Special Education Department

The Department of Special Education was established in the 2000–2001 academic year and is composed of three divisions: Special Education, Education of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Education of Gifted and Talented Individuals. The department currently employs 1 Professor, 3 Associate Professors, 4 Assistant Professors (Ph.D.), 2 Lecturers (Ph.D.), and 5 Research Assistants, all of whom are actively pursuing their doctoral studies.

Our department aims to train highly qualified special education teachers and future academics to meet the growing needs of Türkiye in the field of special education. In 2014, the Board of Education and Discipline (Talim ve Terbiye Kurulu) restructured the teacher training fields, and graduates of undergraduate programs in Education of Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities, Hearing Impairments, and Visual Impairments became eligible for appointment as “Special Education Teachers.”

In 2015, the Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu) decided to unify these previously separate undergraduate programs—Education of Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities, Hearing Impairments, Visual Impairments, and Gifted and Talented Education—under a single and comprehensive undergraduate program titled Special Education Teaching. Following this regulation, our department admitted its first cohort of students under the new unified program in the 2016–2017 academic year