제7차 교육과정에 따른 청각장애 특수학교 중학부 사회과 교육운영 실태

Abstract

The present study purposed to survey social studies education in special middle schools for students with hearing Impairment according to the 7th Education Curriculum, to investigate teachers’ perception on the education, the operation of the education, problems in the application of the curriculum and methods of activating the application, and ultimately to provide basic materials for improving social studies teachings in special middle schools for students with hearing Impairment. For these purposes, we conducted a survey of 23 middle school social studies teachers from 19 special schools for students with hearing Impairment throughout the country. The results of this study are summarized as follows. First, the most difficult part in applying the 7th Social Studies Curriculum mentioned by teachers in special schools for students with hearing Impairment was that students’ vocabulary and syntactic development were too poor to study social studies, suggesting that a basic problem in social studies education is students’ language skills. In addition, more than half of the respondents were negative to the realization of the original purpose of the social studies curriculum for the reason that the curriculum did not consider the characteristics of students with hearing Impairment and did not reflect the opinions of special school teachers for students with hearing Impairment. Moreover, as many students with hearing Impairment attended ordinary schools (classes), special schools for students with hearing Impairment have to take care of students with serious hearing Impairment or multiple Impairments and, because of this, most teachers expressed negative views on the continuous application of the 7th Social Studies Curriculum. Second, as for the operation of the 7th Social Studies Curriculum in special schools for students with hearing Impairment, teaching?learning plans and individualized education plans were prepared usually with reference to the guidelines of national, municipal and provincial education office and individual schools’ education programs. In utilizing teaching?learning materials, most of the respondents modified the contents of textbooks into short sentences and easy words or taught easily understandable areas selectively. This shows that contents of social studies are too extensive for students with hearing Impairment and, as a desperate measure, teachers had to extract some easy parts. Difficulties in teaching students were that most students lacked language skills for learning social studies and that it is hard to prepare and select teaching materials according to individual students’ levels. Third, problems in applying the 7th Social Studies Curriculum to special schools for students with hearing Impairment were that students do not have abilities to learn by themselves by reading social studies textbooks and cannot understand vocabulary in the textbooks and that most teachers are negative to students’ academic achievement through teaching and learning and are dissatisfied with the education curriculum. Notable problems in the operation of the education curriculum were that textbooks contain too many abstract words and need to be entirely reorganized, that the textbooks did not consider the characteristics of students with hearing Impairment, that the volume of contents is too large for students with hearing Impairment, that there are not sufficient teaching materials available in the school field, etc. Fourth, improvements required to activate the application of the 7th social studies curriculum in special schools for students with hearing Impairment include the expansion of opportunities for teachers to get training on teaching environment, teaching methods, teaching contents and assessment methods for the application of the social studies curriculum, the participation of special education experts in developing education curricula including social studies textbooks, the development of individualized education programs, financial support for the development of various textbooks designed to approach ordinary education curricula and the increase of assistant teachers. In conclusion, although the national core curriculum intends to give the basically same education to all students, the uniform application of the curriculum to students with hearing Impairment, whose learning abilities are much lower than ordinary students, rather impedes students’ learning. Thus, it is necessary to organize curricula and develop various teaching learning materials fit for the level of students with hearing Impairment.