South Korean Elementary School Teachers' Perceptions of Professional Curricular Autonomy

With increasingly diverse formal education settings around the globe, teachers' ability to differentiate curriculum is essential to meet the needs of students with varied cultural, socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. Teachers' curricular autonomy is a prerequisite to diversify curriculum. Guided by sociocultural approaches to agency and social cognitive theory, this quantitative survey study investigates how teachers are situated in the distinct cultures of specific schools and societies. In particular, this study examines how South Korean teachers' relationships with their principals, co-workers, and students and the Confucian values of collectivism and authoritarianism influence their self-efficacy and outcome expectancy in exercising curricular autonomy as well as their current and desired practices for diversifying curriculum. This study also examines whether teachers' workloads influence their practices of exercising curricular autonomy.;A total of 822 public elementary school teachers in South Korea participated in both the pilot (n=195) and primary studies (n=627). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (EFA & CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicated that teachers are more likely to exercise autonomy to diversify curriculum when they are supported by their colleagues and principals, giving them a high level of collectivism, self-efficacy and outcome expectancy in exercising curricular autonomy. The study also found that the two individual traits encourage them to exercise curricular autonomy as well as to desire more curricular autonomy, while sociocultural factors only influenced teachers' current practices. Moreover, teachers' self-efficacy and outcome expectancy in exercising curricular autonomy were increased via the support of principals and students and decreased if they strongly valued authoritarianism. Lastly, it was found that teachers' workloads did not influence either their current or desired practices for exercising autonomy to diversify curriculum.;This study is significant as it views teachers as critical change agents in the achievement of diversity and social justice. It also broadens and deepens educational scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the conditions for and effective ways to promote their agency to diversify curriculum. Lastly, it argues that "autonomy" is a culturally variable term and must be understood in a way that reflects contextual differences.