Thinking about Immigrant Students through Literature Discussion in a Korean Classroom

In January of 2014, immigrants in South Korea exceeded 295,000 (The Portal for Multicultural Family). Ms. Park¹ an experienced elementary teacher who has taught over seventeen years in a metropolitan city in South Korea, could tell the numbers of immigrants were growing just by looking at her students. She said that during her first ten years of teaching, she did not have students with different ethnic backgrounds, but in the last several years, she has had at least a couple of students from Southeast Asian countries.

Pakistani Students in Ms. Park’s Classroom

Hassan and Sonia were two Pakistani students in Ms. Park’s fifth grade class in 2013. When I visited Ms. Park’s classroom, those two Pakistani students stood out among twenty-one students because their facial features and skin tone were noticeably different from the rest of the students. Ms. Park’s school was located near an industrial area where many Southeast Asian people were employed. Both Hassan’s and Sonia’s parents moved from Pakistan to Korea for their jobs when Hassan and Sonia were in their early years in elementary school. At the time I visited Ms. Park’s class, I was informed that Hassan was going to move to another town soon because of his father’s job. As the industrial area grew, Ms. Park’s school has accepted more students from multicultural families than ever before.

I was surprised to see quite a few students with different ethnic backgrounds in Ms. Park’s school because when I was teaching in the late 1990s in Korea, it was unimaginable to have non-Korean students. At that time, I had lessons on other countries and cultures, but it was more like teaching someone else’s story that my students were not likely to meet in person. However, in Ms. Park’s class, multicultural literature could tell stories about Hassan and Sonia. It was not someone else’s story; it was their story and their friends’ story. When I asked Ms. Park how Hassan and Sonia were doing in her class, she said that according to her observations, they seemed to be doing fine, but it was possible that they were not sharing their struggles with her.

Multicultural Literature in Ms. Park’s Classroom

I wondered if Ms. Park had intentionally used multicultural children’s literature to help students learn about people with different cultural backgrounds. Ms. Park said she realized the importance of bringing multicultural children’s literature into her class, especially when she had two children from multicultural families. Through multicultural literature, children can learn about other people’s lives and cultures, which they have never experienced before (window effect). They can also see themselves if the protagonist goes through a similar experience that they have, even though the protagonist has a different cultural or ethnic background (mirror effect, Bishop ix). When children read and respond to multicultural literature with their personal feelings and emotions, this can lead to critical reading and learning about other people’s culture with the teacher’s guidance and discussion (Cai 216).

Ms. Park said that the fifth grade language arts textbook introduced a story of a black girl during the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. She also said that she tried to introduce multicultural literature during library time. According to Ms. Park, the students could read multicultural literature on several different occasions: morning study time, library time, and special instruction time; however, Ms. Park noted that with the busy class schedule and multiple content areas to be covered, small group discussions on multicultural literature had not taken place. I asked Ms. Park if I could volunteer to host discussions with her students, and she was excited to accept my offer.

Literature Discussion Preparation

Before selecting the literature, Ms. Park and I talked about the lessons that could be applicable in her students’ school life. Since we both had Hassan and Sonia on our minds, we decided to search for books that tell stories about children from immigrant families or friendships between children with different ethnic backgrounds. We...