The advent of knowledge-based information society has affected the education sector as well. Lifelong education has been introduced since the 20th century, which pursues the creation of an open learning community where everybody can study in a self-di...
The advent of knowledge-based information society has affected the education sector as well. Lifelong education has been introduced since the 20th century, which pursues the creation of an open learning community where everybody can study in a self-directed manner without being restricted by time and space. And existing school education is under the influence of that change. The development of lifelong education programs is stepped up by capitalizing on the facilities and human resources of schools, and school lifelong education is being actualized in response to the needs of local communities.
Due to the short history of school lifelong education, that is confronted with several problems, such as poor professionalism, inadequate finance, a shortage of programs and a lack of zeal on the side of people whom the education caters to. There have been a lot of difficulties to tide over in making it take root and prevailing. Nonetheless, teachers who are in charge of school lifelong education take the initiative in the growth of that education both in quantity and quality, as their positive self-concept encourages themselves to serve as a catalyst in furthering that education.
In fact, however, the teachers face lots of conflicts, which results in disturbing their own job performance and getting them to be discouraged. Such experiences are likely to detract from their self-concept and job commitment, which becomes eventually a drag on the development of school lifelong education.
The purpose of this study was to examine the conflicts of teachers responsible for school lifelong education during job performance. It's planned to prepare questionnaires designed to evaluate conflicts with job roles and the level of conflicts by conflict factor, to investigate teachers in charge of school lifelong education, and to explore what efforts should be made to lessen their conflicts.
The following research questions were posed:
1. What differences do the background variables of teachers responsible for school lifelong education make to their own conflicts with job roles?
(1) What differences does their gender make to their conflicts?
(2) What differences does their position make to their conflicts?
(3) What differences does the type of school(public or private) make to their conflicts?
(4) What differences do training experiences in school lifelong education make to their conflicts?
2. What differences do the background variables of teachers responsible for school lifelong education make to the level of their conflicts by conflict factor?
(1) What differences does their gender make to the level of conflicts by conflict factor?
(2) What differences does their position make to the level of conflicts by conflict factor?
(3) What differences does the type of school(public or private) make to the level of conflicts by conflict factor?
(4) What differences do training experiences in school lifelong education make to the level of conflicts by conflict factor?
3. What is the extent of their conflicts with job roles for school lifelong education?
(1) What is the extent of their conflicts by conflict factor?
(2) What is the extent of their conflicts with job roles?
(3) What is the extent of their conflicts with job roles by conflict factor?
Three different job roles were selected in this study to check into their conflicts with the job roles: program planning/operation, facility-management/organizational networking and evaluation. And four different conflict factors were selected to assess the level of conflicts caused by the factors: inter - dependency, goal difference, perceptual gap and resources distribution.
Questionnaire method was adopted, and the instrument used in this study was questionnaires that employed a Likert scale. The subjects in this study were 600 middle school teachers in Seoul, on whom a survey was conducted. The answer sheets from 342 teachers were used, and t-test and descriptive statistics were utilized to address the research questions.
The findings of the study were as follows:
First, the working-level lay teachers who actually conducted school lifelong education felt more conflicts with program planning/operation, one of the job roles, than the head teachers who supervised it. Among the conflict factors, goal differences triggered more conflicts among the teachers. It implied that the lay teachers suffered more conflicts with job performance than the head teachers in the school lifelong education sector.