Investigating the professional agency of secondary school English teachers in South Korea

Wook Namgung,Josephine Moate,Maria Ruohotie-Lyhty

doi:10.1186/s40862-020-00083-1

Wook Namgung, Josephine Moate + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-020-00083-1

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Abstract

This qualitative study examines the professional agency of secondary English teachers in Midwestern South Korea. Specifically, it investigates how secondary English teachers in South Korea understand their professional agency and what mediates their professional agency. The ecological approach in this study recognises that agency encompasses both individual and environmental dimensions and is formed through the constant interplay between the individual and the environment. The dataset for this study comprises 15 semi-structured interviews with secondary English teachers in South Korea. The thematic analysis highlights a significant gap between Korean English teachers’ espoused agency and realisable agency, as well as three levels of legitimation that teachers have to negotiate. These levels are individual, collegial and sociocultural. The findings from this study suggest that the participating teachers censored their own pedagogical behaviours due to their own sense of inadequacy and in response to structural requirements as well as the external evaluation of parents and high-stakes test scores. This study concludes with implications for English teachers in South Korea, theorisation on teacher agency and future research.

Highlights

In South Korea the teaching profession is consistently the most attractive career choice in regular opinion polls for high school graduates due to high job stability and the relatively high salary of teachers (Korean Ministry of Education, 2015a, b), and the intake for teacher education is only a small percentage of all applicants
As an investigation into the professional agency of secondary English teachers in South Korea, this study is interested in the dynamic interplay between individual teachers and their ecological environments
The findings suggest that legitimacy of professional agency is significant in relation to the individual self, collegial relationship, and the wider sociocultural environment as outlined in more detail

Summary

Introduction

In South Korea the teaching profession is consistently the most attractive career choice in regular opinion polls for high school graduates due to high job stability and the relatively high salary of teachers (Korean Ministry of Education, 2015a, b), and the intake for teacher education is only a small percentage of all applicants. During the first decades of Japanese colonisation periods, teachers were tasked with fostering pupils to be obedient and cooperative people for the Japanese Empire (Kim, 2013a, b); subsequently, teachers were tasked with preparing pupils to be suitable workers for the developing nation of South Korea modelled on the competitive, capitalist system of the US. This historical background has arguably encouraged Korean teachers to follow top-down instructions and disrupted the formation of teacher initiative and autonomy. Successive governments resisted the establishment of a teachers’ union that promoted the basic rights of teachers and students because of its anti-governmental stance (Kang, 2009) and teachers have been overly committed to long working hours teaching and doing excessive administrative works (Lee, 2019)

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