Changes in History Teachers’ Curricular Decision-Making to Address Gender: Five Novice Teachers’ Experiences in South Korea

• In Event: Challenging Norms and Navigating Choices: Critical Perspectives on Student Experience, Gender, and Educational Decisions in East Asia

Proposal

This study examines how history teachers in South Korea make changes in their sense of purpose in addressing gender, their conceptual understanding of gender, and curricular decision-making to invite students to engage with gender-related social issues during their collaborative lesson development, classroom implementation of their lessons, and post-lesson reflection.
Theoretical Framework
Thornton’s (1991) concept of social studies teachers as curricular-instructional gatekeepers provides a basis for this study. In theorizing that teachers shape students’ learning experiences in the classroom by making “the day-to-day decisions concerning both the subject matter and the experiences to which students have access and the nature of that subject matter and those experiences” (p. 237), he recognizes underappreciated teachers’ agency in the curriculum implementation and suggests the teacher-led improvement of teaching. This concept offers the opportunity to see teachers’ curricular-instructional decision-making as a case to gain an insight into a wide range of contextualized strategies to improve teaching without large-scale curricular reforms.
Also, Wertsch’s sociocultural approach (1997, 1998) guides this study’s methods and serves as a tool to interpret its findings. Given that “concrete social interaction is always located in some institutional and cultural context” (1991, p. 86), I analyzed the teachers’ curricular decisions, focusing on how they prepared their lessons through discussions with their colleagues, how they implemented their plans with their students, and how they reviewed their experiences with history education researchers.
Methods
South Korea offers a rich context to examine how teachers address gender in a limited curricular space. This is because in South Korean society, strong antagonism toward feminism restricts gender-related discussion (Kim & Lee, 2022), the mandated political impartiality of education discourages teachers and students from engaging with social issues at school (Jho, 2007), and the centralized and standardized educational system strictly limits curricular experiences (Misco, 2016).
The participating novice teachers were interested in addressing gender-related social issues but had not tried doing so. They taught at different schools in different metropolitan areas. They varied with regard to gender, age, and marital status, and all the teachers explicitly described that their gender identity corresponded with the sex assigned to them at birth. This non-random procedure was meant to help gain access to teachers who were interested in the topics, but it may have limited both the range of participants and the ideas presenting in the data. Thus, this study’s external generalizability is limited.
For approximately four months, the teachers developed their own lesson plans through regular Zoom discussions with veteran teachers. After carrying out their lessons in their classrooms, the novice teachers watched a gender theorist, Judith Butler’s public lecture about gender as a socioculturally constructed, non-binary linguistic concept, structure, and tool. Lastly, they had meetings with history education researchers. I participated in their discussions, observed their classrooms, and conducted semi-structured individual interviews with novice teachers.


Findings
The novice teachers in this study demonstrated substantial changes in their a) sense of purpose in addressing gender, b) conceptual understanding of gender, and c) curricular decision-making to invite students to engage with gender-related social issues after carrying out their lessons and watching a gender theorist’s lecture.
During the collaborative lesson development, the teachers conveyed deep concerns about the intense antagonism toward feminism in their society, particularly young men’s “hatred toward women” and “reverse discrimination” claims. They chose each topic they wanted to address depending on their interests and students’ needs, but all the topics were “historically important women’s experiences,” such as the women’s suffrage movement. This was a tactical decision to bring gender into the classroom, particularly in their highly controlled setting, but that also reflected the teachers’ narrow ideas about gender, limited historical understanding, and conventional notions of historical significance.
During the classroom implementation of their lessons, the teachers demonstrated a stronger sense of curricular agency in general but kept gender underdiscussed. They confidently explained their curricular decisions to their colleagues and students by emphasizing the topic’s curricular relevance. Yet, when students explicitly brought up a wide range of ideas, including “transgender individuals” and “feminists,” the teachers avoided directly addressing them. In one classroom, when the students asked their teacher to confirm if she suggested gender fluidity, she affirmed the gender binary in confusion. Those responses were inconsistent with the teachers’ careful attention to the topic but consistent with their unexpected “awkward” feelings and uneasiness with uncertainty.
After their classroom teaching, the teachers were eager to deepen their understanding of gender. During reflective discussions, the teachers seriously reflected on their curricular decisions and challenged their ideas about gender. In making sense of “why I got stuck on” students’ questions about gender, they embraced gender fluidity and explored ways to incorporate LGBTQ+ issues into their teaching, referring to specific examples, such as “Band of Thebes.” They wanted to address gender as a historically constructed social structure, use their own inconsistency as a curricular resource to invite students to engage with gender-related issues, and present diverse gender groups’ historical experiences beyond “women role models.”
Scholarly Significance of the Study
This study’s findings suggest that teachers’ classroom experiences can be used as a resource to make curricular changes through collaborative and critical reflection. Given that teachers’ gender-related curricular decisions carry particular weight in the social studies classroom, where students engage with gendered human experiences and can prepare themselves for deliberation on social issues (Crocco, 2008, 2018; Hahn et al., 2007; Levstik ,2009), the findings add to present knowledge, in that few studies have explicitly focused on how teachers create curricular space to discuss gender-related social issues.
Furthermore, in exploring the teachers’ collaboration using digital technology as a strategy to navigate the highly controlled educational setting in East Asia (Ho et al., 2014; Jho, 2007; Misco, 2013, 2016; Misco & Tseng, 2018), this study closely aligns with the conference theme, “Envisioning Education in a Digital Society,” particularly by offering insight into how we can envision teacher education and professional development through the online space.

Author

• Hana Jun, Valparaiso University