A comparative analysis of the internationalization of the higher education curriculum in South Korea and Indigenous nations within North America

• In Event: Poster session I
  In Poster Session: Poster session 1

Proposal

The purpose of this paper is to compare the internationalization of the higher education (HE) curriculum in South Korea and in the Indigenous nations of North America, primarily the United States. The research questions guiding this study is what lessons from the processes which have informed HE internationalization in the Indigenous nations of North America can be applied to the Korean case. To address this question, we provided a macro level overview of HE internationalization processes in these nations and identified the meaningful comparison points of their different internationalization processes.

We have chosen these two somewhat disparate sites of comparison because there is a sound historical basis establishing a common thread in their struggles. As Shreve (2015) argued, there are many parallels between many colonized societies which, following World War II, were able to achieve liberation from colonization vs. those for which such full-scale liberation “proved unfeasible or simply impossible” (p. 19). Korea, falling into the former category, attained independence from Japan in 1945 (Lee, 2004). Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples in North America, falling into the latter category, began to utilize existing structures within the colonial nation-states in which they found themselves situated (e.g., the U.S. and Canada) to win partial liberation (Shreve, 2015).

In a contemporary context, the push for “Indigenization” (e.g., centering of the Indigenous) of educational curricula in North America has been regarded as a trend existing in tension with or opposition to internationalization (Garson & Dumouchel, 2013). We embrace Indigenous education as inherently international while also focusing on Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination in the realm of HE curriculum. We therefore argue that while Indigenization and internationalization may not exist in inherent conflict, Indigenization and Western industrial education most certainly do. In the South Korean context, we identified three main sites at which curricular internationalization is currently realized: Englishization of the curriculum; mobility programs, e.g. the movement of Korean scholars and students to largely Western countries for fixed terms of study; and the curricular impact of the presence of international students.

Considering distinctive processes of internationalizing HE curriculum in these nations, it would be possible to draw useful lessons from the struggles of the Indigenous nations of North America for curricular autonomy and control within the realm of HE which can then be applied to the challenges facing South Korea as it internationalizes its HE curriculum. Our main theoretical reason for doing so is that Indigenous North American nations are and have been under the very explicit control of colonial hegemony, forces which are more implicitly present in the internationalization processes taking place in South Korea. Both cases illustrate the challenges faced by formerly or currently colonized peoples struggling under the hegemonic effects of global neoliberalism and ongoing colonialism. Regarding the lessons that we can draw, what implications do these have for the study of internationalization in Indigenous nations as well as in global nation-states in the future?

Authors

• Sohyeon Bae, Michigan State University

• Sarah Owocki, Michigan State University