Darling-Hammond (2015) sheds light on the practice of caring homeroom communities in Asian schools as a successful new model of American schooling that can “create a caring environment…increase instructional authenticity… and enhance the extent to which students are well known by adults through systems (p. 65). Indeed, a founder of an innovative charter high school in Harlem, New York, saw the Korean-style homeroom system as a transformative education model, particularly for underserved students and successfully adopted it (Paybarah, 2021). What is intriguing is that, despite the possibly meaningful value of homeroom, scant scholarly attention has been paid to it in terms of the practice of authenticity and care in teaching. Indeed, most Korean educational researchers tend to see homeroom as merely a system for administrative efficiency or an old-fashioned tradition of schooling that needs reform.

This study centers on my own lived experience as a young female PE teacher and a researcher of teaching and teacher education. By visiting each storied curriculum commonplace, this inquiry aims to explore the yet-uncovered spiritual values of homeroom in terms of authenticity in teaching.