The purpose of this study is to examine the actual manifestation of history teachers' teaching professionalism in the classroom field. This study regards history teachers as designers of teachers’ curriculum and focuses on history teachers' subjecti...
The purpose of this study is to examine the actual manifestation of history teachers' teaching professionalism in the classroom field. This study regards history teachers as designers of teachers’ curriculum and focuses on history teachers' subjectivity, called Views on Aims of School History Education, which is a criterion for instructional design. There are two core questions that clarified the purpose of this study. First, what are the characteristics of history teachers that distinguish teaching professionalism of history education from that of general pedagogy? Second, how can history teachers' teaching professionalism be manifested in actual classroom practice?
To explore the research question, this study selected three history teachers with wealth of experience in history teacher training as the main research participants. The study is conducted in three phases. First, it starts with understanding the individual history teachers. Second, it analyzes the classroom mentoring process of a novice teacher who is struggling with the methods of teaching of history. Third, it compares the perceptions and practices of the individual history teachers with the perceptions and practices revealed in the instructional mentoring of the novice teachers. Because history teachers' perceptions are tacit, it is difficult to clarify them through classroom observation or in-depth interviews. However, this research method has significant point in that it can, directly and indirectly, reveals each teacher's perceptions of what it takes to become a professional history teacher by utilizing the steps of analyzing instructional mentoring of novice teacher.
This study drew four main results. First, ‘views on aims of school history education’ three teachers had was so fully sophisticated that they were able proficiently persuade researcher and students. Moreover, each teacher’s views on aims of school history education was deeply internalized by the individual teacher and served as an important criterion in the entire process of classroom design, performance, evaluation, and improvement. In particular, the views on aims of school history education were a unified form in which the overall understanding of the history subject was concluded to the purpose of history education. It suggested that the realization of embodied views on aims of school history education and the efforts of individual teachers to refine it can be a factor that distinguishes 'history' teaching expertise from other teaching expertise.
Second, views on aims of school history education which was inherent in classes could be revealed when a single teacher fully built up an understanding of a number of classes. It meant it required discernment that a single teacher could perceive class as a long-term process, with longer breath, not a single unit. Specifically, it represented the ability to control one's views on aims of school history in a long-term classroom process, at the same time to be able to detect the views on aims of school history of a colleague teacher in the long-term process. This led to the implication that it is important to maintain consistency between the views on aims of school history education and the content and methods of teaching.
Third, although the teachers' views on history education were an important factor in their decision-making, they could not impose them unilaterally. The three teachers were considering three main environmental factors: the influence of the national curriculum and textbooks, the influence of the college entrance examination and assessment system, and the characteristics of the school and students, including local characteristics. The social, institutional, local, and individual circumstances surrounding the classroom sometimes constrained the way history was taught. Nevertheless, teachers were making small and large changes to their instructional designs in order to make their idealized vies on the aims of school history education be a reality in their classrooms. The demonstration of history teachers’ teaching professionalism was remarkable when they utilize this adaptive capacity to reconcile views on aims of school history education with the elements of the classroom environment.
Fourth, the three teachers were not content with their present teaching expertise and constantly devoted themselves to developing their intellectual passions. One of their intellectual passions was heuristic desire to know new things, and the other was viewed as a persuasive passion, which was the desire to communicate their knowledge with other teachers. In this intersection of heuristic and persuasive passion, the teachers reflected on their views on aims of school history education and were constantly looking for ways to improve their history classes.
Taken together, these findings lead to four suggestions for history teacher training. First, the refinement of views on aims of school history education should be a priority in the education of pre-service history teachers and in the retraining of history teachers. Examining their own views on aims of school history education, verbalizing it, and finding teaching methods that are appropriate to it are the task of refining one's own embodied views on aims of school history education. Second, when it is necessary to evaluate a teacher's "teaching", it is necessary to look at the process of how the teacher's views on aims of school history education has been transformed through certain activity stimuli. The 'process' shares the meaning of a long breathing, long-term class. Third, this study suggests that the essence of history teachers' community activities should be scrutinizing their views on aims of school history during cooperation. Fourth, teacher training programs should be active at the local level, which is narrower than the provincial level. Local characteristics have a strong influence on the adaptation of history teacher’s perspectives. Therefore, it is expected that teacher training programs at the local level can contribute positively to the improvement of the teaching professionalism of history teachers as a whole if they are activated as a venue for sharing understanding of the classroom environment.
The results and implications that emerged from this study can have effect on organization of history teacher education programs, even if only marginally. It can also important to note that attention to the views on aims of school history education respects the subjectivity and intentions of individual teachers and the diversity of individual classes that reflect that. Most importantly, the results of this study were derived from observations of each teacher's teaching and mentoring practices, and were therefore a realistic voice from the field of history education.
However, this study has four limitations related to data collection and analysis. First, due to the characteristics of the researcher who is not a teacher, it was not possible to interpret the field of history education in detail. Second, the data collection was not consistent for each participant. Third, although it was mentioned that history class should be understood as a long-term process beyond unit class, this study could not observe history class based on the long breath. Fourth, even in the context of a history classroom where teaching and learning coexist, the discussion in this study focused on teachers rather than students. These limitations can be partially compensated for by the features of qualitative study. Thus, observing the adaptability of teachers’ views on aims of school history education in long-term classes, and comparing teachers' views on aims of school history education with students' acceptation of them in long-term classes may be topics for further research that can compensate for the limitations of this study.