Critical Reflection on Instantiating “Foreign” Theory in the Korean History Teacher Community

This study explored the extent to which a community of history teachers in Korea applied foreign theories, such as Reading Like a Historian, into their classrooms and how they enhanced their theory-driven practice through reflections. The history teachers’ community in Korea has been at the crossroads of multiple types of teacher communities as they need to span learning, inquiry, a sharing of beliefs, and practice groups. The teacher community enables individual teachers to be competent teacher-practitioners engaged with the learning and inquiry cycle as well as with collaborative reflection. The teacher community is a platform on which teachers can assess the applicability of educational theory to local contexts. This observation highlighted the significance of positioning teachers as agencies for the interpretation and application of theory in Korean contexts to develop “Koreanized” learning theory. Therefore, as prosumers of learning theory, teacher communities need to have a firm grounding in the systematic use of protocols and critical reviews of academia when collaboratively transforming educational theory to practice.