North Korean Defector (NKD) students’ contentious experiences of South Korean schooling

• In Event: Poster session III
  In Poster Session: Poster session 3

Proposal

The study tries to explicate North Korean Defector(NKD) students’ lived experiences of South Korean schooling, focusing on contentious local practices that emerge as they try to participate in schools socially and academically. In particular, we look into cases of five NKD students who have experienced various educational systems and culture in places including North Korea, China, and South Korea (a mainstream school and an alternative school). Taking advantage of the informants’ rich contextual understanding with diverse schools, this study seeks to understand in what ways NKD students interact with educational contexts and make sense of their experiences of schooling in South Korea. Social practice theory (Holland & Lave, 2001) which emphasizes historicity and translocality –“historical production of persons in practice” and pays attention to how history in person, contentious local practices, and history of enduring struggles are interconnected – offers a viable conceptual framework to explore schooling as cultural activities across multiple places in time and space. Findings present three contradictions emerged from analysis which open up and facilitate possibilities for negotiation, hybridity, improvisation, and self-authorship (Bennett et al., 2017; Holland & Lave, 2001). First, “coming out” or conceal North Korean identity? The issue of “coming out” is not a “once and for all” event. Rather it is a process that NKDs have to struggle constantly which points out their conflicted positionality (inside or outside) and imposed upon dichotomous discourse. Second, mimic to fit in or stay othered? To socially engage, NKD students mimic the mainstream culture, risking losing or damaging their identity as a North Korean since the schooling constantly makes them “feel guilty” about being different. While they struggle through marginalizing experience (of discrimination, deficit practices & microaggressions) which creates conflicts in their identity, invisible liminality of their struggle in schooling (included or being othered) allows them to overcome binary demarcation (e.g., asking to take sides) to reconcile with their historicity and recognize possibilities for hybridity. Third, failing to learn or failing to teach? NKD students have come to observe and critique “broken fantasies about South Korean schools.” By dropping out of mainstream schools and choosing Hope High instead (accepting social stigma of being “less than”), NKD students are choosing marginality as a space for self-authoring. This study offers NKD students’ counter-stories on their “contentious” experiences of South Korean schooling which reveals how schools impose binary demarcation, practice marginalization against them, and falsely putting blames them for their educational difficulties. Their stories also demonstrate how critically yet strategically the NKD students work to reconcile with their historicity and defend their place identity by resisting discriminatory practices and overcoming a dominant demarcation discourse, and further to author their identities in practice as they choose marginality for “communitas”(Turner, 1969). Findings underline educational efforts for NKD students need to consider 1) historicity is constantly in action as local & translocal and 2) marginality as a critical, strategic positioning is self-authoring.

Author

• miyoun lim, Ewha Womans University