Action research, colloquially referred to as ‘teacher research’ in academic discourse, represents a research paradigm that has been prominently adopted in the field of education and is gradually gaining traction in Turkish academic research. The present research systematically examines postgraduate action research conducted in the Turkish educational field in recent years, including considerations of subject matter, technical characteristics, and resulting outcomes. The last part of this scholarly work outlines a participatory action research framework in line with the established characteristics elucidated in the scholarly literature. The overall aim of this literary contribution is to provide a valuable resource for educators engaged in the intricacies of action research, postgraduate students, experts within the educational sciences, and diligent researchers, thereby fostering an enriched academic discourse.

A workshop was held between 27 November and 4 December 2022 with 100 Science and Art Centre   teachers in the project named Society 5.0 for Gifted Education, which is carried out to improve the quality of special education services for gifted students. The project, which is financially supported by the European Union, Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA), is carried out by Bornova Şehit Fatih Satır Science and Art Center, while Turgutlu Science and Art Center Dokuz Eylül University and Celal Bayar University are project partners.

We hope that the design thinking system will be internalized and learned by our children and young people and used in their studies, thus opening new horizons for us. It is hoped that this book will contribute to the new ideas, designs, projects or works of art that will be formed by using this new method in the future.

The book, which started its journey as a research article but later turned into a book, examines the educational problems experienced in the Music Departments of Fine Arts High Schools in Turkey through the views of the music teachers working in this school in a provincial city and discusses the results with a generalizable approach, mainly from the perspective of music teaching. Although Fine Arts High Schools have been extensively studied in the music education literature, studies focused on the problems experienced in these schools are quite limited. The data of the study were obtained from a single study group instead of a sample selected from the population. Some problems are strongly related to the socio-cultural and socio-economic variables surrounding the school. These two justifications should be interpreted as the results are not generalizable. However, it should be emphasized that some of the results obtained in this study regarding common and non-intervening elements for all Fine Arts High Schools in Turkey such as the criteria for appointment of administrators, teacher-student selection method, curriculums, and textbooks may be generalizable. In this context, the study is considered important in terms of drawing attention to the current problems experienced in these schools and providing results that will help to make a comparison between the school where the research was conducted and other Fine Arts High Schools.