Learning US history in an age of globalization and transnational migration

Abstract

This paper examines US Korean youth’s perspectives on US history and the impact of their sociocultural backgrounds, particularly their migration status, on their historical interpretations. Based on in‐depth interviews with 42 US Korean high school students, the study opens up the question of diversity within an ethnic group, while it also begins to address both the lack of research on Asian American students’ historical perspectives and the relative inattention to global migration patterns as a key factor in students’ historical understandings.

Keywords:

• history education
• Korean‐Americans
• migration
• globalization
• citizenship

Notes

1. e.g. Barton (2005), Barton and Levstik (1998), Barton and McCully (2006), Epstein (1998, 2000), Lévesque (2005), Levstik (2001), Mosborg (2002), Schweber and Irwin (2003), Seixas (1994), Spector (2005), Terzian and Yeager (2007), Yeager et al. (2002).

2. I use ‘US Korean’ instead of ‘Korean American’ to refer to people of Korean origin in the US. In light of globalization and transnational migration, people of Korean origin living in the US today are highly heterogeneous in terms of their legal citizenship status (e.g. US citizen, US resident, dual citizen, Korean citizen), migration type (e.g. immigrant, transnational migrant, sojourner, visitor), and subjective national/political belonging (e.g. American, Korean, transnational). In order to be more inclusive and neutral, I prefer ‘US Korean’ to ‘Korean American’. However, I use ‘Korean American’ in the contexts of direct quotes from interviews or other literature.

3. At the same time, it is important not to generalize from the US Korean case. The Asian American population is composed of ∼ 50 ethnic groups that are very different in terms of migration history, class, language, religion, and political ideology (Lee 2006). Scholars of Asian American studies have warned of the danger in lumping diverse Asian ethnics into a single racial category, ‘Asian American’, thereby silencing the multiple voices among them (Lee 1996, 2006, Tuan 1998, Lei 2001, Lew 2004, Min 2004).

4. Numerous anecdotes and the literature tell us that Asian professionals face difficulty in finding employment appropriate to the level of their training and experience in a white‐dominant country (Min 1995, Yoon 1997, Ong 1999, Boyd 2000, Waters 2003).

5. Thirty‐three US‐born and nine Korean‐born; 15 male and 27 female; 19 high school seniors (∼ age 18), eight juniors (∼ age 17), 11 sophomores (∼ age 16), and four freshmen (∼ age 15). I conducted two in‐depth interviews with individual students so that I could more quickly establish one‐on‐one rapport with the participants and gain the rich understanding of their identities necessary to contextualize and explain their ideas about US history. In the first set of interviews, students talked about their daily lives and schooling experiences in the US and/or South Korea, migration histories, national, racial, cultural identities, and ideas and experiences of US society. The second set of interviews focused more directly on the participants’ learning and understanding of US history.

6. See, e.g. Barton (2005), Epstein (1998), Seixas (1997), Terzian and Yeager (2007), Yeager et al. (2002).

7. Barton (2005) points out the socially constructed and politically contested aspects of historical significance.

8. This part of the coding process also involved systemic content analysis, cross‐case analysis, and constant comparison to look for similarities, differences, patterns, and themes in my participants’ ideas about US history.

9. This challenges the modern conceptualization of citizenship that is based on an assumed congruence between legal membership, political identity, nationhood, and the territorial state (Taylor 1994).

10. In their study on Cuban American youth, Terzian and Yeager (2007) also found that being a racial or ethnic minority in the US does not necessarily imply a critical viewpoint on the school history curriculum. As Terzian and Yeager (2007) suggest, many dimensions of the sociocultural backgrounds of a racial or ethnic minority may influence how minority youth in the US evaluate school history curriculum.

11. As broad themes emerged from the coding and recoding process, ‘nation‐building’ included sub‐categories such as ‘national origin’, ‘national formation’, ‘national unity’, ‘national development’, and ‘national threat’; and ‘equal rights’ included sub‐categories of ‘racial equality’, ‘gender equity’, and ‘human equity’ in general.

12. Although the study of US high school history textbooks by Lerner et al. (1995: 71) found that African Americans, along with women, have ‘moved to the centre of American history’, the emphasis on African American figures in school curriculum may leave behind other minorities such as Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans (Wineburg and Monte‐Santo 2008).