Multicultural Early Childhood Education Policy and its Local Interpretation in South Korea (abstract only)  

Oleh:

Lee, Younsun ; Kang, Hyunmi ; Kim, Sanghee ; Kyun, Juyoun ; Hwa, Tak Jeon

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: The International Symposium on Social Sciences (TISSS) and Hong Kong International Conference on Education, Psychology and Society (HKICEPS) at Hongkong, December 2013, page 935-936.
Topik: multicultural education; policy analysis; assimilationist
Fulltext: Hong Kong-Conference 151.pdf (214.17KB)

Isi artikel

Since the late 1990s, demographic diversity has increased in South Korea because of marriage-immigrants and migrant-workers, and discourses of multicultural education have arisen. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has presented multicultural educational policies as a major task since the late 2000s. However, discourses have focused on having children with diverse linguistic backgrounds adapt to Korean language and customs. This tendency might relate to how national institutions produce an ideology of multicultural education. What are the national goals of multicultural education policies for young children in Korea? Along with problematizing multicultural education policy, another concern relates to the gap between policy and implementation. Which ideology is reproduced, transmitted, and maintained by local offices of education? How do teachers interpret them? This study critically read the ideology of multicultural education in Korean early childhood education policies and identified the potential space between ideology and implementation. Critical Discourse Analysis was used to examine word repetition, lexical selection and location, and to assess promoted values and hidden ideologies in various written and spoken texts. Findings demonstrate that, by borrowing and selecting favorite words from Western multicultural education models or theories, policymakers reframed early childhood multicultural education to assimilate ethnic minorities in Korea. National educational institutions functioned as the dominant form of producing and controlling the notion of multicultural family and education. School inspectors in local offices of education were active disseminators of national ideologies within centralized and bureaucratic structures. Policies underwent transformations and met resistance by teachers interacting with local factors, including the top-down imposition of the new curriculum, their busy schedule, and their experiences with individual children. Teachers were neither assimilationists nor active multicultural educators. It is recommended that policymakers in Korea consider experiences of teachers and voices of parents and children from culturally diverse backgrounds in developing multicultural education programs. Regarding the role and responsibility of intermediate offices of education, a comprehensive effort to change the delivery system is strongly recommended. s. Creating professional learning communities to share diverse ideas with colleagues, parents, and professionals within, between, and across schools could be key to improving teachers’ multicultural teaching competencies. Finally, we problematize the absence of discourses related to critical reflection on cultural self- including the Korean ministry as well as school inspectors and teachers. As is evident in the analysis of discourses from the three different layers, the process of identifying the self and deconstructing the dominant discourse related to multicultural education is missing within all documents and narrative. Without questioning values, experiences, perspectives, and practices that are taken for granted within a Korean society, it is difficult to pursue goals of the multicultural education including transforming the world and making a just society.

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