Rethinking Curriculum and Teaching Through Student Voice: Insights from the Korean Educational Context

This study examines what student voice offers to curriculum and teaching in the Korean educational context. Drawing on major Anglophone scholarship on student voice, the study first explores how students’ words may be understood not simply as criticism of school, teachers, or learning, but also as proposals for school improvement, resources for teacher reflection, and forms of participation in meaning-making. It then considers practical challenges accompanying student voice, including formal participation, representation and exclusion, interpretive asymmetries in knowledge production, constraints of time and place, and differences in modes of expression. On this basis, the study proposes three implications for curriculum inquiry: students should be recognised as co-inquirers rather than objects of research; inquiry with students should be understood as a process of teaching and learning; and curriculum should be understood as a generative process and outcome co-constructed by teachers and students. The study argues that student voice should be treated not merely as data about schooling, but as an epistemic and practical resource for rethinking curriculum and teaching.