A Comparative Study on Parent Education Program and its Implementation in South Korea: Philosophy-based Program vs. National Curriculum-based Program  

Oleh:

Ryu, Sumin ; Lee, Younsun ; Chung, Kai Sook ; Lee, Somin ; Kim, Jiyeon

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: The International Symposium on Social Sciences (TISSS) and Hong Kong International Conference on Education, Psychology and Society (HKICEPS) at Hongkong, December 2013, page 576-581.
Topik: parent education program; national curriculum of Early Childhood Education; Reggio; Montessori; Eco-friendly education
Fulltext: Hong Kong-Conference 93.pdf (311.37KB)

Isi artikel

In Korea, diverse kinds of early childhood education programs have been developed and used based on their own philosophies and educational perspectives. Examples are Waldorf, Reggio, Montessori, Eco-friendly program, English-based program and so on. From 2012, the new standard curriculum for young children, that is, Nuri has been imposed to all preschools. Regardless of educational philosophies of each program, all kindergartens and child care centers have to follow the highly structured national curriculum for young children. Then what about parent education program? We presume that each preschool might implement different kinds of parent education program (PEP) based on their own educational philosophies. Therefore, it is important to investigate how each preschool plan, implement and evaluate parent education program under the pressure of national standard movement. This study compared parent education programs and their actual implementations in kindergartens and child care centers. We focused on four parts: 1) the process of planning of parent education program, 2) the contents of parent education program, 3) the implementation of parent education program, and 4) the evaluation of parent education program. Four public preschools (where adopt the national curriculum) and six private preschools (where use their own curriculum based on educational philosophies) were included in our comparative study. With regard to data collection, annual parent education plans of each kindergarten and daycare centers and relevant data including newsletters, workshops and 577 parent-participation activities are collected. Open-ended interviews were conducted after reviewing the written texts of parent program. Content analysis was used. Analysis entails cross-comparisons across informants, across written texts, and between written texts and informants. To avoid bias in methods or interpretation of data, we worked with a variety of data including both written documents of parent education programs and spoken data from directors and teachers in preschools. The result of study showed that PEP of public and private preschools is strongly affected by the Nuri curriculum. Teachers and directors talked about limits and restrictions on their parent education in the process of planning, contents, implementation and evaluation. It was difficult situation for preschools to carry out parent education program based on own their philosophy and educational point of view. In public preschools, teachers played a role of transmitters of what the Nuri says. The parent education in public early childhood education sectors was developed and implemented by a cooperative network system. By constructing the cooperative network system, teachers uploaded annual plans and used each sample planscript. Therefore parent education program in public educational sectors has been regarded as one of the process of administrative works. Following the Nuri, contents consist of information-providing series rather than sharing, participating or communicating. However parent education program in Montessori, Reggio, and Eco-friendly education has a different story. With their educational values and philosophies, they encouraged parent participation through PEP. As the Nuri Curriculum began to be implemented in March 2012, autonomy of kindergartens and child care centers in the planning and implementation of parent education programs seemed to be constrained by a set of nationwide guidelines and accreditation standards. This tendency is that own educational philosophy is lost and identity is shaken. Through this study, we could see how strong the pressure is in the early childhood education fields. With regard to PEP, all kindergartens and child care centers come to lose their autonomy of planning and implementing. Therefore PEP was gradually regarded as one of the administrative works that teacher have to write, not implement. We suggest that the Korean government need to think deeply what will be going on in the educational fields when everything is standardized.

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