Identity struggles: Korean stories on transitioning to secondary school from primary school
Margaret Kitchen
Abstract
This article relates Korean parents’ stories of their children’s transition from primary to secondary school and identity struggles on entering secondary school. Mystified by the loss of a characteristically invitational culture at primary school, and without salient role models to provide ideas of who they might become, some students responded to pressure from newly arrived international students to prioritise Korean-language use and to learn traditional Korean school behaviour norms. Although The New Zealand Curriculum’s vision prioritises confidence, connectedness, and active involvement, the lived transitioning experiences of these students were characterised by a faltering of confidence, a break-down in connectedness, and constrained options for identity construction.
Introduction
While transition from primary to secondary school is widely recognised as a stressful time for students, much remains unknown about its complexities (Ministry of Education, 2006). This case study picks up one thread of the complexity in exploring the positionings available to New Zealand-resident Korean students and focuses on Korean parents’ stories and what they reveal about the positionality of Korean students in transition from New Zealand primary to secondary schools. The article begins by exploring ideas around positionality, identity construction, and transitions to secondary school, then moves on to describe the empirical study and findings relating to parents’ stories of their children’s struggles in transitioning from primary to secondary school. In the discussion, the parents’ stories are placed in the context of the wider study and relevant literature.
Positionality and possible future selves
Positionality is inclusive of the places students can occupy, who they can interact with, and, through interaction, the knowledge that is produced (Rhoads, 1997). Positionality focuses attention on young people as they are and might be; on the identities young people have and might attain. Such thinking drives the overall vision of The New Zealand Curriculum’s directions for learning: “young people who will be confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners” (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 7). However, the positions that might be taken are negotiated in social contexts, including schools, which may set constraints on identity negotiations and also apprentice students into particular identities. Connected to positionality are relational approaches to learning that draw on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of learning as social apprenticing.
Researchers in the field of applied linguistics contend it is possible to disrupt the default secondary school settings which constrain identity construction. These researchers draw on Markus and Nurius’s (1986) notion of possible future selves, to show that salient others conspicuous in a migrant student’s social context can give direction and help with patterns of interaction and behaviour in social and academic settings by showing that other options are available (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009; Ushioda, 2006).
Adolescence and transitioning to secondary school
Anxiety accompanies transition to secondary school (Hargreaves & Galton, 2002). Early adolescence is a time of increased vulnerability for many students, and at stake are questions of students’ identity as they shift from the known, comfortable world of primary school to the unknown social and learning environment of secondary school (Measor & Woods, 1984). Students look for friendship networks as they try to establish their secondary school lives. While making friends within the first few weeks of school is recognised as important (Hargreaves & Galton 2002), McGee, Ward, Gibbons, and Harlow (2003) point out that transition needs to be seen not as a particular event but as a process of making adjustments over time. For this reason, it is recommended that secondary schools provide meaningful social support activities that give students the opportunity to get to know—and develop positive relationships with—other new students and with older students (Hertzog & Morgan, 1998). Developing cross-cultural relationships in an unfamiliar setting provides yet another problematic layer for bilingual students, given that the more complex the transition events that students have to negotiate at one time, the greater is the likelihood of negative consequences (Simmons, Burgeson, Carlton-Ford, & Blyth, 1987).
The emergence of sociocultural perspectives foregrounding the role of socialisation and participation in learning, or language learning, or both (Morita, 2004; Norton, 1997), and their inclusion in The New Zealand Curriculum’s vision (Ministry of Education, 2007) should work to support bilingual students’ positioning as they transition to secondary school. In their practical outworking in multicultural school settings, however, international researchers suggest that such visions are either too challenging for schools to enact, or are not prioritised (McCarthy, Rezai-Rashti, & Teasley, 2009; Miller, 2004). Bilingual students are often left to struggle on their own with ways of becoming legitimate within the wider school context.
Social practices and identity construction
Identity theory has reconceptualised the sense of self as socially constructed, contestable positionings for being in the world of school (Ortega, 2013). Contestable these identity positions may be, but they are also characterised as labile and ephemeral (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), with students constantly reorganising their sense of who they are through socialisation and participation. However, access to social and learning relationships is determined by students’ agency which can be constrained by others (Morita, 2004; Norton, 1997). Schools that pay attention to the identity and human agency of bilingual students enable a wider range of identity choices while positioning them to more fully participate in their learning contexts (Norton & Toohey, 2001).
Imagined communities
Social categories are well established in secondary schools, with adolescent peer groups having hierarchies according to popularity or status. Neither Korean nor Asian are high on the list (Cotterell, 2007). One possible tool to expand students’ thinking beyond these default settings is imagined communities. These comprise a range of possible selves, and investment in these desired futures can affect the trajectories of students’ learning (Norton & Toohey, 2001). Students can visualise themselves interacting with target communities. The notion of possible selves derives from work in social psychology on self-schemas:
Possible selves can be viewed as the future oriented components of the self-system. They represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become. (Markus & Ruvolo, 1989, p. 212)
These possible selves are task and context related. They give direction. They help with the setting of goals and plans, with on-task behaviour, and energy levels. Within a school setting, motivating visions of possible selves can be a powerful tool: “Thus language is not conceived of as a neutral medium of communication, but is understood with reference to its social meaning, in a frequently inequitable world” (Norton, 2010, p. 350). Meanings become available gradually as learners act and interact within and with their environments.
Educational institutions have the power and expertise to navigate students’ learning towards such visions in a systematic manner beyond the capacity of individual learners and parents. Thus, a school can communicate to its students an image of a society in which they have useful and fulfilling roles to play, and the school can make that image tangible and accessible. Conversely, if a school tacitly assumes limited social participation in the future for certain groups of children, it would be extremely difficult for the children to fight that influence (Kanno, 2003, p. 287).
By providing concrete local settings, schools can play an important role in what migrant students can imagine. It could be implied that without deliberate scaffolding it might be difficult for Korean students to constitute their worlds with participation in communities beyond the category Korean.
Piller and Takahashi (2011) contend that research shows that deliberate interventions which scaffold all students to becoming more inclusive are more effective than schemes that target the marginalised. Such schemes can have an important role in encouraging students from dominant cultures to accept accents and non-standard ways of speaking English—sensitivities that may be significant for students who later become employers. Teachers’ relationships with bilingual students also play an important role in actioning this participative vision (Catterall, 1998). Educational institutions set the ground work, but it is the classroom teacher who legitimises participation. Leki (2001, p. 63) argues that the teacher’s role is to expand the “narrow thinking system” of domestic students. Students’ expectations are formed in primary school by teachers and by the processes of socialising, and teaching and learning. This formation involves a relationship of working together and interacting as learners and teachers. Many students, both monolingual and bilingual, report a regression in their relationships with teachers at the secondary level (Ministry of Education, 2006).
Interventions are critical to help find ways of ensuring that all individuals have access to full participation and with it the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential (Lantolf, 2001). Bauman (2001, pp. 149–150) contends that if migrants feel welcomed in their new home, they will open up willingly and adapt to the culture of the new country:
If there is to be a community in the world of individuals, it can only be (and it needs to be) a community woven together from mutual sharing and mutual care; a community of concern and responsibility for the equal right to be human and the equal ability to act on that right.
The study itself
Overview of the context
In the mid-1990s I had been involved in a Ministry of Education initiative to introduce Korean language to selected Auckland primary and secondary schools, an initiative motivated by fast-growing trade connections. However, it is noteworthy that, as a proportion of the population, New Zealand has the highest expatriate Korean community in the world (Park, 2010). At the end of 2007 I rang the principal of West High School (pseudonym) offering to run English-language classes for the Korean parent community. At this time Korean students made up 14 percent of the school roll (3 percent being Korean international students). The stories that the Korean women and men in the English-language classes told, and the warmth with which the school approached contact with the Korean community, prompted this research. I was positioned as a go-between by the principal and the parents. The research arose organically when the principal told me he was keen to get feedback from the Korean parent stakeholders, and the Korean parents were seeking to understand the school’s practices and beliefs.
Research approaches and methods
The project evolved into a large ethnographic, participatory/advocacy doctoral study that explored the educational hopes and dreams of a Korean community attached to one secondary school. An advocacy/participatory approach involves collaborating with the research participants. Creswell (2007) contends that such approaches complement constructivists’ focus on individuals seeking to understand and so construct the world in which they live. This study drew on the following practices: pragmatism (being informed by critical theory, but not driven by it (Peters, Lankshear, & Olssen, 2003); exploration of the particular while making connections to wider political, social, and educational scenes; and, for analysis, Charmaz’s (2006) practical exemplars of modified grounded theory for memoing and theory building, and techniques of discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003).
The data discussed in this article came in response to this question to the parents: “In what ways is secondary school education in New Zealand like what you expected? Tell me about what you would like to change.”
Data sources
Pseudonyms are used for all participants. On the staff when this project began were a New Zealand-trained maths teacher who is a native speaker of Korean (John), and a Korean-trained health teacher who worked as a member of the ancillary staff with responsibility for Korean international students and Korean family liaison (Grace). Following my contact the principal set up regular information meetings for the Korean parents which he attended, sometimes with other members of senior school management. The Korean staff members always attended, and I was always invited to attend as well. Grace and John invited the most regular meeting attendees to participate in the research project on account of their enthusiasm for education. Purposive participant selection is common in qualitative research (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005). The data in this report are drawn particularly from two parents out of a group of eight Korean parents, Heon Ju and June, because their reports typified the parents’ small stories. Heon Ju and June had been in New Zealand for 3 years and had permanent residency.
The translator, who had left Korea in her teens and attended a New Zealand high school, was also a source of information. I encouraged her to annotate her translations with comment on how the texts resonated with her own experiences. Goldstein (1995) contends that such a translator can provide sociocultural and sociolinguistic background knowledge that can strengthen analysis. Unfortunately, there is not room in this article to discuss the challenges of interviewing in Korean and translating into English.
Data collection
The group of eight had two long focus-group interviews in Korean, and some email exchanges in English following data-confirmation checks. On later occasions I recorded conversations in English when we met socially, often over meals. The data presented here come from both these settings.
Focus-group interviews
The Korean parents at West High School were receptive listeners at the school meetings I attended. They asked questions but tended not to air their views. I chose Korean-language focus groups for the Korean participants because I thought this would be a comfortable way for the participants to express their opinions. While they didn’t know each other well, they shared similar backgrounds. I thought that bringing the parents together to talk about and reflect on their experiences might be useful in their making sense of their experiences in New Zealand, particularly in relation to their children’s trajectories at school. The parents took charge of the focus groups sharing their talking turns deliberately, introducing themselves at first, and then, as familiarity grew, they crafted almost a collective thematic thread exemplified by individual stories told with such detail and emotional force as to garner empathy and respect for the speaker’s positioning. Each speaker would respond to what had previously been said before adding their own illustrative story. In this way, the participants directed their own interviews and consequently, the coding. Their stories tapped into issues that group members found familiar and important: barriers to participation in education and in society.
Data analysis: Using grounded theory in this context
Once data-confirmation checks were completed (in both Korean and English) I numbered the data, roughly into meaning or topic chunks, and displayed these in a word document, in the first of a series of columns. I read the data closely, writing comments in adjoining columns. I named segments of data with a label that categorised and summarised. I searched the data and assigned salient themes or codes. Establishing salience was straightforward in that the co-constructive nature of the school group’s talk was immediately noticeable, both the structure and the content. The group members constructed an almost thematic group story providing clear cues for content analysis. While collating and coding these themes I noted relevant literature that came to mind, in this way relying on both inductive and deductive approaches. As Ellis and Barkhuizen note (2005, p. 258): “qualitative researchers ... use both induction and deduction throughout their analysis, and to classify a study as either only one or the other would be an oversimplification”. Discovery benefits from a systematic approach and familiarity with relevant literature. Much later I moved onto memoing following the patterns offered by Charmaz (2006) in her practical guide. In memoing I used the following headings: Topic; How the category emerged; Beliefs and assumptions that support it; Practical significance; and Contrary evidence. This article arises from one of the memos: “Mum I cannot get a Kiwi friend in college”.
Findings: “Mum I cannot get a Kiwi friend in college”
The parents were united in expressing the struggles their children experienced in trying to retain cross-cultural friendships on transition from intermediate school to college. Heon Ju’s daughter, for example, couldn’t understand why she was no longer wholeheartedly accepted as a friend by those who had been her friends at intermediate school.
My daughter doesn’t get stressed if she meets one Kiwi student, but when she is in a group with them she gets stressed a lot. It is okay when she talks with one Kiwi student. Yeah. So she can hold a conversation well with just one via cell phone or something, but she told me that troubles arise when they form a group.
Heon Ju’s daughter was accepted one-to-one, but not welcome in native English-speaking social groups. The mother provides evidence of her daughter’s English fluency (she can talk on the phone with ease), so it does not appear to be English-language fluency that impedes access to her previous mainstream friendship networks. Her Korean identity seems to exclude solidarity with the Kiwi students, the native English speakers seeing her as occupying the category Korean. allowing no other affordances. She is disempowered and consequently her participative opportunities, which are all learning opportunities of one sort or another, are reduced.
Heon Ju’s comments prompted another parent, June, to report that her daughter’s Kiwi friends from primary school would not interact with her either. Her daughter was mystified by the change. Her former Kiwi friends unavailable to her, she was vulnerable to pressure put on her from newly arrived Korean students who expected her to hang out with them and to conform to Korean school norms about sharing exam knowledge. June explained what happened to her daughter.
Several months ago [my daughter] said to me, “Mum I cannot get a Kiwi friend in college. I played with Kiwi friends in intermediate, but I cannot. It’s very strange”. After she entered college, she gets stressed a lot about that. She has to get along with Korean children but she is quite a lot used to her Kiwi friends. Before college she played, just got along with Kiwi friends so she doesn’t realise her attitude is very Kiwi. The first time [the Korean international students asked her to share test information] she couldn’t understand and in exam time they [new Korean students] follow her and sit next to her and then always say, insist, so she just gets stressed. But still I talked to my husband about that, but he said. “Just leave her alone, she has to decide. Don’t interrupt her, just listen because she has to learn Korean society, that is a small Korean society and she has to learn something.” But I think she didn’t talk about it again, but I think she inclined to Korean way.
June described her daughter’s conflicted thoughts. Her daughter thought like a Kiwi (“her attitude is very Kiwi way”), and consequently she couldn’t, at first, relate to the newly arrived Korean students’ thinking about sharing test information which was a cultural school practice she was unfamiliar with (“she couldn’t understand . . . she just get stressed”). She surmised that her daughter had reluctantly reverted to Korean school behaviour norms of handing over test information after talking over the issue with her father who was domiciled in Korea at that time. While inferring he had been open-minded with their daughter, June’s husband tried to persuade his wife that it wasn’t a bad thing for their daughter to learn Korean ways (“She has to learn Korean society”). June didn’t resile from adopting a different position to her husband, but later on, she conceded that sharing at exam time could be viewed as positive: “Western people think it’s not rational but I think that kind of treating is not bad, it’s kind of friendships.”
June’s daughter’s individual future self-visions shifted. She had seen herself as sharing a future with peers from the dominant group (her mother commented that her daughter didn’t realise how Kiwi she was). Now she found herself in an uncomfortable place, unable also to relate readily to newly arrived Korean international students who sought her out and demanded that she share their values and behaviours. Trapped in a minority identity she couldn’t see a way to escape from, she perceived the best option was to develop solidarity with these co-ethnic newcomers and learn unfamiliar Korean ways of behaving. These were sociocultural and historical models from another place, South Korea, that she had become unfamiliar with because recently she had grown up in the cultural context of New Zealand. She found it stressful charting the new territory and turned to her parents for guidance in the absence of other visible role models. In a later exchange, Jane resurrected the same story but was more explicit about her daughter’s implicit usage of Kiwi school norms and her subsequent changes. Jane described her daughter’s Kiwi friends as “her sisters”, denoting a very close relationship: “She is quite a lot used to Kiwi sister already so I think now she’s changing”.
Changing social practices, in this case concerning students being more self-conscious of otherness in the transitioning space between intermediate and secondary school, positioned June and Heon Ju’s daughters, non-native English speakers, in lonely places. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) contend that interactive practices affect developing student identities, and affect learners’ investment in the language and their future engagement in the new society. June problematised the issue during the interview saying it caused her daughter “pressure” and “stress”. June said that her friends said the same thing: “Other Korean mums the same, even in intermediate.” June described her friend’s reaction to her sons’ wish to become more fluent Korean speakers as one of “shock”:
One of my church members, she’s Korean, she has two boys but when they go to college that children want to learn Korean. She says, “Why? They say they have to communicate with Korean students so she was shocked. They were in college, so she brought them to Korean school for Korean. It’s very strange. . . . I don’t know why but they just want to get along with Korean.
June’s friend had been very happy with her sons’ integration into the dominant school social groups. She was alarmed when, on entering high school, her sons requested attendance at Korean school. Peer pressure, from other students who accused them of not being real Koreans, accounted for this reorientation to all things Korean. Other parents had similar stories. One parent said that her son talked to her about Korean boys who sought out Kiwi friends, instead of Korean friends, and that her son looked down on them. Another talked of bullying behaviour from newcomers to other, more integrated, Korean students.
Discussion
The arrival of international students, and teachers’ assignation of responsibility for new learners to Koreans who have been in the country longer, possibly compounds peer pressure contributing to conflicted identity development, and the loss of the integrated status the Korean students had achieved at primary school. The students interviewed in the larger, doctoral study, commented on the time they spent helping newly arrived Korean students most of whom were international students. In his diary one Year 12 student randomly chose one day to notice how many times he used Korean in class to translate and clarify: period 1, 12x explaining specialist biology language; period 3, 6x discussing maths questions with Korean accelerate group; period 4, 8x explaining chemistry; period 5, 3x explaining physics concepts.
Largely shunned by former friends, the students in this study were invited into membership of a newly arrived international Korean student community. They initially interacted with reserve, seeing themselves primarily as members of English discourse communities. They questioned their parents about unfamiliar Korean school norms. This hovering on the outside of the international Korean student community illustrates Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of legitimate peripheral participatio. in communities, “peripherality” suggesting an opening to learning how to more fully participate. In time, trajectories shifted and the New Zealand-resident Korean students moved towards fuller participation in the group’s practices, assuming more traditional Korean identities, even studying Korean language. An inbound trajectory into such a group is likely to be counterbalanced by reduced imaginings of participation in English-discourse communities because students are also defined by practices they do not engage in.
We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. (Wenger, 1998, p. 164)
Korean students in this study saw themselves categorised in their former friends’ eyes as Asian or Korean. This reshaped their meanings of who they were and the Korean students experienced reduced agency in creating their individual identity and consequent participative opportunities at school.
For many identity is a position that is forced, that has to be occupied, for which there is no alternative and which is attributed with no value and hence cannot be mobilised as a resource for enhancing privilege, or a resource to the nation, to belonging. (Skeggs, 2007, p. 26)
Students restricted to mixing with other Koreans are more likely to use Korean language and because interacting in Korean reduces visibility they become even less visible to English-speaking students. Kanno (2003, p. 137) reported that when the Japanese students in her study talked about English, they talked about becoming visible through interaction in English:
It was above all about making friends, getting respect and recognition, and establishing themselves as fully fledged members of the school community. In short, they associated English primarily with social participation.
Miller (2004) in her 3-year study of 10 Australian high school students found that English fluency determined the extent to which a student could participate in social interactions and community practices.
The students in this study reported that they were mystified by the loss of their taken-for-granted invitational primary school culture characterised by hospitality and dialogism (Kostogriz, 2009), Lave and Wenger’s communities of learning as practised in primary school. Their parents reported that, at primary school, their children had become very Kiwi in their school behaviour. Transitioning to an unfamiliar secondary school context, which included the arrival of a significant number of co-ethnic international students, the students were excluded from accustomed social networks. All students seek recognition, affiliation, security and safety, desires that are integral to identity (Norton Peirce, 1995), and consequently some took up, with initial reluctance, overtures from a cohort of international Korean newcomers. The New Zealand-resident students were thus manoeuvred into learning and adhering to more traditional Korean student behaviours, behaviours that were unfamiliar to them. Equivocal about changing their narratives of who they were, the students questioned their parents. Echoing international findings (Abelmann, 2009; Kanno, 2003; Norton & Toohey, 2001) these fluently bilingual migrant students perceived it safest to choose, or were manoeuvred into choosing, one set of friends, one language, one culture or subculture over another.
Secondary schools are sites of struggle for Korean teenagers developing a sense of who they are. Students are particularly in need of support if they are to realise the national curriculum vision of becoming “positive in their own identity” (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 8). The recruitment of Korean international students, and the teachers’ assigning responsibility for newcomers to students who are fluent users of both Korean and English, have unintended consequences for the New Zealand-resident Korean students. Both identity categories and opportunities for interacting with diverse others are constrained.
The other parents in the focus group were of the same mind, having come to New Zealand so their children could find a career they were passionate about untrammelled by traditional hierarchies and practices in the workplace in Korea. The parents talked of being motivated to migrate because they thought in New Zealand their children would have the opportunity to find their own voices. The parents knew opportunities were available in the mainstream at school, and they were alarmed to see their children positioned, almost in a state of paralysis, on the margins. The parents requested welcoming and structured invitations from the mainstream to enable their children to participate and engage. They asked for older students who had been successful to talk to and inspire their children. The parents were implicitly aware that “adolescents learn about what is possible and what is valued through engagement with their social context” (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006, p. 21). The parents sought for their children entry into the relational bonds of the mainstream classroom.
Implications
Contradicting The New Zealand Curriculum’s vision of students who are confident, connected, actively involved learners, the parents in this study reported that their children’s connections were fractured, and their confidence lost on transition to secondary school. Trapped within the unwelcome, unfamiliar and inaccurate category of “newly arrived international student”, the New Zealand-resident students were hesitant to return to a Korean past while living in a different, present, New Zealand context. The parents were taken aback themselves, “shocked” as one parent explained. They saw their children manoeuvred into learning constructions of their selves more appropriate for life in Korea. June’s daughter’s reluctant but probable decision to share her test knowledge illustrates Pavlenko’s (2002, p. 293) contention that “individuals may act upon their wishes only if their present environments allow for such agency”. Agency is both individual and social. Identity positions may typically be characterised as labile, contestable and ephemeral, but these descriptors do not fit the lived experiences of the Korean students in this study. Quite the opposite. Their available categories were inflexible and retrogressive. These were not the positions they had sought on entering high school.
For schools to see themselves as sites where social inclusion is an active focus, and to consider bridging and linking roles for students from migrant backgrounds, stories such as June’s need to be heard and discussed. Connectedness may be central to the national curriculum vision, its principles, its values and its key competencies, but embodying it in school practices is another, less travelled, matter. Researchers suggest that initiating newcomers into group membership may be easiest to initiate in more formal classroom settings (Leki, 2001), and secondary schools could explore how contributing primary schools manage this. Gilbert (2009) advocates structured classroom cross-cultural groupings contending that creative sparks fly in discursive interchanges, bringing about new knowledge creation for all students.
Schools could take a more deliberate role both in facilitating purposeful talk, but equally important is the highlighting of salient, successful bilingual and bicultural role models. Such moves would assist all students to imagine participation in integrated communities and students could redefine their sense of who they are, and in doing so, invest in and define New Zealand as a multilingual and multicultural society.
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to the reviewers, including the editorial reviewer, for the clarity of their thinking and their constructive and generous suggestions for the article.
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The author
Margaret Kitchen is a senior lecturer on the Graduate Diploma in TESOL at The University of Auckland. She was previously a secondary school English teacher and then retrained as a teacher of ESOL and Korean language. She runs a community English-language class for Korean adults.
Email: m.kitchen@auckland.ac.nz