In Korea, there are more and more laws about education. When school violence became an important social issue, a law was enacted more than 20 years ago that set out specific procedures for dealing with school violence. The law requires that disciplinary actions against students who commit violence be recorded, and the student record can be used for admission to higher education. A decade ago, when child abuse became a serious social problem, a law was enacted to prohibit child abuse in schools. After this law was enforced, parents who were dissatisfied with a teacher's guidance of their students would report the teacher for child abuse. Last year, a teacher committed suicide after receiving malicious complaints from parents. After this incident, laws were enacted to protect the rights of teachers. Not only are the number of laws governing schooling increasing, but they are also becoming more specific. Increasingly, laws regulate what used to be done autonomously within schools.

This presentation will use actor network theory(ANT) to analyze how teacher-parent relationships change after laws are enforced. When a problem arises, many people want to utilize the law as a means to solve it. However, laws change relationships between people. In this sense, the law is a non-human actor. Within schools, various people and non-human actors form networks. When a law enters the school, it changes the network. We can call this a 'translation'.

The obligatory passage point is important as networks form and change. It is important for one actor to be able to disrupt the existing network and make other actors dependent on it in order to attract them to their network, which is called an obligatory passage point. Both teachers and parents want to use law to enforce their demands, and both want to change the other to be more in line with their demands. In this sense, law is a kind of obligatory passage point.

This presentation aims to analyze how relationships in schools, especially between teachers and parents, change after the creation of an obligatory passage point of legislation. In South Korea, the use of legislation as an instrument of education policy is increasing. And laws change schooling. This presentation analyzes the ways in which laws as policy instruments change schooling.

This presentation will utilize actor network theory to analyze how teacher-parent relationships are changing after a law was implemented. Actor network theory(ANT) will be utilized as a framework for analysis. To some extent, I have already analyzed the literature on actor network theory. In particular, I will pay my special attention to the concepts of 'obligatory passage point' and 'translation'. In 2023, a law was enacted to protect teachers' rights, but the law made it difficult for parents to provide feedback to teachers. I have already collected quite a bit of data on the background of the law, the main contents of the law, and the views of teachers and parents on the law. This presentation will report the results of a case study in one elementary school. Conflicts in teacher-parent relationships were more severe in elementary schools than in secondary schools. This is why I chose an elementary school as a research case. The study site will be an elementary school with a recent history of teacher-parent conflict. From March to June 2024, I will visit the school and interview teachers to investigate their perceptions of laws prohibiting child abuse and laws protecting teaching rights. I will also investigate teachers’ view on parents and teacher-parent relationships. I will ask teachers to introduce us to parents, and then will interview parents. The study will examine how parents feel about legislation to protect teachers' rights. In addition to the interviews, I will visit schools to examine how teacher-parent relationships are changing, and analyze how much of that change is related to the law.

J. Habermas described the phenomenon of an increase in the number of laws, and the resulting change in a living world, as the "colonization of a living world”. When laws are enacted, many of the people involved act in a law-conscious manner. When a problem arises, teachers are more likely to rely on the law or a manual created under the law to make a decision rather than making their own judgment. This is a kind of "colonization of the living world”. Parents will seek to justify their behavior in terms of the law, and if their behavior is challenged as being in violation of the law, they will turn to the courts. It is clear that law has become a mandatory passage point in schooling. Since law is a means of mediating the relationship between opposing parties, it is possible that the law creates an adversarial relationship between teachers and parents rather than fostering a cooperative relationship. However, networks are always changing. If the teacher-parent relationship becomes problematic, other changes may be made.

Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. 2011. Considerinf Materialirt in Educational Policy: Messt Objects and Multilple Reals. Education Theory, 61(1). Koyama, J. 2015. When Things come undoen: the promise of dissembling education policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4). Koyama, J. and Varenne, H. 2012. Assembling and Dissembling: Policy as Productive Play. Educational Researcher, 41(5). Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford Univ. Press. Law, J. 1999. "After ANT. Complexity, Naming, and Topology" J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After.