Politics and the practice of school change: The Hyukshin School movement in South Korea

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine the characteristics of a progressive school-change project in South Korea called the Hyukshin School (HS) movement. HSs are public schools that are intended to disseminate progressive and democratic practices. We obtained data from interviews with participating teachers, official documents, reports, and various statements from the stakeholders involved in the project. First, we found that in the case of the HS movement, decentralization as a global practice interacts with local politics, producing an unintended result that promotes a progressive approach to counter both competition-based pedagogy and the neoliberal accountability system. Second, the teachers in HSs have developed their own democratic approaches that feature the four key strategies of a learning community, a community of caring, a democratic community, and a professional community. Third, teachers in HSs perform their practices within the relationship between their new praxis and the East Asian style of pedagogy, which we believe to be the consequence of the latter's compressed modernization.

KEYWORDS:

• School change
• neoliberalism
• democratic schools
• politics of education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The teachers’ names are all pseudonyms.

2. Whole-school peer observations and reflection sessions are unique to HSs, as ordinary schools seldom implement them. Teachers are typically unavailable to observe others’ teaching because of their own simultaneous teaching responsibilities. In contrast, HSs manipulate their timetables so that all grade-level teachers have access to peer observation by taking turns in teaching only one class on designated days of observation while others are dismissed (Sung et al., 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Youl-Kwan Sung

Youl-Kwan Sung is a professor of education and a dean of Graduate School of Education at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea. He received the PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the field of the critical and sociological approach to curriculum. His research interests include social justice education, comparative approaches to policy borrowing, and democratic school change. He has published various book chapters and articles on the sociological aspects of the curriculum and educational policies in such journals as Comparative Education, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, International Social Work and Oxford Review of Education.

Yoonmi Lee

Yoonmi Lee is a professor of education at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. She received the PhD degree specializing in the comparative history of education from the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was the 2011–2012 president of the Korean Association for History of Education. Her research interests include state formation/nation building and education, gender politics and education, and the historical/structural development of East Asian education. She has published numerous articles and books, including Modern Education, Textbooks and the Image of the Nation: Politics of Modernization and Nationalism in Korean Education (New York: Garland, Routledge, 2000).