Chapter 2: Negotiating Ideological Borderlines: Korean Social Studies Teacher Gatekeeping in the Teaching About North Korea

As the strong control over national curriculum has gradually waned with the heightened democratic mood of society, school teachers in South Korea (hereafter Korea) have witnessed that the image of North Korea, once colored by harsh ideological biases, has taken a different shape in the latest national social studies curriculum and textbooks. However, the ghost of Cold War ideology still lingers on in the Korean peninsula. It is fair to say that the general public’s ambivalent attitude toward North Korea tends to have Korean teachers ideologically and pedagogically constrained when they deal with issues related to North Korea.

How do Korean social studies teachers perceive and teach about North Korea? What challenges and dilemmas do they face when teaching issues related to North Korea? Compared to observed changes in recent curricular materials, the educational community of Korea has suffered from the absence of information about how social studies teachers actually perceive of and teach about North Korea. As Kelly (1986) perceptively noted 2 decades ago, social studies teachers “have been criticized for the values they are or are not transmitting” (p. 113), no matter what ideological stance they take.