Research Institute for Social Sciences

I have always been interested in the sociological and educational aspect of young people. During my study at university I worked in a private girls’ boarding school on a voluntary basis. The families of the girls were living overseas and they were feeling lonely and needed to be encouraged to achieve well in school.  Although I was of a young age, it was a pleasure for me to get together with those girls and fulfil their emotional needs as much as possible.

After completing my Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology at EGE University, which is one of the most outstanding universities of Turkey, I decided to take an opportunity offered to me, and went overseas to teach. I have had the chance to work in different countries such as Turkey, Thailand, New Zealand and the UK where schools have a variety of students from different cultural backgrounds. I have also been keen on studying and earning proficient and significant qualifications while teaching.

I was first employed in a Private International School in Thailand where I also completed some programmes to improve my teaching. Then I moved to New Zealand. After finishing my Graduate Diploma Course in Secondary Teaching, I worked again in a Private Girls School in Auckland. It was a great experience for me to have students from different backgrounds in one classroom. It inspired me to look deeply into the influences of their first language on their education. There were many clever students, whose attainment was very low only because of their limited English, which was the spoken and taught language in that school. Teaching in an environment where language and culture have an enormous influence on students’ learning motivated me to study and explore more in this field of education.  The following year I obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Maths Education at Auckland University.

When I arrived to the UK, I worked as a Mathematics teacher in two Independent Secondary Schools,  where I met many students of a Turkish background who were born and were being raised in Britain. They all had similar problems and difficulties like my students in New Zealand. I liked talking to their families about how they could help their daughters to achieve better at school. This became an increasingly important issue for me as I wished more and more to help by addressing these students’ educational issues and difficulties that they were facing. In the future I would like to carry out a research study to explore Turkish-Speaking parents’ involvement in their secondary school daughters’ education, and to investigate the barriers which prevent them to be involved in the responsibility of their own education. I would like to look at some of the cultural experiences of the Turkish-Speaking communities, and to present possible ways in which they could integrate to the British society successfully by raising their educational attainment. I believe that this research would benefit students, parents, teachers and schools and thus society as a whole.