• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.351-361
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• 2021

With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the liberal arts education of universities has been called for fundamental innovation in its content and methods. H university has continuously made efforts to improve its general education curriculum with the goal of satisfying students' needs as well as the demands of the times. Its efforts can be summarized as the harmonization of competency-based education and the traditional liberal arts education. In more detail, it has tried to meet the demands of Ministry of Education which requests each university to establish its general education system focusing on key competencies. Simultaneously, it also radically changed its education system based on the guidelines of the Korea National Institute for General Education(KONIGE). The starting point of those changes was the basic consulting by KONIGE in 2017. According to the consulting report, H university introduced comprehensive and overall revision of its liberal arts education curriculum, increasing its liberal arts credit requirements from 22 to 28 credits in 2019. It has also reorganized and reclassified its liberal arts courses by introducing distributive elective classes. In 2020, in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Education, H university altered its curriculum once more in order to establish a competency-based general education curriculum. Under the new curriculum, all requirement subjects are completely matched with key competencies of H university. It also includes newly opened courses and subject areas such as "Social Service" and "Global Citizenship." Through these changes, H university hopes that its general education contributes to fostering students equipped with key competencies, who can face actively this challenging period.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2022

The two most influential rationales for the 21^st century science curriculum reform can be said to be core competence and scientific literacy. However, the relationship between the two has not been scrutinized but remained speculative - and this has made the harmonization of the general guideline and subject-matter curriculum difficult in Korean national curriculum system. This study compares the two discourses to derive implications for future science curriculum development. This study took a literature research approach. In chapter II, national curriculum or standards, position papers, and research articles were reviewed to delineate the historical development of the discourses. In chapter III and IV, the intersections of those two discourses are delineated. In chapter III, the commonalities of the two discourses are explicated with regard to crisis rhetoric, multi-faceted meanings (individual, community, and global aspects), organization of subject-matter content and teaching and learning method, and the role of high-stake exams. In chapter IV, their respective strengths and weaknesses are juxtaposed. In chapter V, it is suggested that understanding scientific literacy and core competence discourses to have a family resemblance as 21^st century science curriculum reform rationale, after Wittgenstein and Kuhn. Finally, the ways to resolve the conflict between the two ideas from the general guideline and subject-matter curriculum over crisis rhetoric were explored.