In the Korean education system, CPD for teacher educators may be characterised as government-led, top-down, product-oriented and evaluation-focused. University professors’ CPD is closely related to government-mandated university quality control policies, and, similarly, the competency rating system applied to government officials has an influence on education officials’ CPD. The chapter thus examines the experiences of these teacher educators as they pursue CPD and how they cope with the challenges they face both inside and outside the workplace. In so doing, we hope to give due consideration to the development of teacher educators as professionals within society, which rarely features in discussions of education in Korea. Based on the experiences recounted here, we offer suggestions as to ways in which teacher educators’ CPD may be improved, and also how professional learning activities inside and outside the workplace may be strengthened. By considering the CPD of teacher educators in their socio-educational context, the chapter shows how CPD needs to be tailored to particular circumstances but it also draws out general principles for CPD for teacher educators, which may be useful for other contexts.
The context University professors A university professorship has long been regarded as one of the most popular – but highly competitive – occupations in the job market, offering both security and stability. It was widely accepted that once appointed as a university professor one could keep the position until retirement unless a personal decision was made to resign. There were no specific performance regulations for keeping the job, and professors were promoted according to seniority. They were considered to be experts because they possessed doctoral degrees, they had studied hard and were respected for their specialisations. Because of its security, stability and respectability, the job used to have the nickname ‘steel rice bowl’, which had a satirical meaning that the job would be kept safe in whatever situation. This is not true any more. Things began to change at the beginning of the 21st century when Korea introduced an evaluation policy to achieve university excellence. The government introduced a mechanism for differentiated financial aid according to the rankings of the universities. This had implications for university closure or mergers in the long term, another government objective designed to remedy over-expansion in the sector. A 60-year overview reveals that Korean education achieved significant quantitative expansion (Lee et al., 2010) responding to demand – with more than 90 per cent of high school graduates wanting to go to universities – but, as the birth rate has decreased, there is now less demand and universities have been under pressure to close or merge. Government-mandated university evaluation was introduced to improve the competitiveness of higher education, using objective forms of measurements including teaching quality, research, management and finance. The evaluation was administered by external teams appointed by the Korean Council for University Education (KCUE) with results unpublished. A review of the evaluation criticised it for being problematic with regard to validity and reliability (Han et al., 2010) and, in
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| Investigating continuing professional development for teacher educators in South Korea