Cultivating Cosmopolitan Orientations in Korean University Students: An Initial Foray

• 발행기관: 한국외국어교육학회
• 저자명: Herron, Lindsay
• 간행물 정보: 『한국외국어교육학회 학술대회 자료집』2018년 한국외국어교육학회 학술대회, 71~72쪽, 전체 2쪽
• 주제분류: 사회과학 > 교육학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2018.10.30

영문 초록

In a world rife with seemingly endemic intolerance, impatience, and division—including in Korea, where increasingly diverse populations bring rich new perspectives but also face resistance and even prejudice—there is a need to consider the potential of critical cosmopolitan education in facilitating open-minded, responsive dispositions in students. Cosmopolitanism is, in essence, a fundamental sense of hospitality; its aspects include openness and receptiveness (Corpus Ong, 2009; Hannerz, 1990), empathy and forgiveness (Ahn, 2010), trust and belonging (Ramadan, 2015; Vasudevan, 2014), and mutuality and connectedness (Glick Schiller, 2015). It is a lens that encompasses and expands upon contemporary notions of intercultural communication and awareness, underscored by elements of solidarity, social justice, and critical reflection. In literacy classrooms in the U.S., there has been some success in cultivating cosmopolitan orientations through online intercultural exchanges of digital projects (e.g., Hawkins, 2014; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014). Such an exchange, in providing a context in which students must communicate across difference, requires consideration of self and other, along with respect for the influences of place, context, and perspective—in short, understandings of ontologies of place (Hawkins, 2014) and proper distance (Silverstone, 2002). Situated in a sociocultural framework and using a qualitative ethnographic approach, this presentation explores the cosmopolitan literacies displayed by Korean university students participating in a similar online intercultural exchange. For this project, 28 Korean university students taking a mandatory English writing class participated in a semester-long, online intercultural exchange with 17 diverse counterparts at a community college in the eastern United States. While multiple types of data were collected, this presentation focuses on three data sources: the Korean students’ interactions on Facebook, their reflections on the exchange program, and their comments on a course evaluation survey. These data sources were examined using thematic analysis (Saldaña, 2009), which progressed from initial descriptive coding to the identification of patterns that could then be grouped into categories and ultimately themes. Finally, these findings were compared to the proximal, reflective, and reciprocal cosmopolitan stances identified by Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014) in their own classroom. Overall, while students demonstrated all three types of cosmopolitan orientations and took a generally hospitable stance toward their counterparts, the full potential of the exchange in drawing students’ attentions to disjunctures in cultural understanding and critical cultural awareness seemed stunted, possibly due in part to assumptions, inequitable nvestment in the Facebook group, and even the positive atmosphere of the group, itself. Lessons from this research and future steps will be discussed.