The international community has been making efforts to solve the problems of global
poverty and inequality for decades, emphasizing the role of education in particular. Recently,
the professional development of teachers in developing countries to improve the quality of
education became an important issue, followed by the discussion about how to make use of
Korean teachers’ expertise, who are thought to be excellent teachers. There is, however, little
research on the reason why Korean teachers should participate in international development
cooperation and what specific role they can play through participating. This research tries to
understand the reality of education development cooperation and find out related
implications both in theory and practice, by analyzing the experience of the teachers who
participated in an education development cooperation project. For this purpose, the
researchers conducted in-depth interviews with six teachers, who are members of an
organization implementing an ODA project.
Findings indicate that the teachers participated in the project either out of ‘curiosity about
a different world’ or interest in ‘following their original dream’. While preparing for a
teacher training workshop which aimed at empowering the instructional capacity of teachers
in a developing country, the participants experienced ‘reflection on the experience of past
participation’ and expressed ‘vague hope of communication with teachers in the partner
country’. In the process of implementation, they ‘reflected on their current participation on a
personal level’, which helped to fuel growth, and were provided with experiences which
could be utilized in their schools and lessons. However, the participants did not thoroughly
evaluate the teacher training workshop’s efficacy and efficiency, despite the training
workshop being a part of the education development cooperation project. In addition, while
they actively participated in the teacher training workshop, the teachers were having
difficulties in performing another role of an ODA project’s implementer.