Dialogue within and dialogue between: a duoethnography of two researchers in the field of North Korean refugee education

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to document dialogic reflections of two researchers (Shin Ji and Eun-Young) who had conducted collaborative projects on education for youth with North Korean refugee backgrounds. By employing duoethnography, conversations were conducted on the following questions: What are the experiences that impacted our researcher identities? What is the transformative learning emerged from our engagement in NK research? How do we become more holistic researchers through duoethnography? During a series of facilitated dialogues both within and between Shin Ji and Eun-Young, they learned that their personal experiences of marginalisation served as an experiential and emotional foundation for their increased critical awareness of North Korean refugee students: the disparities in position, power and access that the students experienced in the process of resettlement in South Korea. Participating in the duoethnogrphy, the authors also experienced qualitative transformation as they made sense of the ways their identities and NK research were feeding each other. The authors thus concluded that the duoethnography created a third space for them in that it was a personally therapeutic and professionally productive engagement that was able to secure transparency that represents unique insights from each researcher.

KEYWORDS:

• Duoethnography
• dialogic reflection
• researcher reflexivity
• North Korean refugee education
• a third space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2018, laws for part-time university lecturers were passed to protect their rights. Since then, some lecturers have earned much higher levels of job security and others lost their jobs completely.

2 These days, a majority of North Korean youth in South Korea speak Chinese as their first language. For further information, see Jang (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2021 Research Fund of Seoul National University of Education.

Notes on contributors

Shin Ji Kang

Shin Ji Kang is a Professor of the Department of Early, Elementary, and Reading Education at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, USA. She received MEd and PhD in early childhood education from Vanderbilt University, USA. Her academic interests include social justice in education, spiritual issues in education, and North Korean refugee children education. Her scholarship has been shared in forms of book chapters, journal articles, art exhibitions, interviews, study abroad special programs, and youth summer camps. She has been pursuing engaged scholarship by directly working with the shareholders including North Korean students, South Korean teachers, policy makers, and civic organizations.

Eun-Young Jang

Eun-Young Jang is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Multicultural Education at Seoul National University of Education, Seoul, South Korea. She received MEd and PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture from Vanderbilt University, USA. Her research interests are multicultural and multilingual education,pedagogical translanguaging, and critical literacy pedagogy. Topics covered in her recent scholarly work include multilingual and media literacy education for North Korean refugee adolescents and teacher education for multilingual and translanguaging pedagogy in the Korean context.