Marginalization at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Disability: Systemic Contradictions Perceived by Special Education Teachers in Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students with Disabilities in South Korea

ABSTRACT

In 2018, 13.3% of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families with international marriages had at least one child with a disability enrolled in South Korean public schools. Increasing school diversity requires special education teachers to bring new professional knowledge(s) and identities to meet the unique needs of CLD students with disabilities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary lens informed by disability critical race theory and cultural-historical activity theory, we conducted an instrumental case study to investigate the systemic contradictions that special education teachers experience in serving CLD students with disabilities. The results highlight how the intertwining of ethnicity-based racism, monolingualism, and patriarchal ideology shapes (in)visible deficit ideologies that mediate teachers’ everyday interpretation, pedagogical practices, evaluation, and communication. Coupled with harmful deficit ideologies, the lack of systemic support in special education policies and practices consolidates the interlocking marginalization of CLD students with disabilities and their families at the intersection of language, culture, and other identity badges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In the context of South Korea, CLD may encompass various groups such as immigrants, refugees, individuals with foreign citizenship, and those with distinct language and/or cultural differences. We deliberately chose the term CLD as it signifies a more inclusive range of diverse learners, surpassing simplistic binary classifications determined by race/ethnicity or citizenship. Moreover, the term da-mun-hwa (the Korean translation of multi-culture) has been used in public policies and discourse to describe CLD students. However, in this paper, we challenge the use of da-mun-hwa, as this term often carries a deficit-oriented connotation. It is often associated with immigrants from low-income countries who have historically been marginalized within South Korean society. Therefore, we purposefully employ the term CLD to accentuate that the diversity, inherent within the intersectional identities students bring to schools, should be affirmed and leveraged as assets for promoting equity and social justice in schools, not perceived as deficits.

² This represents self-reported statistics by CLD families, derived from a triennial national survey on CLD families. To date, the absence of national statistics hinders an accurate understanding of the prevalence rate of disabilities among CLD students. This survey is the only available national data source, and its results have shown a trend: in 2015, the estimated proportion of CLD children with disabilities was 9.5%, and this figure rose to 13.3% in the subsequent survey conducted in 2018 (Korea Disabled People’s Development Institute, 2018; Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 2018). Therefore, it is anticipated that this percentage will continue to increase in alignment with the expanding representation of CLD students within the Korean public school system.

³ We purposefully indicated the term immigrant as (im)migrant to denote those who are in the immigration processes including immigrant, migrant, refugee, and undocumented to acknowledge not all immigration follow the same trajectories and legal status (Arzubiaga et al., 2009).

⁴ We intentionally utilized the terms “international marriage women” and “families with international marriage” as these are the official descriptors employed in Korean governmental policy documents. They refer to foreign women who have married Korean men and subsequently migrated to Korea. The Korean government announced a policy plan to promote the social integration of international marriage women and their families in April 2006 (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2006). Aligned with the new governmental policy direction, local governments have competitively introduced “rural old bachelor marriage programs” aiming to secure augmented funding for the support of international marriage women and their families (2013). According to the National Law Information Center (2022, p. 20) local government bodies in Korea have enacted ordinances to provide international marriage support, including financial assistance for marriage expenses when rural bachelor residents marry foreign brides. However, this approach has recently come under scrutiny. The National Human Rights Commission (2022) issued an opinion statement and criticized the local governments’ rural bachelor marriage support program as a manifestation of patriarchal bias, calling for a reconsideration of these policies from a gender equality perspective.

⁵ Throughout the interview process, participants were specifically prompted to recount their professional experiences with the most memorable CLD students they had encountered. Participants provided the disability categories for the focal students during the interviews. To respect and accurately represent the terminology, we utilized terms verbatim from the interview transcripts. In Korea, the majority of special education laws and policies have been influenced by diffusion from the U.S. education system, such as the establishment of the Korean version of special education law, the Act on Special Education for Persons with Disabilities (ASEPD) in 1977 (Yoo & Palley, 2014). Consequently, the definitions and categorizations of disabilities in ASEPD closely align with those stipulated in the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

⁶ We also acknowledge that our prior knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and own experiences may shape our perspectives and interpretations, inadvertently leading to confirmatory biases.

⁷ 1 = very low, 2 = low, 3 = average, 4 = high, 5 = very high.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yehyang Lee

Yehyang Lee is a PhD candidate in Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests center on intersectional oppression and systemic invisibility of educational disparities encountered by students and their families at the intersection of dis/ability, race, language, culture, and socioeconomic status.

Dosun Ko

Dosun Ko is an Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University. Building upon an interdisciplinary lens informed by cultural historical activity theory and disability critical race theory, his scholarship aims to understand how the intersection of racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression shape inequities in special education. This includes the misrepresentation, misidentification, and mistreatment of students of Color in disability identification and school discipline. His scholarship also seeks to amplify the voices of local stakeholders and leverage their transformative agency to design equity-oriented school systems, promoting equity, inclusion, and access for all students. Dr. Ko has been a prolific scholar, publishing in leading scholarly outlets in both general and special education fields, including the Review of Educational Research, Urban Education, Teachers College Record, Mind Culture and Activity, Race Ethnicity and Education, and Remedial and Special Education.

Sumin Lim

Sumin Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling, Special Education, and Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research is dedicated to promoting epistemic justice within special education service systems and civic engagement among school stakeholders to cultivate democratic decision-making and equity-based school-family partnerships.