Television as cosmopolitan education: a comparative case study of Face Me and Smile and Modern Family

This study discusses the value and importance of cosmopolitanism in the modern globalized era, and how aesthetic experiences through television can contribute to promoting cosmopolitan education. Cosmopolitanism, an ambition to interact with and belong to the world by expanding one’s national or cultural borderlines, requests people to have an intuitive sense of a common humanity based on both rational and emotional engagement. This study argues that conventional multicultural education in formal schooling has limited impact in empowering cosmopolitanism, since this direction mainly focuses on offering detailed engagement with multiple cultures without adequate extending that engagement to develop a disposition that moves easily between and among varieties of traditions. This study suggests that aesthetic experience of daily lives can become a possible alternative to develop cosmopolitan dispositions. In this project, I propose that television, as a medium of aesthetic experience in daily life, can contribute to cosmopolitan education. I do this by examining theoretical research and conducting a comparative case study of two particular television series. Through the analysis of Face Me and Smile (2010), a family drama produced in Republic of Korea, Modern Family (2009), an American situation comedy, and this study shows how television creates aesthetic experience in its distinctive way and how such experience can promote cosmopolitanism. Differing concepts of cosmopolitanism in the United States and Republic of Korea is also contrasted to broaden the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2017

Author dc:creator

• Seo, Hyeonah

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dhillon, Pradeep
• Witt, Allison
• McCarthy, Cameron

• Cosmopolitanism
• Cosmopolitan education
• Aesthetic experience
• Media education
• Television

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 Hyeonah Seo

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97497

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/97497