I do not know what it would be like to be poor: Learning about privileged Korean 6th graders' understanding of poverty.

摘要

Freire (1970/ 2000) argued that both the oppressors and the oppressed should engage in a discussion of power struggles in order to become fully human. This study investigated how Freire's idea of becoming fully human was exercised in a critical literacy curriculum with a privileged group of students. As a teacher and researcher, I constructed an after-school critical literacy curriculum about poverty with three Korean 6th graders from economically affluent backgrounds. Different instructional models of critical literacy (Busching & Slesinger, 2002; Lewison et al., 2007) elaborated how students' resources should be reflected in a critical literacy curriculum. This research provides one example of how an instructional model of critical literacy can be unique, depending on students' backgrounds. This study employs an integrated design of case study and teacher research. I used grounded thematic analysis, employing Strauss (1998) and Gee's (1999) discourse analysis to analyze cultural models and the world and political building tasks of the participants. I also used Appadurai (1996) for analyzing students' movement across spaces. The findings indicated how students made use of their personal beliefs concerning poverty both to embrace and to resist the teacher's curricular moves. The students' resistance demonstrated their unique movement without disrupting their cultural models of poverty. Tracking students' transnational identities illustrated how students reconfirmed their life histories as hard-working individuals without challenging their privileges. While there were moments where students were critical about poverty, the development of critical consciousness was unique. Every student demonstrated his or her own ways to understand poverty. They also imposed their own life experiences and histories on the poor to imagine a way to help them. In the process, my approach of being direct and exploratory in terms of particular beliefs and ideologies about poverty interacted significantly with the students' learning. Unique meanings derived from the critical social practices these particular individuals constructed emerged as a way to personalize a critical literacy curriculum. A discussion of how the transnational identity of students influenced their resistance as well as possible movement beyond their personal boundaries is included for its pedagogical utility.