International Faculty Members’ Intention to Leave South Korea: Do acculturation and cultural advantage matter?

International faculty mobility raises important questions about the relationship between culture and teaching in higher education. As international faculty members adjust to new cultural expectations, they may alter their teaching styles. This study uses survey data to examine the teaching styles of international faculty members in South Korea. The study considers whether international faculty assimilate into Confucian heritage classroom culture by testing the hypothesis that formal authority and expert teaching styles will correlate positively with the number of semesters an international faculty member has taught in South Korea. However, the results reject this hypothesis. The findings elucidate teaching styles used by international faculty members in Korea and provide a platform for further investigation into intercultural pedagogy in higher education.

There are three major groups among academics teaching in a Korean university. About 61% of them are Koreans with domestic doctoral degrees, 30% are Koreans with foreign degrees, and about 9% are international academics with foreign degrees. All three categories of academics experience a socialization process after they are hired for an academic position. This study focuses on how international academics influence their new university and some barriers that they experience when they are adjusting to the new academic and sociocultural environments. More specifically, this study discusses how international academics bring changes that attract international students, their research productivity, and their influences on the changes of academic culture. In addition, this study discusses major barriers that international scholars confront in the selected university.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of international faculty towards English teaching at a local university in South Korea. For data collection, a comprehensive survey questionnaire was administered to 71 international faculty teaching English at the same university. The survey consisted of items of questions concerning faculty’s second language learning experience, teaching/learning philosophy, and teaching techniques and skills. Description of the responses revealed the following results: 1) Second language learning experience of faculty helps improving quality of instruction through understanding students’ learning difficulties; 2) Faculty’s view of language was mostly holistic while that of language learning was inclusive of different perspectives; 3) The role teachers was mainly that of a facilitator in a student-focused class; 4) For those applying CLT, it was used to engage students within a student-centered classroom; 5) A general maxim of teaching was the golden rule: “Do unto others, as you would have done unto you.”; 6) Views on teaching explicit knowledge varied widely among faculty; 7) The majority of faculty chose to correct both global and local errors; 8) A number of strategies were utilized in order to help students overcome reluctance to speak such as letting students decide on what they want to learn and helping them realize it is okay to make mistakes; 9) In order to enhance students’ communicative abilities, an innovation for general English education programs was suggested.

Cardiac calendar—2005 to 2006

This paper discusses the topic of ‘interculturality’ in higher education as it relates to global student mobility and internationalization efforts at higher education institutions. Starting with the underlying idea of ‘internationalization at home’, it explores domestic students’ intercultural experiences at a summer international program in Korea. Four main themes emerged from this case study, interpreted as student intercultural learning and development. They include: (1) intercultural impact due to the presence of international students; (2) personal intercultural change including development in construing cultural differences; (3) the English language perceived as a tool rather than an end; and (4) intercultural experiences with international faculty in class. This study concludes that ‘interculturality’ in higher education can be understood as student intercultural learning and development, as noted with domestic students.

Institutional educational technology policies in Higher Education Institutions can help or hinder the objectives of faculty and administration staff. In many national contexts, these policies typically result from a top-down unilateral canonical decision-making process  and or/retroactive heuristic models of investigation. However, research utilizing and advocating multilateral non-canonical approaches and more sociocultural models of investigation in institutional educational technology policy decision-making are novel.This paper stems from a project which used a formative Change Laboratory intervention to affect real meaningful change in institutional educational technology policy at one university in South Korea. Participants, including Korean faculty, international faculty and administration staff participated in multilateral, non-canonical workshops over a period of 7 months to explore and redesign their own activity.Central to this formative Change Laboratory intervention was Engeström’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). The study utilized CHAT as a practical lens/toolkit to expose/examine contradictions and collectively transform institutional educational technology policy-practice activity. CHAT’s activity system models helped participants identify, shape and question ‘normal’ or ‘routine’ practices in shared activity. As a result, participants realized how unilateral canonical policies inhibiting research and pedagogy objectives might be questioned and changed for the better.This paper reflects on the use and value of CHAT as a more sociocultural approach to institutional educational technology policy. Rather than presenting a paper that just ‘happens’ to use activity theory, this paper discusses my reasons for using CHAT, how it was used, how I collected and analysed data, my experience of using it, and prevailing criticisms. This paper will be of particular interest to researchers who are interested in using CHAT to conduct research on topics related to technology enhanced learning.Keywords: institutional educational technology policy; higher education; Change Laboratory; activity theory; CHATPart of the special issue Activity theory in technology enhanced learning research <https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.cbaae672>

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During the last a few decades, internationalisation of universities has emerged as an important issue not only in developed countries but in developing countries. South Korea as a fast catch-up country has experienced a remarkable change in its higher education system. This change is largely related to the South Korean government's higher education policy and to economic developmental stages. Against this backdrop, in order to assess the internationalisation of Korean higher education, we focus on international student mobility rather than other criteria such as infrastructure or programmes for international students and faculties. According to the recent statistics, the number of inbound foreign students involved in Korean higher education has increased significantly since 2005. Nevertheless, compared to other OECD and Asian countries, the number of outbound students in Korean higher education is high, whereas the number of inbound foreign students in higher education in Korea is very low. Against these observations, Korean government's recent policies and efforts of Korean universities to improve internationalization are discussed. Finally, some policy implications are put forward.

DOI: 10.9734/BJMCS/2015/15393 Editor(s): (1) Yilun Shang, Department of Computer Science and Institute for Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. (2) Doina Bein, Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, USA. Reviewers: (1) Anonymous, India. (2) Niranjan Panda, Computer Science & Engineering, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan University, Odisha, India. (3) Anitha Vijaya Kumar, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Visvesvaraya Technological University, India. (4) Sherin Zafar, Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad And Faculty of Engineering, Jamia Milia Islamia, India. (5) Yueran Gao, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. (6) Natarajan Meghanathan, Department of Computer Science, Jackson State University, USA. (7) Anonymous, South Korea. Complete Peer review History: http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history.php?iid=1030&id=6&aid=8450

Of saving children

Of saving children

In 1969, the Black Panther Party (BPP) established a relationship with the North Korean leadership that was based upon the principle of self-reliance (under the rubric of the Juche ideology), the transnational goal of Third World revolution, and a mutual antagonism toward American intervention around the world. Although the U.S. government forbade its citizens from travelling to North Korea, BPP leader Eldridge Cleaver along with other Panthers bypassed travel restrictions and visited North Korea to join anti-imperialist journalist conferences in 1969 and 1970. In North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Panthers found a new ideology and a government that was critical of the U.S. government. The Panthers established an alliance with North Korean leaders who they recognized as an independent force within the world communist movement. They believed that the “Black colony” inside the United States could learn from the DPRK's self-reliant stance in political, economic, and cultural matters. This study adds to recent scholarship on the global influence of the BPP and opens a new field of inquiry, as the BPP-North Korean relationship has not been analyzed in-depth.

This paper investigates the influence of cultural and historical factors on educational policy transfer, drawing on an analysis of the curricular reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation of the two Koreas. In South Korea, curricular changes were made, such as the introduction of the subject of social studies, in order to teach democratic procedures and concepts. In North Korea, a socialist–communist ideology was extensively promoted, along with an attraction to the Soviet Union as a model state to follow. In both contexts, the localization of the reforms was influenced by the authoritarian legacy of Confucianism and Japanese colonization, and the nationalism that had been fostered for the purpose of state formation. The Korean case indicates that while investigating the influence of culture on educational policy transfer, it is important to identify the unique characteristics of educational traditions and nationalism of a country, and to analyze how the newly transferred policies and ideas are received by local actors in their searches for meaning and power.

The building up of a variety of institutions, serving the purpose of promoting individual savings, and organizing them and making them fruitful to the saver and to the community, should be given a high priority in every development plan. To be effective, the institutions have to be adapted to different individual needs and possibilities and must fit into the community patterns; they must aim at encouraging planned and "goal-directed" savings. Even if, at least in the beginning, the financial results would not constitute more than a trickle of new capital disposal, the effects in rationalizing attitudes and mobilizing ambitions might be crucially important. --Gunnar Myrdal, in An International Economy (p. 360)

The knowledge of host-country nationals who work in the foreign subsidiaries of multinationals is a crucial strategic resource for their employers. This study explored the role that cultural intelligence plays in employees' knowledge sharing within a cross-cultural workplace context. Building on social identity theory, this study developed a theoretical framework to explore how hostcountry nationals' cultural intelligence could enhance their knowledge sharing via increasing their social identity, and further investigated the mediating role of host-country nationals' relationships with expatriates and identification with their organization. Using survey data from 412 host-country nationals working for 16 foreign subsidiaries in South Korea, I found that cultural intelligence directly predicted knowledge sharing. The results support and extend the extant literature and provide practical implications for multinationals regarding the management of host-country nationals.