Korean mature women students’ various subjectivities in relation to their motivation for higher education: generational differences amongst women

Abstract

This qualitative case study attempts to conceptualize certain ‘patterns’ and ‘processes’ of which 28 mature women undergraduates give meanings to their motivation for higher education in their life contexts. Particular attention has been paid to include diverse groups of women according to their age, prior educational background, marital and occupational status. This was to seek for possibilities of differences amongst the mature women undergraduates, which is a scholarly neglected issue in the existing literature. Life history interviews were conducted with individual participants aged 25–75. Based on a combination of grounded theory approach and feminist post-structuralist theory, three types of learners were identified primarily in different generation—an age cohort that shares certain experiences in common. They are younger ‘careerist learners’, ‘personal growth learners’ and older ‘vicarious living learners’. Although the motivations for these three types of learners overlap to some extent, they disclose distinct gendered subjectivities. The analysis suggests that this partly reflects the historical dynamics of gender relations in Korean society. Drawing on empirical findings, this paper argues that more attention needs to be paid to diversities among mature women students and to socio-historical contexts under which those learners’ motivations and perspectives are constructed.

Keywords:

• mature women students
• gendered subjectivity
• generational differences
• historical gender dynamics
• Korean society

Notes

1. Korean higher education is comprised of regular universities and special universities for adults. The regular universities consist of ‘traditional 4-year research-led universities’ and ‘2-year vocation-oriented colleges’. In contrast, special universities for adults include a National Open University, 17 cyber universities and in-company universities.

2. From the feminist post-structuralist viewpoint, discourse offers ‘the conditions of possibility for being and acting in the world’ (Gavey, 2011, p. 185).

3. The respect for scholarship in Korea is reflected in the advancement rate of traditionally aged students to tertiary education. In 2013 99.7% of young people graduated from secondary schools and of these, 70.7% progressed into tertiary education. This is the highest percentage among OECD nations.

4. From 1960 to 2010, Korea’s gross domestic product soared from $2.0 billion to $1014.8 billion.

5. It is the first Korean script published by King Se-Jong in 1446. Twenty-eight Korean letters were created by the King so that the common people, illiterate in Chinese, could accurately and easily read and write the Korean language.