The Journal of The Korean Association of Geographic and Environmental Education ISSN:1226-511X(Print) 2586-5641(Online) 한국지리환경교육학회지

This study examines the course “Cultural Landscape and the Rediscovery of Place,” a humanities-social sciences convergence curriculum centered on geography, by jointly reviewing curriculum design and implementation records (syllabus, weekly course materials, assignment design) alongside learner perception data, in order to empirically analyze the gap between the way “convergence” is professed and the way it is actually implemented and perceived in university geography education. The course was delivered through sequential team teaching across geography, Korean linguistics, and classical Chinese literature, with each discipline led by a different instructor for roughly five weeks in turn — a structure typical of convergence courses in Korean universities, which lends this case its representativeness. The analysis shows that under this sequential team-teaching structure, learners perceived the course less as a chemically integrated convergence and more as a multidisciplinary arrangement of “three disciplinary contents laid out in parallel.” A Spearman rank-order correlation revealed a strong positive association between learners’ perceived gains in convergent thinking and their perception of the course’s adequacy as a convergence course, a paradox suggesting that perceived quality of individual disciplinary sessions and the actual realization of interdisciplinary integration may be independent of one another. Nevertheless, learners strongly endorsed the necessity of convergence education itself, and their recognition of geography’s core concepts “place” and “cultural landscape” was embraced consistently across majors and genders, confirming geography’s potential to function as an interdisciplinary hub. To address the limitations of this physical combination, the study also presents the actual implementation of an integrated capstone assignment (an urban regeneration and place-marketing proposal) that was built into the course from the design stage; students reported that this assignment helped them review and apply their understanding across all three disciplines, demonstrating that integrated assignments can serve as a practical attempt to partially offset the limitations of sequential team teaching. However, the extent to which this potential can be realized through improvements in actual operational practice cannot be determined from the present data alone, and further verification of the expanded application and effectiveness of integrated assignments is needed. These findings indicate that for humanities-social sciences convergence education to be successfully established in university geography education, geography’s core concepts must be explicitly positioned from the design stage as an epistemological hub that genuinely connects knowledge across disciplines, and integration must be extended beyond sequential relay-style team teaching into integrated assignments and integrated assessment throughout the course design.