Department of Biology Education, College of Education, Pusan National University
Wednesday 17th June at 12h00 - 13h30, Room A1-065
Title of Talk:
‘Some Issues and Problems of Policy and Professional Development
in Science Gifted Education in Korea’
Abstract:
Beyond educational needs in general, science gifted education in Korea was emerged by
social forces about forty years ago when Korea started to thrust forward a national movement of science in 1973. At the time, Korea was gradually recovered from devastating circumstances after Korean War in 1950. It was slowly established economic advances with light industries while it was developed an urgent awareness about Korea’s own capacity of heavy industries and intellectual property of science and technology. Almost all of technologies were introduced from abroad and abundant labor in the nation was the major element for national development. The nation’s economic development was not due
to its own advances of science and technology. The nation had no alternative but to improve manpower of science and technology. From this viewpoint, I will first present some policy directions of science gifted education from historical background, in particular, science high schools in Korea. In this part, a brief introduction to the Korean education system is presented. The second part of presentation will discuss about science teacher professional development in science gifted education based on theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks (adopted from Lee Shulman and other related scholars and epistemological approaches from other perspectives) focusing on different elements of general educational knowledge, content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and others. In particular, pedagogical content knowledge will be further stressed in terms of scientific creativity and tools for diagnosing effectiveness of teachers’ behaviors in classrooms.
Biography:
Hae-Ae Seo is an associate Professor at the Department of Biology Education, College of Education, Pusan National University (PNU, 2008-present), Busan, Korea and a visiting scholar at Aix-Provence University (Feb-Aug, 2015). She received an Ed.D. in science education from Illinois State University in 1993 and worked as researcher at the Science Education Center, University of Iowa (1994-1996). Since till the present, she has been in the field of research in science education and extended into science education for the gifted. She has involved in several research projects including science education as well as gifted education policy developments at national level and made a major contribution for establishment of science gifted education policies when she worked at the National Center for Gifted and Talented Education, Korean Educational Development Institute (1996 to 2006). She teaches courses of biology teaching methods at her department and takes in charge of the graduate programs of gifted and talented education at PNU. Her areas of research interest include scientific creativity, characteristics of science gifted, science teacher education, and related policy studies. Hae-Ae Seo has been actively involved in several academic organizations within Korea as well as abroad. She was editor-in chief for Journal of Korean Association for Science Education (KASE, 2012-2015) and serves as vice president for KASE. Abroad, she is currently serving as a president of International Organization for Science and Technology Education (www.ioste.org), which aims to encourage informed debate, reflection, and research on science and technology education and will hold the XVII IOSTE Conference in Braga-Portugal, July 11-16, 2016.