The purpose of this study is to investigate the meaning that the workplace child care center teachers' subjective perception and the experience of the workplace have on their job performance. For the purpose of this study, the narrative inquiry method... The purpose of this study is to investigate the meaning that the workplace child care center teachers' subjective perception and the experience of the workplace have on their job performance. For the purpose of this study, the narrative inquiry method from Clandinin & Connelly(2000) was used. The participants of this study are teachers with 3 or more years of experience at workplace child care centers. Materials for the study were collected through interviews, field notes, research logs, call records, and memory boxes. The interviews, the primary method for data collection, were conducted three times per participant, for one and a half to two hours each. In the first interview, questions were aimed at helping the participants look at their life as a whole, from their personal growth environments and reasons for choosing their majors to how they came to be employed. In the second interview, interesting phenomena or experiences related to coworkers, directors, parents, children, and the company were discussed. The focus was on the participant's thoughts and beliefs so that their experiences at their past and present workplaces would be revealed. In the third interview, they looked at diverse dimensions of themselves not only as teachers but as workers through the passing of time, spatial environments, and different relationships. They discussed how the various factors of the interactions led to the present and what they experienced in the process so that they could look back on the meaning of their experiences. For data analysis, the experiences of the past, present, and future were explored in time order from their entrance to their majors to the present. The meaning of the physical spaces such as the business building and the company's shared spaces and the hierarchical narrative of the teachers' affiliations, professionality, and social status was extracted. Furthermore, attention was given to the societal interactions with company officials, parents, directors, and coworkers. The results of the study are as follows. First, the teachers of the workplace child care centers have had potential directivity towards the job before choosing their majors or workplaces. Their perception of the workplace was explored through outside reactions to the profession of child care teacher and the sense of belonging and self-esteem they have about the workplace. Specifically, the teachers of workplace child care centers had positive perceptions of their job, and had a double sense of belonging to both the company and the foundation contracting out. They perceived the company as the workplace that shows their external value, and the foundation as the workplace that guarantees their existential value. They had a clear sense of belonging to the foundation that strengthens their identity, self-esteem, and vision, but the brand awareness of the company also affected the teachers’ positive perception of self. Second, teachers of workplace child care centers experienced role confusion caused by relationships with the company in the process of job performance, but confirmed their identity as child care teachers and possessed a vision of the future. The teachers of workplace child care centers had a desire for increasing professionality. This derived from the satisfaction of intrinsic motivational factors such as the sense of accomplishment, stability, potential promotions, and the opportunity for growth, and had been earned through hands-on experience in their job. In other words, job experiences affected job satisfaction and led to a voluntary attitude for learning. Furthermore, the teachers of workplace child care centers had anxiety about maintaining their career after giving birth to and raising a child, for they did not have a workplace child care center to care for their children. Through the above research results, first the need for a change of perception about the workplace child care center teachers’ job scope according to the characteristics of their work environment was proposed. As teachers in a workplace child care center established by a company, they must accept understanding and dealing with the company and the parents’ structure of thought and working system as another part of their job. Furthermore, the company running the workplace child care center and the foundation contracting out must encourage and support teachers with a desire for growth in increasing their professionality and displaying their capabilities. Lastly, the grounds and direction for practical plans for support on a government level in order to minimize career interruptions of workplace child care center teachers were proposed. This study is meaningful in that it understood the workplace child care center teachers’ perception of the workplace and thoughts and attitude gained through job experience by exploring their job experience from the diverse dimensions of sociocultural, temporal, and situational context, and proposed plans for support.
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