Fragile civility: an evangelical American school meets Korean educational sojourners in neoliberal time
type: CreativeWork
description: This study is situated in the burgeoning body of scholarship on South Korea’s “Early Study Abroad” (ESA) movement and English hegemony and bilingual education, and in the larger narrative of global educational migration, especially the integration of international students into U.S. schools. It examines the conflicts that emerged when a noncompetitive evangelical Midwestern Christian high school, predominantly white lower-middle class, enrolled escalating numbers of Early Study Abroad (ESA) Korean teenagers. It focuses on the importance of language, in particular the emergence of English as today’s lingua franca, in terms of integration as opposed to assimilation. The school implemented polices regarding the use of English–Only at school and guardianship of those students who were unaccompanied by parents. During three years of ethnographic interviews and observations of fourteen upper-middle class 10th-12th grade Korean students (nine male and five female), their parents, and school personnel, both at the school and outside of the school (in the U.S. and in Korea), I asked how those policies came into being and how various groups of students, teachers, administrators, and parents viewed them, and why they had these views. I observed what the effects of the policies actually were, in practice. Examination of these policies provided a window into uncomfortable, underlying, and unstated incompatibilities among the educational and social goals and expectations of the Korean students, their parents, and the school’s staff and leadership. A veneer of civility hid from the various parties – students, parents, and school staff – their diverging goals and viewpoints. Their reactions were further convoluted with linguistic, religious, racial/ethnic issues, as well as class, citizenship, and identity. The fraught experiences that resulted suggested that neither the Korean ESA families nor the school staff were prepared for the conflict that resulted from linguistic, racial, a…
abstract: This study is situated in the burgeoning body of scholarship on South Korea’s “Early Study Abroad” (ESA) movement and English hegemony and bilingual education, and in the larger narrative of global educational migration, especially the integration of international students into U.S. schools. It examines the conflicts that emerged when a noncompetitive evangelical Midwestern Christian high school, predominantly white lower-middle class, enrolled escalating numbers of Early Study Abroad (ESA) Korean teenagers. It focuses on the importance of language, in particular the emergence of English as today’s lingua franca, in terms of integration as opposed to assimilation. The school implemented polices regarding the use of English–Only at school and guardianship of those students who were unaccompanied by parents. During three years of ethnographic interviews and observations of fourteen upper-middle class 10th-12th grade Korean students (nine male and five female), their parents, and school personnel, both at the school and outside of the school (in the U.S. and in Korea), I asked how those policies came into being and how various groups of students, teachers, administrators, and parents viewed them, and why they had these views. I observed what the effects of the policies actually were, in practice. Examination of these policies provided a window into uncomfortable, underlying, and unstated incompatibilities among the educational and social goals and expectations of the Korean students, their parents, and the school’s staff and leadership. A veneer of civility hid from the various parties – students, parents, and school staff – their diverging goals and viewpoints. Their reactions were further convoluted with linguistic, religious, racial/ethnic issues, as well as class, citizenship, and identity. The fraught experiences that resulted suggested that neither the Korean ESA families nor the school staff were prepared for the conflict that resulted from linguistic, racial, a…
author: Park, Hye-Young
language: en
keywords: Korean spirit, Education fever, English fever, Maternal zeal, Educational dilemma in South Korea, Educational migration as upper middle class family strategies, neoliberalism, global capitalism, Parachute kids, Early study-abroad students, educational sojourners, International Students, hegemony of English, U.S. imperial shadow in South Korea, English-Only in the U.S. and U.S. schools, Linguistic imperialism and globalization, South Korean racial and linguistic ideology, Asian model minority and yellow peril, Color mute, White supremacy, assimilation and integration, School ethnography, Cross-cultural clash, Second language learning, Bilingual paradigm, Bicultural identity, Transnational identity, Neoliberal subjectivity
date published: 2013-08-22T16:39:32Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:34Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/45416