• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.1-17
• /
• 2016

The purpose of this review was to introduce and examine 'development' and 'relations' as the core concepts of Home Economics in 2015 revised middle school curriculum in Korea. The 2009 and 2015 proclamation of the ministry of education on home economics curriculum and 26 published middle school textbooks were reviewed. The major findings were as follows. First, the components of human 'development' and family 'relations' were strongly associated with promoting four key competencies (i.e. the self-management competency, the communication competency, the aesthetic sensibility competency, the community competency) of 2015 revision. Also, four of cross-curricular learning topics (i.e. character education, multicultural education, safety and health education, human right education) in 2015 revision could be effectively discussed with human 'development' and family 'relations'. Second, when teaching and learning of the core concept, human 'development', continuous dynamic aspects of life-span development, the connectedness of different domains of development, systematic approach of various concepts in development, specificity and empirical evidence of information and variability of developmental patterns in adolescence should be considered. Third, when teaching and learning of the core concept, family 'relations', family trait such as generational relations, gender relations, role relations and power relations should be taken into account. In addition, exclusively focusing on normal family ideology or image of middle-class family and lecture-centered instruction methods should be changed for students to achieve the competencies relevant to family relations. The future directions for applying core concepts, 'development' and 'relations' in classroom will be discussed.