ABSTRACT
A poll conducted in an in-service training program for high school teachers in South Korea saw that 64.3 percent of the 28 respondents felt that training in curriculum design was irrelevant to them as teachers. When asked to elaborate, the fairly unified opinion was that it wasn’t their job to decide what to teach, which should be left to those who had a view of the larger picture. Only two of the remaining respondents felt strongly that it had a place in a teacher's education. In Korea, as in many countries around the world, education is governed by a national curriculum. Decisions regarding what children need to know and when it should be learned are made by a dedicated branch of the national government. Although not a universal model, national curricula are established in the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and many other countries. In Australia, education policies are made by the states or territories although a national curriculum may be adopted in the future. Education policies in the United States are also left to the states; even the hotly contested No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Meier & Wood, 2004), a piece of national legislation, allows standards to be set by the individual states. But in all these countries, education policy is the domain of elected or appointed officials. Teachers, then, are the executors of policy. While writings on curriculum design generally acknowledge that any teaching situation has constraints of various kinds, much of what is written applies largely to models where the instructor has a far greater degree of freedom than the public school teacher. Without accounting for the academic freedom associated with higher education, undergraduate programs, for example, are frequently the final step in English education for many learners, a situation that accords its own degree of freedom. By examining a government-published textbook and its implementation in a South Korean middle school classroom, this chapter examines this imbalance and discusses the limitations and the freedom of the teacher at the terminal end of the curriculum chain.
