Curricular interstices between South Korea and the U.S.: an autobiographical inquiry into decolonizing transnational curriculum studies

Abstract

Curriculum studies provides a wide range of tools for conceptualizing, critiquing, and transforming educational ways of knowing, being, and doing, which are related to students’ and teachers’ identities and subjectivities (Gershon & Helfenbein, 2023; Pinar, 2019). In the era of globalization, transnational curriculum studies has emerged as a response to the global flows of cultures, ideas, and identities, reshaping how curriculum, pedagogy, and educational identities are conceptualized. It explores how local educational spaces both reflect and resist global influences, engaging with postcolonial, decolonizing discourse, highlighting the unequal flows of power and knowledge across borders and their impact on curriculum theories and practices (Durand & Asher, 2023; Miller, 2006; Moon, 2021).Curriculum studies in South Korea has tended to draw on Western knowledge and theories from the U.S. with American curriculum studies regarded as the most influential point of reference for engaging in curriculum studies, which can be seen as part of (neo-)colonial context marked by U.S. hegemony (D. Kim, 2024; Y. C. Kim, 2010). The transnational flows of power and knowledge from the U.S. to South Korea have been intertwined with my experiences and identity constructions as a student, an educator, a citizen, and a graduate student in South Korea and as an international doctoral student in curriculum studies in the U.S. Against this background, I address this critical issue by investigating three research questions throughout this dissertation: (1) In what ways are my identities—as a student, an educator, and a graduate student—(re)constructed at the intersections of power relations between South Korea and the U.S., curriculum studies, and postcolonialism within and across South Korea and the U.S.?; (2) In what ways is postcolonial, transnational curriculum studies relevant and significant to me as an educator and a curriculum researcher within and across South Korea and the U.S.?; and (3) What possibilities and limitations do I encounter, engage with, and challenge in relation to postcolonial, transnational curriculum studies within and across South Korea and the U.S.? And how does this research project, in turn, inform transnational curriculum studies? To answer these research questions, I use an autobiographical narrative inquiry to explore my own experiences regarding curriculum and curriculum studies across South Korea and the U.S. I also engage in this autobiographical research, thinking with Bhabha’s (1994) postcolonial theory about cultural hybridity and cultural translation and Chen’s (2010) idea of Asia as method to investigate my local, global, and transnational experiences from the perspectives of postcolonialism and decolonization. In the findings, I narrate my lived experiences in relation to (neo-)colonialism and postcolonial, decolonizing possibilities, focusing on the following themes: challenges and questions on ambivalent identities as a student in South Korea; questions of race, ethnicity, and gender across South Korea and the U.S.; engagement with curriculum, curriculum questions, and curriculum studies in a transnational context; and the politics of colonial/postcolonial: decolonizing in and through curriculum studies. Based on these findings, I discuss transnational entanglements of multicultural education and curriculum studies from the perspective of transnational Whiteness as an onto-epistemological influence. In addition, I attempt to revisit curriculum studies in transnational contexts as transcultural conversations towards disrupting the unequal flows of power and knowledge and creating new possibilities for epistemic justice. I also suggest postcolonial, decolonizing autobiographical writing as inquiry to this end along with some implications for curriculum and instruction and for lines of future research.