This study analyzes how an interdependent caring community has been formed and sustained within the relationship between a school and its surrounding community, focusing on the collaborative case of the Munsan Community and Munheung Elementary School....
This study analyzes how an interdependent caring community has been formed and sustained within the relationship between a school and its surrounding community, focusing on the collaborative case of the Munsan Community and Munheung Elementary School. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research examines how care emerges and endures within lived conditions marked by vulnerability, where people necessarily depend on one another, in an educational environment shaped by competition and performance-oriented values.
The findings show that the collaboration between the Munsan Community and Munheung Elementary School did not develop through a specific policy or a single project. Rather, it accumulated through ongoing processes in which participants revealed life conditions that were difficult to bear individually and responded to one another from their respective positions. These relationships did not remain at the level of temporary emotion or intention. Through repeated everyday practices, they became embodied as relational habits and shared sensibilities. In this process, the subjectivities of activists, teachers, and students were not fixed by predefined roles but were continuously reconfigured within relationships.
Care expanded as a public practice that coordinated shared life. Public practices such as the Owol-gil Walk illustrate care as a relational mode formed through the shared passage of diverse participants across the same time and space.
This study also identifies key conditions for sustaining interdependent care and examines the reflective challenges that emerged in the process.
Psychological safety formed through emotional experience, relational networks grounded in trust and reciprocity, and democratic experiences in which collective discussion led directly to practice functioned as conditions for sustaining collaboration. At the same time, differences in participation and experience, modes of relationship formation, responsibility structures within democratic governance, and conditions surrounding care labor and compensation reveal that interdependent care requires ongoing adjustment and reflection.
Based on these analyses, this study conceptualizes the case of the Munsan Community and Munheung Elementary School as an interdependent caring community. An interdependent caring community refers to a mode of collective practice in which care is not confined to specific individuals or institutions but is sustained through relationships that support one another’s lives while jointly adjusting roles and responsibilities in response to shared vulnerability. This conceptualization rethinks school–community collaboration not as a programmatic outcome but as an educational practice in which care and democracy are embodied through lived relationships.
Keywords: Interdependent Caring Community, Vulnerability, School– Community Collaboration, Care