Beginning teachers’ narratives, coping with social justice

Carving out a hybrid space: a self-study of contextualizing teaching for social justice in South Korea

“…The lack of support from the school is far starker in South Korea and other Asian countries in which there is a lack of experienced teachers who have participated in learning to teach for social justice during a preservice or in-service teacher education program and the seniority-based hierarchy among teachers is still pervasive within the cultural tradition of Confucianism (e.g., Seo & Koro-Ljungberg, 2005;Cho, 2018b). Existing scholarship situated in Western countries such as the United States suggests that teacher educators provide their teacher candidates with rich and frequent opportunities to work with social justice-oriented veteran teachers (e.g., Dover et al, 2016) and that beginning teachers seek collaboration with the school authorities and system (e.g., Dvir & Schatz-Oppenheimer, 2020). Taking one step further, Lane and his colleagues ( 2003) discussed a case of student teachers who became change agents by engaging their cooperative teachers in dialogue about socially just teaching.…”

“…Whether to engage students to participate in social actions or let them make their own decisions is a subject still under debate (e.g., Tatum, 1992;Johnson, 2016;Dvir & Schatz-Oppenheimer, 2020). Although the controversy itself is universal rather than nation-specific, South Korea provides more hostile conditions for teachers and teacher educators to support activism than the U.S. and other Asian countries, due to the nation's struggle over ideology since the North-South division.…”