Conditions of Divergence in Teacher Practice in Elementary Unification Education: A Narrative Inquiry with Three Experienced Teachers

Abstract

This study first identifies the substantive and methodological limitations confronting unification education in Korean elementary schools, and then examines how three experienced sixth-grade homeroom teachers (over 20 years of service each) construct their classroom practice within those limits, and under what conditions their practices diverge. Using Clandinin and Connelly’s narrative inquiry, the analysis identified three shared conditions of practice: declining learner efficacy regarding unification, risk perception arising from the ambiguity of the political neutrality mandate, and a vacuum in cross-subject curricular linkage and up-to-date materials. These findings converge with national survey trends. Despite these shared conditions, teacher practice diverged into three types: avoidance and stability orientation, self-censorship and fact-oriented safety, and value expansion through curricular reconstruction. A cross-case analysis indicates that the decisive variables were not pedagogical competence or training completion, but rather the nature of the teacher’s experience of North Korea (threat exposure versus human contact), the level of perceived political risk, and the teacher’s sense of curricular autonomy. Three propositions follow: avoidance is a rational response to risk and therefore requires institutional protection rather than individual training; because learners already evaluate unification as a matter of reasons rather than obligation, universal norms such as human rights and peace function as a low-cost entry point; and perceptual change in teachers was triggered by direct, equal-status contact rather than text-based training, consistent with intergroup contact theory. Each recommendation is explicitly labeled as data-derived, theory-derived, or policy judgment.