One of the major social changes of Korean society since the 1990s is diversified population and the advent of multiculturalism. As the number of international marriages, labor immigrants, and the second generation of multicultural families are getting...
One of the major social changes of Korean society since the 1990s is diversified population and the advent of multiculturalism. As the number of international marriages, labor immigrants, and the second generation of multicultural families are getting increasing, diverse racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural groups coexist in our daily lives. In this situation, how best to educate citizens to function effectively in a multicultural society becomes increasingly important as the ethnic, racial, and cultural context of Korea deepens.
Accordingly, it is about time we wake up to the importance of multicultural education, which helps students have tolerant attitudes and diverse perspectives to understand people who are different from them. Multicultural education is a field of study designed to improve race relations and to help all students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to participate in cross-cultural interactions and in personal, social, and civic action that will help make nation-state more democratic and just. Also, it is an educational reform movement to challenge previous educational contents, curriculum, and school practices to help students develop the knowledge, values, and skills needed to become effective citizens in a particular and democratic society.
Given that the world at large and Korea in particular have experienced pluralism and multiculturalism in the 21^(st) century, this research critically examines newly revised Korean national social studies curriculum in 2007 focusing on curriculum principles for multicultural education. This research examines the concepts, purposes, principles, and necessity of multicultural education and finds the meaning of the integration of multicultural education as a citizenship education and social studies curriculum. Then, it selects the 11 social studies curriculum guidelines for multicultural education and analyzes how the national social studies curriculum reflects the principles and contents of multicultural education with critical discourse analysis.
The following are the results of this research.
First, text analysis reveals that social studies curriculum successfully reflects diversified perspectives to understand society including interdisciplinary?multidisciplinary and comparative perspectives and focuses on developing the skills necessary for effective interpersonal, interethnic, and intercultural group interactions. On the other hand, self and ethnic identity development, understanding conflicts between ideals and realities always existing in human societies, and local community studies are not integrated in the curriculum in balance. Teaching and learning methods as well as evaluation are limitedly diversified.
When it comes to the educational level, elementary social studies curriculum focuses on maximum use of experiential learning, especially local community resources, and is constructed based on the environmental expansion principle. Middle school curriculum, particularly 8^(th) grade history part, views the development of national territory and culture with multidisciplinary perspectives. When it comes to the high school curriculum, 20^(th) century history part thoroughly examines Korean society’s development toward multicultural, ethnic identity, and social integration. However, social science part lacks of interdisciplinary approaches to deal with social issues.
Second, discourse practice analysis reveals that the revised national social studies curriculum, which is constructed, distributed, adopted, and educated by national educational organizations, concentrated its efforts on separating history from social studies and intensifying history education to educate national integration and to build social consensus on national history. However, it makes revised social studies curriculum failed to realize multidisciplinary approaches and curriculum integration principles. Also, it does not include diverse racial, ethnic, cultural groups’ life, culture, and discrimination and deal with Korean society’s changes toward multicultural society.
Third, unique characteristics that revised national social studies curriculum particularly shows are Korean War, the division between North and South Korea, and their efforts for peaceful unification as special aspects of multicultural Korean society. On the other hand, the revised curriculum fails to deal with new social conditions and educational problems caused by the increasing number of immigrants and multiracial children since the 1990s.
On the basis of the results, this research suggests the direction of multicultural education and its integration with social studies curriculum in the pluralistic 21^(st) century.
First, Korea as a society should have a better understanding of multiculturalism and multicultural education and stand multicultural education theory. Multicultural education should not be understood as an educational program to teach different skin colors or ethnic cultures but be considered an educational reform movement to give equal educational opportunities to everybody and to raise effective citizen in the more diverse, pluralistic, and democratic future society.
Second, social studies curriculum reform to reflect multicultural education curriculum principles should be done with school practices. Social studies curriculum, from its characteristics to evaluation, must include tolerant attitudes to understand other people and their lives, respect others’ language and culture, and pursue democratic ideals like freedom, just, and equity. At the same time, school should recognize its diverse population and individual differences and help students have better multicultural interactions. School administrators and policies also have better understanding of multiculturalism and the principle of multicultural education.
Third, governmental organizations and administrators should know the difficulties of school teachers to do multicultural education in their classrooms and improve the barriers and problems that teachers have. Thus, they must provide abundant information about multicultural education and do research to find out school teachers’ difficulties and limitations. It will improve the future social studies curriculum and multicultural education in classrooms.