Music education for elementary students is more important than any other grade students because it is a starting point of formal music education. Importance of teachers' roles is emphasized as much as is declared that mankind's future will depend on t...
Music education for elementary students is more important than any other grade students because it is a starting point of formal music education. Importance of teachers' roles is emphasized as much as is declared that mankind's future will depend on teachers. Despite importance of teachers' roles is emphasized as such, elementary students are responsible for classroom management, administrative works and other services in addition to the heavy load of teaching job, and as a result, students' right for quality education is impeded. The subject specialist teacher system whereby those teachers with professional knowledge and expertise are in charge of certain subjects has been operated since 1992 in order to reduce teaching hours and give more time to teachers to study textbooks. Nevertheless, teachers' professionalism has been disputed because those specialist teachers' traits were not taken into consideration.
Under such circumstances, this study was aimed at examining the efficiency of the subject specialist teacher system and elementary music teachers' professional traits. To this end, relevant literature was reviewed to discuss concept and background of the subject specialist teacher system, its changes over time in Korea, its legal ground and operations, its advantages and disadvantages, its needs, characteristics, quality and functions of elementary education, contents of elementary music education, and professionalism of music education. Then, from the population of 143 elementary schools in Inchon and Buchon, the researcher sampled 129 schools with music special teachers for a questionnaire survey.
The questionnaire consisted of demographic variables and items about elementary music teachers' capacity, their musical traits and their music education professionalism. The collected data were subject to Frequency Analysis to determine teachers' demographic variables, and subject to T-test and one-way ANOVA to analyze the differences of teachers' traits depending on their demographic variables. Scheffe test was used to test detailed differences. All the differences analyzed were tested at the levels of significance p<.05, p<.01 and p<.001, while the data were processed statistically using the SPSS WIN 12.0 program.
As a result of reviewing the literature about subject specialist teacher system and surveying the teachers for their traits, it was found that 70.6% of teachers opined that the system was required. 43.4% of them perceived that the system was more or less effective, 24% of them thought that it was effective or very effective and 32.6% of them answered that it was not effective. Accordingly, teachers' overall responses to the subject specialist teacher system were that it was required but the current system is not much effective. On the other hand, among the professional traits, evaluation of the music learning scored 4.49 points, which was relatively high, but most of the teachers thought that they should continue to develop their professionalism for themselves, while being reeducated or retrained on the Korean traditional music education and music composition to be more professional.
It is almost 13 years since the full-scale operation of the subject specialist teacher system. So, it is required of the government to correctly establish the elementary subject specialist teacher system, improve elementary music teachers' professionalism and elementary music education, reflecting on those transient trials and errors so far.