Teaching Across Differences: Elementary Teachers’ Transition toward Culturally Responsive Teaching in Multicultural Education

This qualitative case study examined South Korean elementary teachers’ development of cultural critical consciousness and their transition toward culturally responsive teaching. Four elementary teachers participated in the study. Teachers’ cultural critical consciousness emerged through three recurring tensions: frustration that national curriculum standards and textbooks did not resonate with students’ lived experiences; reframing students’ lives through dual perspectives while teaching students from immigrant backgrounds; and a growing sense that multicultural education needed to be reconsidered. In response to these tensions, teachers engaged in culturally centered, incremental efforts rather than attempting immediate, wholesale change. They negotiated workable alignments between curriculum standards and students’ lives and cultural backgrounds, diversified the language and instructional modes used in class, created safe spaces for revealing diverse perspectives, and coordinated with bilingual instructors and after-school teachers to share student contexts and consolidate practices. Through this transition, teachers experienced a shift in their professional identity from cultural transmitters to sensitive practitioners, and a shift in practice from delivering a standardized curriculum to enacting a curriculum co-constructed with students in the "here and now“. This study suggests that the starting point of multicultural education must consider the specific “context” of classrooms, regions, and students. It discusses expanding the discourse of teacher professionalism to include connecting student culture with the curriculum and using discomfort as a medium for critical reflection. Finally, it argues that culturally responsive teaching should be understood not as a fixed methodology, but as a processual praxis of integrating students' cultural backgrounds based on critical consciousness. The study proposes utilizing "School-designed Autonomous Hours" as a potential spatio-temporal site for this praxis.