21st-Century Knowledge Worker: Historicizing the Making of Teachers as Professionals in South Korea

• In Event: 75.016 - Historicizing the Present: Logics of Knowledge and Constructions of School Subjects in the Modern Era

Abstract

Current society considers the teacher as a professional. Although the perception of teaching as a semi- or quasi-profession is still apparent, many educational reformers and teacher educators in both the United States and South Korea put much effort toward building a consensus about teacher professionalism (Schön, 1983). Accordingly, teachers are expected to have skills and characteristics required of conventional professionals such as medical doctors and lawyers through certificates, expert knowledge, practice-based skills, and participation in professional development programs. This modern approach, which expects teachers to evolve from novices to professionals, creates a new notion of teachers. I argue that this new type of human, the professional teacher, is produced along with South Korea’s history of the scientization of education (Hacking, 1986).

In the history of teacher education in Korea, the traditional concept of teacher (선생, 先生, who was born earlier) has been changed into teacher as a profession (교사, 敎師, teaching person). Before modern schooling started in Korea, traditional Confucian culture defined teachers as moral models, who deliver the truth, which is not limited to ‘knowledge’ but includes wisdom, cultural rules, and religious truth (Jung, 1980). In contrast, the advent of the new type of teachers included different roles in school and the knowledge society, and they brought new institutions such as teacher education programs and professional development centers, which reinforce the notion of “teaching as a profession,” that give teachers the responsibility of self-development. In this process, teachers become producers and executors of power-knowledge upon students, and at the same time, become customers of it (Ball, 1990). This process requires teachers to be quantified, objectified, and controlled in the modern knowledge system. Also, the changing notion of the teacher as a professional offered less room for cultural discourses on teaching as concerning care and ethics.

This paper takes a genealogical approach to the notion of teacher in South Korea’s educational history through a discourse analysis of national curriculum documents and teachers’ guides for each curriculum from 1945 to 2008 (1st to 8th reforms). By finding historical rules and standards generated in the curriculum programs and policies related to the notion of teachers, this analysis focuses on the historical set of distinctions, categories, and classifications about a collective notion of teachers: who the teachers are and who they should be. By looking at the historical changes from a culturally ethical figure to a professional knowledge deliverer and skillful practitioner of technologies of self (Foucault, 1988), the paper will discuss how teachers became an object that needs to be evaluated, supervised, and managed by the scientific discourses of the current education system. Also, this study on the modern project of the “making-up of a teacher” will reveal societies’ changing expectation of teachers in terms of their relation with school knowledge and curriculum.

Author

• Ji-Hye Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison