Individualization, Peer Learning, and the Cultural Model of Sociality in South Korean Education: The Case of an Educational Metaphor

This article, based on interviews with teachers and classroom observations, examines the contour of the educational reform for individualization over twenty years in South Korean schooling. By way of an educational metaphor implicated in shifting dynamics between two competing yet complementary cultural models of sociality and human development, I attempt a historically nuanced analysis of an interdependence orientation manifest in South Korean schooling. In so doing, I closely attend to how a cultural model of sociality strongly associated with peer learning is reassessed, re‐activated, or even accentuated to nurture individuality and self‐expression. The focus of inquiry is the cultural organization of peer learning and the underpinning cultural model of sociality in the context of the home class, the latter being an organizational pivot in South Korean schooling. [Individualization, peer learning, cultural models, home class, South Korea] Abstract in Korean 20 . , . . .