Major Changes and Issues in the 2015 Revised Social Studies Curriculum

Mo, Kyung-Hwan; Kang, Daehyun; Eun, Ji-Yong

doi:10.35557/trce.48.1.201603.001

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To capture recent changes of multicultural education in Korea, this study focused on analyzing the two national curriculum documents revised in 2011 and 2015, respectively, because the Korean government first incorporated multicultural contents and issues into the social studies curriculum in 2011 and then revised the curriculum again in 2015. The 2015 revision was initiated not by multicultural issues but by political (regime change) and organizational issues, such as adopting the concept of “key competence,” reducing achievement standards, and re-organizing selective courses into a required course (Mo, Kang, & Eun, 2016). However, in the process of curriculum revision, two conflicting changes were made with regard to multicultural education: inclusion of critical perspectives on culture and more emphasis on ethnic history.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discursive Struggles for Multicultural Curriculum in South Korea

Kang

2021

The Journal of Social Studies Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines how discourses on multicultural education are constructed in the recent curriculum reforms of South Korea. In response to the rapid demographic change in the last two decades, the South Korean government has revised its national curriculum to promote multicultural education. However, contrary to the benign intention, multicultural education often serves to perpetuate the dominant group's perspectives. By employing critical discourse analysis, this study investigates implicit messages of multicultural education embedded in the recently revised national curricula of social studies. The findings of this study reveal that the revised curricula contain five competing discourses including pluralist, conservative, essentialist, neoliberal, and critical multiculturalism, each of which has conflicting values and approaches to multicultural education. This discursive conflict in the new curricula shows ambivalence and conceptual instability of multicultural education promoted by the Korean government. By demonstrating how multiple and conflicting discourses coexist in the national curriculum at the same time, this study complicates previous research focusing on unpacking a single predominant discourse in multicultural education.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%