https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/between-self-and-community/9781978831384/

Hyemin Lee: Your book wonderfully illustrates the encounters between globally dominant socialization ideologies and the local socialization landscapes in South Korea, paying particular attention to the moments of tension, conflict, and confusion in everyday preschool classroom settings. Your argument and findings are significant for developing and enhancing current educational policies, curricula, and pedagogical approaches in the South Korean context. I am curious how your book and findings inform us about South Korean education and society. 

Junehui Ahn: Thank you for the opportunity to share my findings about early childhood education and socialization in South Korea. To begin, I’d like to briefly relate the experience of one passionate and well-intended teacher I met at Somang preschool (my research site). At start of school year, Ms. Choo and her colleagues eagerly pursued globally dominant socialization ideals by implementing the Reggio approach (an Italian curriculum). As the year passed, she became increasingly fatigued and frustrated when they all failed to attain their initial goals. By year’s end, Ms. Choo expressed a dream of “being an old teacher who has just spent many, many years with children,” not one “who makes fancy posters and documents children’s play.” Why had she become so frustrated and pessimistic about her job in just one year? 

My research revealed that teachers’ seeming failure to achieve global ideals and their fatigue and frustration stemmed mainly from the gap between global ideals and local implicit values as well as the inevitable conflicts and contradictions this gap brings into the socialization sphere. If global imports cause conflict and confusion on a local level, this suggests a need to be wary of and vigilant against the assumption of global ideals as necessary for what is viewed as good, quality education. I’ve seen many instances where teachers and children collaboratively contrive their own indigenized models that are not simple copies of imposed global imports but are, instead, responsive to local community conditions and concerns. However, these models and practices often faltered or faded away due to the perception of globally dominant socialization values and practices as “necessity.”

My findings urge South Korean early childhood education to pay attention to practices, ideas, and sentiments of local actors (with emphasis on children as crucial local actors). They should consider taken-for-granted local values and habitus as valuable, legitimate sources for creating what is widely understood as good, quality educational practices. I believe this shift in the educational environment would allow teachers to disclose reservations about imported curriculum, openly discuss implicit expectations, and thereby develop feasible, durable, indigenized models and practices that fit local contexts. In turn, teachers like Ms. Choo would not be frustrated by their inability to achieve ostensibly attainable goals, nor would they be pessimistic about teaching. Instead, they could be content to remain in the profession while retaining their initial enthusiasm, sincerity, and goodwill.

Hyemin Lee: Ideologies and practices about cultivating and fostering a specific type of self stand at the core of the South Korean socialization landscape. As you emphasized, these ideologies of self are a historical and political product born from importing specific strands of Western pedagogies and translating them as “advanced and scientific” (32). At the same time, your chapters and examples demonstrate that everyday practices implicitly entail the so-called old and traditional/Korean socialization values and ideas about self. Perhaps with a brief introduction of your research trajectories, could you tell us how the concept of self, especially the ideologies of self, became central to your research and book? 

Junehui Ahn: The ideology of self became a central theme of my book through its significance within local contexts as well as within my intellectual trajectory as an anthropologist of children and childhood. In previous research, I studied class-specific features of American selfhood at a Midwestern preschool. Therefore, anthropological studies of self or personhood were in my intellectual toolbox when I entered Somang preschool. Simultaneously, discourses on children’s self-concepts were at the center of demands to reform early childhood socialization practices and ideologies within South Korea. Economic restructuring and globalization during the last few decades demanded global citizens with a broad array of skills; and these new skills, values, and qualities are often discussed under the term/concept of self. Teachers in Somang preschool explicitly stated “raising a child who has a self” as a major socialization goal. In this respect, the concept of self as a central theme of my book partly emerged from its significance in local contexts.

As my previous work was conducted in a U.S. preschool setting, my book inherently has a cross-cultural component. Thus, when I first began fieldwork for this book, I assumed the term “self” in Somang preschool had identical meaning to the one I encountered in the U.S. Midwestern preschool. The ostensibly similar socialization goals, practices, and even physical environments of both preschools assured my presumption. However, as I discovered, the two had highly different constructs. The self practiced and sought after in Somang, at first, looked much like so-called Western or globalized self because it typically entailed values of creativity, diversity, and self-confidence. However, by the time I left Somang, I saw it as distinctively Korean. My book is a journey to find local meanings of selfhood as (re)constructed by children and teachers and interpret the contradictions, heterogeneities, and dilemmas involved in these processes, using anthropological discussions of self and personhood as analytical tools.

Hyemin Lee: Your book looks at the South Korean socialization landscape, which constantly interacts with globally circulated socialization ideologies and practices. Because globalization has continued to play a significant role in the South Korean socialization landscape, I assume some new socialization landscapes/scenes have emerged. Have you noticed any changes in educational policies, approaches, curricula, and everyday practices in preschools (including Somang) that assert new or different ideologies of self?

Junehui Ahn: There have been significant changes in the South Korean socialization landscape since my Somang experience. Back then, the explicit pursuit of global personhood and adoption of Western curriculum (especially child-centered and play-oriented programs) to achieve this end were new to South Korean early childhood education and were features of middle- and upper-middle-class preschools. Somang, located in an affluent Seoul neighborhood, actively embraced new global socialization ideals and introduced what they understood as fancy, Western, global curriculum to parents who were eager to raise a creative, competitive, successful child. Now, ten years later, adoption of play-oriented and child-centered curriculum is no longer special nor class-specific. South Korean parents across classes are familiar with imported curriculums and send their children to preschools implementing these new pedagogies. This shift also resonates with changes to educational policies. In 2019, the Korean Ministry of Education announced national early childhood education curriculum reform that declared “child- and play-centered pedagogy” as its main agenda. Now, all preschools in South Korea are expected to employ this national-level agenda in their pedagogy. Interestingly, upper-middle-class parents are now less interested in sending their kids to child- and play-oriented preschools. Rather, they opt for private English academies called English kindergarten, so their children experience English immersion education as early on. They also send kids to private after school institutes for math, reading, and writing, and so on, where teacher-centered dyadic learning prevails. While these academies are costly, parents willingly pay in order to give their kids a competitive edge.

Hyemin Lee: One of the many strengths of the book comes from your efforts to “bring voices of the children to the current thinking of socialization and globalization” (19), particularly by showing how children’s agentive participation further shapes teachers’ interpretations and conceptualizations of these global imports. In this respect, I am very interested in hearing more about your research methodologies, positionality, and everyday interactions with children, which led to your findings in Chapter 5. Specifically, I want to know more about your “microhistories” approach. Could you elaborate more on this approach, its significance, and how it led to your findings in Chapter 5?

Junehui Ahn: My research aimed to bring children’s voices and agencies to the globalizing socialization scene. So, it was essential to gain access to the children’s social world and capture their experiences and perspectives. However, being an adult posed obstacles to this research objective. Children usually see adults in preschool settings as authoritative figures who control their behaviors; therefore, children modify their behaviors and speech when adults approach them. To position myself as an atypical adult, I employed several strategies, including Corsaro’s (1997) “reactive method of field entry.” That is, I entered play areas, sat down, and waited for kids to react to me—the opposite of what most teachers do. Gradually, children began asking me questions and drawing me into their activities, and they eventually defined me as an atypical adult. I also tried to dissociate myself from authority and power typically attributed to adults in classrooms by not participating in activities that signify adult authority or skills, such as initiating play, settling disputes, or directing activity. This allowed me to interact with children in a more egalitarian manner, permitting observation and collection of children’s peer interactions without affecting their nature or flow.

Microhistory approach was not what I planned from the start, but it emerged during the research process and got its name at the writing stage. As I spent the whole school year in Somang preschool, I could see the ebb and flow of classroom activities and curriculum. Thus, I could observe how particular classroom activity changed through mutual involvement and the interplay of children and teachers. With detailed microhistories of each activity in hand, I could link each case to the larger theme of multidirectionality of learning, which conceptualizes socialization as a process of testing, negotiation, reinvention, and reproduction, wherein both children and adults mutually attune, collaborate, and shape learning experiences. The microhistory approach worked well since I was fortunate to conduct fieldwork shortly after the preschool adopted imported curriculum. As teachers experimented with various aspects of the Reggio curriculum during a formative period, I could observe pedagogical shifts.

Hyemin Lee: Finally, socialization landscapes and experiences are themes that many readers can relate to, as they have had their own socialization experiences during early childhood (such as preschool), with a possibility of being exposed to different socialization discourses and ideologies that circulate globally. If there is one thing that you would want readers to learn from the case of the South Korean socialization landscape, what would that be? 

Junehui Ahn: As any author would, I have many thoughts and findings I hope to convey to readers. But, to choose one, I would say reflection. The conflicts, ruptures, and tensions I describe in this book illustrate that what we regard as good, quality education is never ideologically free. I hope this South Korean story provides opportunities for readers to reflect on their own upbringings or socialization practices and view them not as something natural but as always wrapped in the social fabric of power, ideologies, and inequalities.