A law, an agency, and a walk into school

The arts-instructor system, in this study, begins in 2005: the year the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service was founded, and the year the Culture and Arts Education Support Act was enacted. The aim was to bring culture-and-arts education to life, to raise the quality of cultural life, and to strengthen the country’s cultural capacity. Working artists in each field would visit schools, join art as it is practiced to public education, and help raise students’ sensitivity, character, and creativity.

The support program itself had already been opening in stages. Kim Sang-hee, in 2010, lists instructors in traditional Korean music from 2000, in theatre from 2002, in dance from 2004, and in film and in cartoon animation from 2005 — five fields, in that order. Under Article 21 of the Act’s enforcement decree, the agency also runs a qualification for culture-and-arts education instructors, and supports universities and culture-and-arts education centers in offering a sound course for it.

That qualification, the study says, is meant to keep a tight hold on who may teach. Even so, the demands of a school — the number of hours, the curriculum — do not easily fuse with the expertise and the creativity the art itself asks for.

A jobs program, and a training that does not yet hold

The support program has been criticized, the study says, as a jobs scheme more than as a way of forming arts teachers, even though the early hopes were not small. Kim Hee-jae and colleagues, in 2014, pointed to fields that were too many and too mixed, to the low quality of a 30-session training meant to prepare instructors, and to standardized culture-and-arts programs that were spreading without securing good teaching. Those points are left with the 2014 account.

Jang Ji-hyun, in 2005, wrote that teachers with five or more years in the classroom begin to feel a professional spirit, and, from a more settled place, to work with a trust in themselves and with a sharper mind. Heo Eun-yeong, in the same year, reported that as many as 90 percent of arts instructors also taught privately — in academies, in one-to-one lessons, in school classes — and that the teaching years piled up in those other rooms were said to help their professionalism. That 90 percent is left with 2005.

A later government paper is brought in beside those earlier studies. The Comprehensive Plan for Culture and Arts Education (2018–2022), issued by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2018, said the instructor-qualification course needed to be strengthened, and that programs linking classroom work to the field, including internships, needed to be complemented and reinforced. The study’s own judgment is that the moment is less for arguing why culture-and-arts education ought to exist, and more for setting out how an instructor in one field — here, dance — can actually be retrained.

What the dance research has counted, and what retraining should hold

Dance education, in Lee Eun-yeong’s 2015 account, is not only a training of the body or a kind of sport. It uses an artistic experience to help form a way of valuing, and a way of being a person. The body, in this telling, is the medium: movement is how a person comes closer to things and to the world, and how feeling and understanding widen together.

When the study looks at research already done on dance instructors, satisfaction studies are the largest group: 13 papers, or 26 percent. Studies of how dance education is seen come next, at nine papers, or 18 percent. Work on identity is four papers, or 8 percent; work on methods of teaching, and on curriculum and instructional design, three papers each, or 6 percent. The pattern is that more attention has gone to asking how already-given teaching was received than to asking how the instructor’s quality might be raised. Korean universities, in Kim I-gyeong’s 2006 account, have many arts departments and many graduates, but professional education in the field is thin, curricula are incomplete, and a systematic training in applied arts is lacking. Research on the education of dance instructors themselves, the study says, is still thin.

From a look at instructors in eight fields, the study sets out what a dance instructor is asked to hold: professional knowledge of dance, the ability to carry a class, artistic imagination, ongoing self-review and improvement, and a way of talking and keeping a relationship with students and with staff in the school. Some school sites also want a hand in administration and in managing the environment of the room. Retraining, it says, should be able to hold all of that. Around it, the study asks for a new paradigm that can keep up with a changing culture-and-arts world: room for creative dance, which it treats as a core of the art; retraining for digital and communication technologies that have already changed how work is made and moved; and a marketing of the work that would let a dance artist stand in a more competitive place. Policy, it adds, has to build an environment in which that retraining can actually run, and in which creative work can be drawn out.

What the study wants next

The hope is modest and practical: that retraining designed for dance, rather than a single course for every field at once, might give culture-and-arts education a firmer next step. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Study on retraining to raise the professionalism of arts instructors, with a focus on dance, Cheongeoram Uri Dance Research Society (Korean source page).
2. Kim Sang-hee, 2010, on the staged opening of the arts-instructor support program from 2000 to 2005. Culture and Arts Education Support Act, 2005; founding of the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service, 2005; Article 21 of the enforcement decree.
3. Kim Hee-jae and colleagues, 2014, on the 30-session training and standardized programs. Jang Ji-hyun, 2005; Heo Eun-yeong, 2005, on the share of instructors who also teach privately. Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Comprehensive Plan for Culture and Arts Education (2018–2022), 2018.
4. Lee Eun-yeong, 2015, on dance education. Kim I-gyeong, 2006, on university arts curricula. Counts of prior dance-instructor studies as gathered in the source (satisfaction 13 papers, 26 percent; perception 9, 18 percent; identity 4, 8 percent; teaching methods and instructional design 3 each, 6 percent).

Last updated: 14 November 2026