Diversities and Multicultural Education: History and Policies in Korea

• In Event: 30.021 - Immigration and Multicultural Urban Educational Policies and Their Implementation in India, Korea, Japan, and Singapore

Abstract

Purposes and Perspectives

This historical policy study seeks to identify the progression of multicultural education in Korea after World War II, especially in the urban areas of three Korean provinces: Gyeonggi-Do, Seoul, and Incheon. There are 673,849 multicultural residents (i.e., residents who are immigrants or children of immigrants) living in these urban areas, which accounts for almost 50% of the entire multicultural population of Korea (Kosis, 2015). Focusing on the history of multicultural educational policy development, this paper considers two interrelated perspectives: Korean society’s immigration-induced population transition as a major push for multicultural education and the concepts of multicultural education and multicultural education policy development and implementation. Using these two perspectives, this paper examines how Korea has shifted into a multicultural society, how the concept of multicultural families in Korean society has been constructed and reconstructed, and how research and policies concerning multicultural education have developed.

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources

This historical policy study took a macroscopic view, reviewing the literature on multicultural education in Korea since World War II and examining major educational policies and relevant national descriptive statistics to analyze the evolution of these policies and the problems and challenges with their implementation.

Conclusion and Significance

There are two major findings discussed in this paper. First, Korean society has traditionally emphasized the virtue of homogeneous ethnicity and taken pride in the so-called “pure bloodedness” of its members. As a result, Korea’s educational institutions are experiencing difficulties as Koreans struggle to adapt to an increasingly diverse society. With vastly increasing numbers of “foreigners,” Koreans widely uses the term “multicultural family,” which includes three minority groups: immigrants through marriage, foreign workers, and North Korean refugees. The term multicultural families may be at risk of triggering prejudice and discrimination because it suggests a distinction between children according to their parents’ country of birth, and the term should be changed or redefined (Chang, 2006). Second and most importantly, this paper challenges the prevailing concept of multicultural education in Korea, where multicultural education tends to be narrowly focused on teaching students to understand other cultures but not to understand the inequality issues within Korean society (Yang, 2007). Furthermore, there are voices calling for a unique Korean-type multicultural education due to the belief that Korean theories on this subject are different from that of other countries. When it comes to Korea’s multicultural education policies, most programs, aside from teacher training, specifically target multicultural families but not schools and society at large. In addition, policies focus on teaching these families to adapt to Korean society and culture rather than on promoting a general educational and societal understanding of and respect for other cultures. Even in schools, a majority of these multicultural programs did not involve activities with a wider range. This study suggests an expansion of the concept of multicultural education and a new direction for the development of multicultural education policies and programs in Korea.

Authors

• Insil Chang, Gyeongin National University of Education, Seoul, Korea

• Harim Ahn, University of Maryland