Youl-Kwan Sung

Rethinking the Pattern of External Policy Referencing: Media Discourses over the "Asian Tigers" PISA Success in Australia, Germany and South Korea.

The article compares how the success of the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of todays ‘globalised education policy field’, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globally disseminated stereotypes about Asian education, economic relations and the sense of ‘crisis’ induced through the relative position and change of position in PISA league tables in the countries in question.

Finland Has it All? Examining the Media Accentuation of "Finnish Education" in Australia, Germany and South Korea.

Drawing on the conceptual work of externalisation in comparative education and multi-accentual signs in cultural studies, this article examines how the print news media accentuate ‘Finnish education’ in the process of inserting this external reference into the domestic political discourses around education reform in Australia, Germany and South Korea. The study identifies all articles referencing ‘Finnish education’ that were published from 2000 to 2011 in two widely circulated newspapers with different political orientations in each country. Discourse analysis of the articles shows various ways in which ‘Finnish education’ is accentuated by the newspapers, serving to legitimise different political agendas in education policy debates. It is argued that ‘Finnish education’ has become a ‘projection screen’ for competing conceptions of ‘good education’ and the associated visions of ‘good society’. The authors situate the findings within the ongoing discussion of externalisation, calling for a careful conceptualisation of the role of the media in this line of comparative education scholarship.

Cultivating borrowed futures: the politics of neoliberal loanwords in South Korean cross-national policy borrowing

This paper examines the politics of policy-borrowing in Korean education. I use the term ‘loanwords’ as a metaphor for the practice in some Korean educational sectors of using borrowed English-origin educational rhetoric to create actual policy reform. I argue that discourses of choice and diversity, as loanwords, are initially bifurcated into progressivist and neoliberal policies; recently, they have been used to highlight particular aspects of market-based policies that are advantageous to particular social groups. I also demonstrate that the upper-class tends to make use of the terms choice and diversity in ways aligned with neoliberal perspectives in order to validate the pursuit of privileged opportunities, such as the right to choose to attend an elite high school.

The cultural politics of national testing and test result release policy in South Korea: a critical discourse analysis

This paper examines the ideological construction of educational discourses embedded within the South Korean print media. Significantly, these discourses have recently promoted the resurrection of a sweeping national testing and test results release policy. Through careful examination of the “test plus release” policy, the authors show how the government has achieved hegemonic power by shaping public opinion through the national testing contexts. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of educational policy texts from the government and top 10 print media sources, this paper analyses how discourses on “accountability”, “the right to know” and “the fairness of the tests” have been produced, reproduced and recontextualized to favour particular perspectives. The authors also examine how government and influential print media discourses interact with political and cultural factors such as “acclaiming the evaluative state”, “education fever” and “meritocratic beliefs” to achieve public consent for the new “test plus release” policy.

Is the United States Losing Its Status as a Reference Point for Educational Policy in the Age of Global Comparison? The Case of South Korea.

Abstract This paper seeks to contribute to recent comparative discussions about the shift of traditional referential points as a result of new global governance by the OECD through PISA. In doing so, the authors investigate whether the lower PISA rankings of the US have resulted in the shifting of its referential status in South Korea. For the purposes of analysis, media representation of US education in South Korea is analysed by using two disparate newspapers from two time periods: three years before the first PISA release in 2001 and three years after 2009. This paper uses media discourses as primary data, but it also considers other complementary data such as policy documents and government policy statements on education. Recently, global governance through comparative data has become more significant, but the results of this study suggest that one should be careful about oversimplification. The results of this study imply that the pattern of external referencing in media representation hinges on historical, political, and cultural experiences rather than purely evidence-based discourses, at least in the case of South Korea.

Re-evaluating education in Japan and Korea: demystifying stereotypes

In this highly readable book, Hyunjoon Park undertakes a series of secondary analyses of the data set produced by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International M...

Politics and the practice of school change: The Hyukshin School movement in South Korea

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the characteristics of a progressive school-change project in South Korea called the Hyukshin School (HS) movement. HSs are public schools that are intended to disseminate progressive and democratic practices. We obtained data from interviews with participating teachers, official documents, reports, and various statements from the stakeholders involved in the project. First, we found that in the case of the HS movement, decentralization as a global practice interacts with local politics, producing an unintended result that promotes a progressive approach to counter both competition-based pedagogy and the neoliberal accountability system. Second, the teachers in HSs have developed their own democratic approaches that feature the four key strategies of a learning community, a community of caring, a democratic community, and a professional community. Third, teachers in HSs perform their practices within the relationship between their new praxis and the East Asian style of pedagogy, which we believe to be the consequence of the latters compressed modernization.

Networking organizations to promote all students’ success: The structure and contents of networks in an educational welfare zone in South Korea and their implications

In 2003, the South Korean national government implemented a systematic school social work program known as the Education Welfare Priority Zone Plan (EWPZP). The EWPZP was designed to enable all related educational and social agencies in a zone to serve students in need by situating schools within the communities’ welfare networks. This research project aims to examine the characteristics of educational welfare networks in a target area in Seoul, South Korea, and assess levels of inter-agency collaboration. The authors also suggest that the EWPZP project needs to institutionalize greater collaboration between schools and welfare organizations and to make networks tighter.