Global Citizenship Education in the Primary Geography Curriculum of the Republic of Korea: Content Analysis Focusing on the Semantic Structure of 2009 Revised School Curriculum (Journal of the Korean Geographical Society; Vol. 49, No. 6)

The purpose of this study is to analyze the share of global citizenship education in the 2009 Revised Social Studies (geography area) School Curriculum of the Republic of Korea. I selected the achievement standards of the geography domain in the fifth and sixth grades as the subjects of analysis. The chosen subjects were examined using content analysis: I used KrKwic, a Korean language content analysis tool, to analyze the content and drew a semantic network of the analysis results using UciNet/NetDraw. I found that the geography domain of the 2009 Revised Primary School Curriculum included the concepts of and factors of global citizenship education. However, global citizenship education did not account for a major portion of the curriculum, and the curriculum achievement standards were noticeably nation-state centered. Global citizenship education factors were not closely associated with to other related factors in fact, they even revealed a isolated pattern. These findings suggest that the inclusion of global citizenship education in primary geography education is limited, because the connections between global citizenship education and related contents, such as the environment, sustainable development, conflict, and cooperation, are probably impeded. Globalization accompanies the transformation of territories, identities, and the relations between nation-states and the world, although nation-states continue to play a significant role in the globalized worlds. Therefore global citizenship education, a educational trend focusing on the global community, is particularly important and is required in the geography curriculum of the global era. I expect that the examination undertaken in this study to contribute to future curriculum revisions regarding globalizatin and global citizenship.