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

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 latter's compressed modernization.