This study aims to examine how ballet teachers working in the Korean ballet education field become teachers, what kinds of professional education they experience, and how these experiences are connected to the design and enactment of their classes, an...
This study aims to examine how ballet teachers working in the Korean ballet education field become teachers, what kinds of professional education they experience, and how these experiences are connected to the design and enactment of their classes, and, on this basis, to propose directions for improving the system of professional education for ballet teachers. To this end, the study combined theoretical and empirical inquiry as two interrelated axes. At the theoretical level, it first clarified the concepts of ballet teacher and professional education for ballet teachers, and then analyzed the characteristics of the Korean system—where academic degrees, national qualifications, and private certificates exist in a fragmented manner without mutual articulation—by contrasting it with overseas structures in which ballet schools, specialist qualification bodies, universities and graduate schools, and national qualification frameworks are linked. The analysis revealed structural limitations in Korea whereby, within a performer-oriented system centered on training ballerinas, there is a lack of teacher-training tracks and life-cycle oriented pathways for professional development, and, despite the proliferation of private qualifications and short-term courses, there is an absence of standard curricula, assessment criteria, and credible certification systems that reflect the specificities of the ballet genre, making it difficult for prospective and in-service teachers to systematically develop their teaching competence.
To understand how this structure is actually experienced in the field, a qualitative multiple-case study was conducted with seven ballet teachers working in diverse settings, including private ballet studios, schools, universities, and adult and early-childhood education. Data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews, lesson plans, feedback records, and documentation of completed training, and were analyzed according to the logic of multiple-case study and Colaizzi’s phenomenological analysis procedure. The empirical inquiry showed that ballet teachers in the field set for themselves broad standards of professionalism that encompass performance and stage experience, knowledge of methods and the body (including injury), understanding of learners, and personal character, and that they accumulated and internalized this professionalism through informal pathways such as individual practice and study, long-term training, observing other teachers’ classes, one-to-one mentoring, and recording and reviewing their own lessons. However, these processes were found to depend excessively on personal time, financial resources, and chance opportunities, while training courses focused on theory and certificate acquisition were only weakly connected to the practical question of how to teach different learner groups—such as young children, school-age students preparing for entrance examinations or majoring in dance, and adult recreational learners—in actual classes. In contrast, mentoring and collegial lesson study based on learner characteristics and real classroom situations were recognized as professional development routes that made a tangible contribution to improving teaching.
In sum, the findings indicate that, although ballet teachers in Korea accumulate professionalism through informal routes such as self-reflection, voluntary participation in training, and collegial interaction, there is a lack of teacher-training tracks and standardized training and mentoring systems that could institutionally support and extend these efforts. The study suggests the need to shift the focus of ballet teacher education from performance skills to teaching competence and learner understanding, to design continuous professional development pathways across the stages of preservice, beginning, and experienced teaching, and to build a life-cycle oriented teacher-education system that links the professionalism developed in the field with national and professional bodies’ standards, training, evaluation, and support systems.