Educational Alternatives ISSN 1314-7277, Volume 13, 2015 Journal of International Scientific Publications www.scientific-publications.net THE PERCEPTION OF TEACHER CANDIDATES ON TOURISM GEOGRAPHY Tahsin Tapur, Caner Aladag Department of Geography Education, Ahmet Kelesoglu Education Faculty, Necmettin Erbakan University, 42090-Konya/Turkey Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate the perceptions of teacher candidates about tourism geography. The data for this study were gathered from 65 undergraduates who studied tourism geography lecture. The collected data were categorized and classified by their semantic relations respectively by the researcher. It was given as table and frequency by these categories. The results indicate that student teacher’ responses are ranked from high frequency to low frequency such as tourism geography, domestic or foreign tourists, cultural heritage, hotels, foreign exchange, and recreation. The main reason of traveling is seemed to be at the forefront of expressions as you explore new places. On the other hand, student teachers mentioned into tourism geography include historical concepts such as monasteries or new trend of tourism such as yacht tourism. In conclusion student teacher’s perception about tourism geography focused mainly local and national level instead of international or global level. Key words: Geography, tourism geography, teacher candidates, tourism perception INTRODUCTION The word “tourism” derives from tornus in Latin. Tornus corresponds to a turning movement. The expressions “touring” and “tour” derive from this word. The term ‘tour’ means transposition with the aim of business and entertainment by visiting various cities and regions (Olalı, 1984). The first use of the term ‘tourism’ dates back up to the end of 19th century. However, Feuler first scientifically described tourism in 1905. In Feuler’s opinion, tourism is described as an event that believes people’s cumulative need for resting and transposition, meeting natural and humane beauty and the fact that natural beauty makes people happy, thus, provide human communities to knit together depending on the developments on trade, industry and transportation (Quoted by Kozak M, et al 2002). In 1980’s, AIEST (the International Association of Sciefintic Experts in Tourism) described tourism as entire events and relations deriving from people’s temporary housing at places except of the ones where they normally stay, work and meet their needs, by demanding the goods and services produced by touristic establishments. Tourism is travels which people perform personally or collectively with personal aims of such as resting, entertainment, curiosity, sports, health, culture, gaining experience, visiting relatives, attending in congresses or seminars, worshipping on condition that they don’t settle in or gain income at places except of the ones where they meet their routine needs. In order to rank these travels as touristic activities, tourists have to stay at those places for at least one night and demand goods and services produced by touristic establishments (Özgüç, 2003:14-15). Tourism is the whole consisting of various sub systems. The nominal portion in tourism system belongs to geography, since geographical places attract both tourists and local people. In other words, locations like country, region, district, city where demand for tourism occurs are each geographical places. Natural and cultural centers of attraction in these areas, facilities, services, tourism organizations generate tourism elements. Thus, tourism firstly appears in a kind of physical environment. That aforementioned physical environment affects human environment as well (Soykan, 2000: 41). Page 623