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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how people at a newly-built Korean international school in Japan are imagining and practicing ideal education. Ethnographic research shows that the school’s stakeholders tend to retreat to ethnic identity when the school cannot present a clear alternative value to pursue.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores how students, teachers, and parents at a newly-built Korean international school in Japan are imagining and practicing ideal education. More specifically, I investigate how people narrate their ideals about skills, qualifications, and achievements in the context of secondary education. Unlike traditional Korean schools in Japan, which cultivate a monolithic expatriate North Korean citizen identity, the school explicitly seeks to produce border-crossing persons [ekkyôjin] who can thrive regardless of their ethnic backgrounds in and outside Japan. This school's emergence indicates a broader shift in educational visions among Korean schools in Japan toward shaping border-crossing people not bound by their ethnicity and nationality: this school does this by teaching English, Japanese, and Korean. However, my 4-month ethnographic study revealed that the lack of a cohesive school policy undermines pedagogical consistency. While leaving the concept of border-crossing relatively open allows for school stakeholders’ interpretive flexibility, the lack of singular goal sometimes negatively affects community solidarity, making the organization less cohesive and the teaching less consistent. Language learning poses another challenge to this goal. Most students are long-term Korean students in Japan or newcomers from South Korea: they are often more comfortable learning Korean and Japanese than English, due to linguistic proximity. Students’ difficulty in achieving English proficiency dissatisfies some parents who expected their children to become trilingual. Moreover, this unmet desire for trilingualism conflicts with the goals of parents from longer-established Korean families in Japan, who value the school as a close-knit community that helps students confirm their Korean ethnic identity. The intimate atmosphere of a small school supports such identity cultivation, as they desire, but at the cost of resources for those who aspire to explore specific fields, such as sciences. The school's current disorientation demonstrates the challenge of constructing an education model around something other than shared ethnicity. The lack of a consistent and clear alternative value produces more precarity and anxiety for students’ futures.