Writing Together for the Self and Others: Korean American Youths' Multimodal Networked Writing

• In Event: Telling Our Own Stories, Together: Singularity and Solidarity in Literacy Collectives

Abstract

Objectives:
The recent massive protests against racism sparked by the death of George Floyd raised and sought voices from diverse populations for social justice and change. In this paper, I focus on Korean youths, who are often classified as a model minority group or silenced as Asian Americans within the Black/White binary in the U.S. By creating a collective writing space for Korean American youth in a community setting, this study aims to explore how Korean American high school students discussed their lived experiences in White-dominant classrooms and negotiated their individual and collective identities through multimodal networked writing.

Perspectives:
Theoretically, this research is grounded in New Literacy Studies (Gee, 2015; Street, 2003) to illuminate young Korean Americans’ multiple language and literacy practices. The New London Group (1996) highlights two key aspects of multiliteracies in their work: “the multiplicity of communication channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity” (p. 63). The digitally infused literacy curriculum in this study offered a multilingual, multimodal writing class for Korean American youth in an immigrant center in a northeastern city. There has been little research on Korean transnational adolescents in the field of literacy education. In one of the few studies, Kim (2018) traced four Korean American youths’ identities and argued that being Korean had multiple layers of meaning for Korean immigrant youth, such as legal, national, ethno-cultural, and racial dimensions.

Methods and Data:
From a larger design-based research project (Barab & Squire, 2016), this study focused on ten Korean American adolescents among over 300 adolescents in a global online writing community for youth. The Korean American youths had a weekly classroom integrating the online community over one year. In addition, they were connected with Korean adolescents in South Korea and they had dynamic collaborations online and through postcards. These young people were collectively engaged in multimodal, multilingual writing with their teachers and the researcher. Among multiple data sources, artifacts, interviews, field notes, and group chats were used mostly for this presentation. Content analysis (Neuendorf, 2016; Saldaña, 2015) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; van Dijk, 2009) were chosen as analytical tools to understand how the youths negotiated their identities together across space and time.

Results and Significance:
The findings illustrate that students developed their transnational identities by sharing their lived experiences together as Korean American youth. Through their collective literacy practices, students expressed that they felt disconnected from the dominant culture, experienced gaps between school and home, and imagined living in other countries. Beyond building a “zone of contact,” the students positioned themselves as social actors to change their community and society and showed empathy to other minority groups by resonating their own experiences. This study contributes to how we can create a space for transnational youth who often feel excluded from the dominant curriculum.

Author

• Jin Kyeong Jung, Texas Tech University