Mimi Lee
Mimi Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of History Education, College of Education at Seoul National University. Her research focuses on teachers’ use of primary sources and inquiry-based instruction. Drawing on nationwide teacher surveys, in-depth interviews, and lesson log analyses, she has shown that teachers vary widely in how they conceptualize primary sources, and that these beliefs strongly influence classroom practice. Her more recent projects investigate teacher factors—such as historical thinking orientations, views on the purpose of school history, and teaching experience—that affect the use of activities, sources, and inquiry. Building on these findings, she is currently leading the development of educative curriculum materials designed to support teachers’ knowledge growth and help them bridge the gap between disciplinary history and school history in the era of digital transformation.
Seoul National University
Sessions
World history education in South Korea has undergone continuous revision, reflecting shifting historiographical paradigms, national priorities, and changing understandings of global interconnection. While curricular reforms have sought to address critiques of Eurocentrism and to incorporate approaches associated with New World History and global history, significant tensions remain between reform discourse and classroom practice. This panel investigates the current state and challenges of world history education in South Korea through four interconnected dimensions: national curriculum discourse, textbook narratives, high-stakes assessment, and scholarly debates shaping reform.
The first paper analyzes the normative goals embedded in national curriculum documents, identifying enduring tensions between “human history” and “today’s world.” The second paper investigates how high school textbooks construct global narratives, focusing on Eurocentrism and the distribution of historical agency. The third paper turns to assessment by examining eleven years of College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) items, revealing how high-stakes testing constrains the realization of global history ideals. The fourth paper situates these developments within broader scholarly debates, analyzing how researchers’ positionalities shape discourse on world history education in Korea.
Taken together, these studies show that world history education in South Korea operates at the intersection of global intellectual trends and national institutional structures. By integrating curriculum, textbook, assessment, and discourse analysis, the panel offers a comprehensive examination of how “the global” is conceptualized, institutionalized, and contested in world history. Korea’s experience offers a valuable case for international scholars seeking to understand how world history education is evolving within national education systems in a period shaped by new debates about globalization.
TBD
This panel examines how historical perspective can be systematically designed, implemented, and analyzed in middle school world history classrooms in Korea. In an era of globalization, the ability to understand perspectives shaped by different historical contexts has become increasingly important. Although historical perspective is widely recognized as central to historical thinking, students often struggle to move beyond presentist or relativist interpretations.
We conceptualize historical perspective across three interrelated domains. Contemporaneous perspective refers to understanding how historical actors interpreted events within the social, political, and cultural conditions of their own time. Historiographical perspective concerns how later historians and interpreters construct differing accounts of the same event based on distinct questions, values, and evidentiary frameworks. Cross-temporal perspective involves comparing and synthesizing perspectives from different temporal positions, examining how interpretations shift across time.
Paper 1 presents the design principles of ten inquiry-based curriculum units built around widely used primary sources in Korean middle school textbooks. The materials articulate a staged progression across the three domains of perspective. Paper 2 analyzes 1,020 student responses generated through classroom implementation in ten schools, identifying patterns in students’ recognition and explanation of historical perspective. Paper 3 offers an in-depth analysis of cross-temporal perspective through close examination of students’ written conclusions on selected modern topics. Together, the panel clarifies the epistemic challenges of perspective learning and suggests instructional directions for world history education.