Analysis of Creative Activities and Sports Club Activities in the Middle School

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine how to operate middle school curriculum, focusing on the creative activities and school sports clubs. This study, particularly attempted to seek for the effective ways of improving the curriculum by analyzing the current situations of curriculum management at schools. In order to achieve the study goals, the survey was conducted with 200 middle school teachers, interviews with 5 middle school teachers were conducted, and the school curriculum documents were analyzed. According to the analysis, 136 instructional hours were assigned on average for creative activities in some semester and the creative activities were operated in a wide variety was based on the regions. The teachers point out that there are some positive aspects of operating the creative activities in the curriculum, but some schools tend to replace the creative activity time with the school events. In the case of school sport clubs, there are some benefits for students such as releasing the stress from study and reducing the school violence. However, a lack of professional instructors and facilities are the problems in operating the sports clubs. In addition, since the creative activities and sports clubs are embedded in the curriculum, the instructional time for content-based classes were reduced and it resulted in the shortness of learning time for students. In addition, administratively, it is difficult for the school to keep the records of the students because there are no space to record the students’ performance for the creative activities in the NICE systems. On the basis of the study results, suggestions were made to improve the ways of operating the creative activities and school sports club activities.