cultural backgrounds were invited to give feedback/ their first impression on the protocol of this human rights lesson.Each educator provided their comments independently and these comments were published in the following issue of the Journal of Social Science Education (see Kesten, Brodsky-Schur, & Gürsoy, 2014).Reading the commentaries, it is fascinating and a kind of productive irritation to see the multiplicity and extensity of comments that can be given for a single social studies lesson.Nevertheless, when we look at the diversity of the reviewers, it helps us to understand the reason behind the variety of the comments and multiple perspectives: One of the reviewers is a Turkish social studies professor (Alper Kesten), the other is an American educator (Joan Brodsky Schur), and the last one is a teacher in Germany with Turkish descent (Kudret Gürsoy).All three reviewers commented on this particular social studies lesson from very different perspectives as all they have diverse cultural and educational background.While each reviewer highlighted very different aspects of the lesson, in some cases they share very similar opinions about the lesson.In some cases, they viewed and interpreted the same facts in the lesson very different from each other.This is the power of the qualitative research perspective, as one single protocol may receive various comments -often times opposing comments-that make it possible for us to see multiple aspects of the lesson.Observation and judgement of the reviewers depends on theoretical framework that they conceived for this lesson and this cannot be seen not clearer than here.
All commentaries agreed that the lesson started about giving general "information" about human rights, taking a deductive approach from general definition to case application and not using an inductive approach from case to the general terms.Some in depth discussion even appears about various human rights violations during that lesson.The case discussion seems to be continued in the second lesson which is documented but not yet commented on.It seems clear that the main goal of the teacher was to have his students grasp the principal concepts of human rights by using lecturing and questions & answers teaching strategies.This whole goal and the strategies could be criticized when considering the educational context in the United States or Germany.For instance, Schur pointed out that a lesson on the same topic in the United States would be more than defining and listing human rights.She states that "what makes the American context different is that the discussion would be based on helping students to understand the founding documents in U.S. history, the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain…" (p.150).Similarly, Gürsoy pointed out a number of times where the lesson was lacking intensive discussion.Here a couple of excerpts from Gürsoy: "… the teacher does not provide an opportunity to deal more intensively with the issue" (p.155); "the teacher does not discuss the issues presented in detail" (p.155).Nevertheless, Prof. Kesten indicated that Turkish teachers had to deal with an extensive work load and overpopulated classrooms, which could be considered one of the main reasons that teachers in Turkey come to class unprepared.On the other hand, Kesten acknowledged that this particular teacher was well prepared and organized for this particular lesson.Kesten also criticized the teacher for not writing the human rights concepts on the blackboard.He stated that "… the teacher simply enumerating human rights concepts one after another could lead to long-term problems for the students grasping them.As the saying goes 'verba volant, scripta manent' i.e. 'word fly away, writing remain'" (p.148).
Thus, what we can see that all three reviewers agreed that this lesson is a content based lesson, while Schur and Gürsoy specially pointed out the topic should have also covered more primary documents and included in-depth discussion about human rights.However, Kesten was more interested in improving the teacher's teaching strategy by encouraging him to use the blackboard for the listing of human right concepts.We believe this discrepancy between the reviewers is mostly based on which educational context they take under consideration when writing their commentaries.
Another noteworthy criticism about the lesson comes from Kudret Gürsoy as his impression is that the teacher overwhelmingly controls the lesson and the classroom interaction process.The reasons behind this situation can be found in Schur and Kesten's reactions.Although neither of them had not known about Gürsoy's comment, they kind of provided some answers or explanations to this comment.This is an interesting example that shows how subjectivity of observer plays role in qualitative research, since theoretical framework of interpretation is not made explicit.The quote from the Üsküdar American Academy (Üsküdar Amerikan Lisesi) website conveyed by Schur can explain this phenomenon."Turkish students are conditioned from an early age to respect authority … Students are used to, and are more comfortable with, traditional teacher directed learning" (p. 151).Thus, as this quote indicated Turkish students generally are very comfortable with their teachers controlling the lesson.Carl Rogers (1994) called this a "tourist classroom", instead of a (active participating) "citizen classroom".However, Schur also pointed out that she is puzzled as to why students in this class do not ask questions while American students ask frequently, even sometimes to an annoying degree.The answer is in the former quote from the Üsküdar American Academy website and Kesten's commentary.Kesten stated that "in line with their role traditionally cut out by society teachers continue to see themselves as imparting the right knowledge, and the students as storing that information for later use.As a result of this, students' talking time in the classroom drops to very low levels.Even more significantly some students resign themselves to not talking or participating at all in the long run" (p.147).

Controversy between the Commentators
This brings us to the students' participation issue which is interpreted very dissimilarly by the reviewers.Prof. Kesten in his review stated that "the analysis of the classroom data suggests that the pupils participate at least as much as the teacher, and express their views in total freedom.Throughout the lesson students had a chance to bring their experiences and opinions into the classroom freely and to link their experiences with lesson and general human rights problems in Turkey" (p.146).On the contrary, Kudret Gürsoy believes that the teacher dominated the whole classroom conversation as he counted the number of words spoken by the teacher and students.The teacher achieves 3,000 words (83.2 %) and the students achieve 607 words (16.8 %).Accordingly, Gürsoy stated that "… I assume that frequently the teacher implicitly and sometimes, by way of his statements, explicitly controls the lesson.In that case the teacher is the one who controls communication and interaction process" (p.155).
We must consider why two different reviewers had precisely opposing comments on the same protocol/source/document.This could be based on several aspects such as cultural background or educational beliefs.Nevertheless, we must also think about the relativity based on the educational context and the relativity that set the expectations -implicit educational theory (teaching and learning concepts, concept of knowledge, concept of "knowledge transmission" and so on).We may assume that Prof. Kesten, knowledgeable about the context in Turkey, compares this particular lesson and the teacher with the mainstream social studies lessons and fellow Turkish teachers.As a result of this comparison, he evaluates this lesson as very successful in terms of students' participation.On the other hand, Gürsoy considering the participating classroom environment and students' attitudes in German cities like Hamburg, he sets his expectation levels more critically which influences his comments about the lesson.
Finally, despite certain weaknesses, this lesson was generally found to be quite "successful" by the reviewers, avoiding a "rhetoric of dismay", which can often be found in lesson practice reviews.

Conclusion -No Interpretation without Explicit Theory/No Judging before Description
A more ethnographic approach would take the alienation and productive irritation caused via comparative approach into serious account and attempt understanding the logic of social practice, the performative and visible structure of teaching and learning, while avoiding a "rhetoric of dismay" by hastily judging or even bashing teachers and students as being insufficient in some way.Thus, in regards to qualitative research methodology, the three commentaries reveal common traps of interpretation: -Nationalization: The commentators generally characterized or considered this lesson as a "typical" Turkish lesson.So this brings us to the question of "what is characteristic of a 'typical' social studies lesson?"It is hard to answer this question, and everybody may have different opinions about judging whether the features of this particular lesson are "typical".
So, this is another question "what is typical for social studies lessons in Turkey and what is not?"As it is impossible to document a typical lesson -as there is none!-, researchers should instead concentrate on documenting the varieties of teaching styles.Thus, as qualitative researchers we should avoid reaching a firm conclusion or trying to find a "correct" place for a lesson in a scale of typical lessons or such.Rather, we must document and present all evidence thoroughly (interviews, observation etc.) in order to encourage discussions and interpretations about the documents among the educational community.
-Culturalization: There might be a tendency to depict Turkish lessons as "typical" Muslim education culture, e.g. the teachers' remark about "what the Koran says" which refers to the authority of a Holy Book.Perhaps the proposal to name the teaching style as "teaching as preaching" is a kind of culturalization -Exoticization: This approach regards a lesson document as "strange" and "alien", but interesting and fascinating as such.As a result, only differences are stressed against similarities in comparison.
On the level of lesson style, a different code/coding of activities of listening and speaking, of attentiveness and performance can be observed according to the mode of so called "democratic" speaking.Different perceptions and comments can be explained with different expectations and research interests, which are applied to the individual case (study).
Whilst Kesten, against the background and experience with standard lesson culture in Turkey, judges this lesson as progressive.However, the expectations of Gürsoy and Schur, coming from backgrounds of German or American classroom culture experiences, are different and more oriented towards student participation.The latter leads them to a deficit of perspective (a modest trap) in their interpretation.