This paper examines ICT policy in education with a particular focus on teachers’ engagement in emergent remote teaching (ERT) during the initial COVID-19 school closure in South Korea. It involves a documentary analysis of newspaper articles on “starting school online” from the highest read daily newspapers published in South Korea, through which three issues regarding teachers and teaching are identified: teachers’ digital competency, teachers’ sense of professional identity, and the revalorisation of the teacher role. Discussion of the three issues points to the need to reflect on and rethink the government’s policies for ICT in education. This paper provides an overview of the ICT policies to show their overall inadequacy with respect to providing teachers with the necessary training and framework for technology-related professional development. It highlights the need to understand the changing nature of teaching and learning in a digital education environment and it suggests a possible redesign of the education and training provisions to teachers to support their professional competency in the digital age.

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This paper aims to present a sociology of literary studies that is distinguished from the sociology of literature in that its focus is on literary studies as a social practice rather than as a socio-cultural institution: how literary studies is institutionalized as such not how it functions in relation to literature. The sociological analysis of literary studies in this paper entails two tasks. Firstly, it constructs a methodological frame within which literary studies can be observed and analysed in terms of the rules of discursive formation rather than as a pre-discursive entity. This is achieved through conceptualizing the Foucauldian notion of discursive formation and knowledge practice as an analytic strategy and operationalising it via Paul Dowling's Social Activity Method. Empirically, the analysis produces a description of the practice of literary studies as instantiated in the particular region of the practice constituted with what I refer to as the crisis discourse. The analysis describes literary studies as that which is emergent upon differing institutionalising strategies articulated by its participants to mark out literary studies from other practices and to maintain its disciplinarity through regulating the distribution and the access of the distribution of the discourse within and beyond the practice. The generalisability of the research in this paper lies in the applicability of the analytical method that can be employed at any given level of analysis to examine discursive practice-such as literary studies-as the effects of the particular discourses in terms of how they articulate and sustain the institutionalised identity of the practice.

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