ABSTRACT
In 2015, the education department of South Korea announced a new task force to produce a state-issued history textbook. This chapter explores how national discourses—or the ways a nation’s people tend to organize knowledge and ideas—impact social studies classrooms and students’ learning in South Korea and Japan. In many social studies classrooms, the national discourse has unquestionable power. The chapter examines several homeroom teachers at the elementary level and social studies teachers at the middle school level, but they were quite cautious about participating in the project. It illustrates how the historical, social, and political context affects design-based research and students’ learning. Design-based researchers therefore should anticipate pushback from families, schools, and regions invested in the national discourse. Design-based research offers a means of reforming curriculum and the instruction in meaningful ways that attend to the contextual factors at play.
