Sebin Cheon
Sebin Cheon is a PhD candidate in History Education at Seoul National University, where she also completed her BA and MA She has taught pre-service history teachers. Her research asks what it means to know history amid contemporary challenges to historical consciousness, and how such knowing shapes students as subjects who interpret, judge, and respond to others across time. She is also committed to inquiry-based history instruction that nurtures students' capacity to think historically and engage critically with the past. Her publications explore how colligatory concepts structure historical understanding and how contextualization functions as a pedagogical problem in history classrooms.
Seoul National University
Session
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.