Becoming Me in Third Space: Media Education for North Korean Refugee Youths in South Korea

Abstract

In this study, the authors explored curricular practices of media education for North Korean refugee youths resettled in South Korea, and investigated the impacts of the media education program on their identity construction. Guided by third space theory and framed within a qualitative research paradigm, this media education program was developed by a group of North and South Korean teaching artists. Multimodal data collected throughout the first year were analyzed thematically with a focus on the discursive construction of identities of North Korean youth participants. The participants were invited to reconsider their identities and address multiple dimensions of lived challenges in a safe media education space.

Digital Storytelling With Youth From Refugee Backgrounds: Possibilities for Language and Digital Literacy Learning

“…Through DST, the students in our study were also able to make intentional investments in their learning through a strong dialogical foundation, targeted and spontaneous language development, new digital literacies and skills creating counter-narratives of empowerment and pride by going public with their digital stories, reiterating how flexible classroom structures and routines can be guided toward nuanced learning and agency. Our findings support previous research (see review in Michalovich, 2021b) that shows how digital multimodal composing can afford youth from refugee backgrounds opportunities to agentively frame their representations of themselves (e.g., Leurs et al, 2018), reveal their competency in digital literacy practices (e.g., Gilhooly & Lee, 2014), share, and take pride in their knowledge about real-world issues as they communicate it to audiences (e.g., Luchs & Miller, 2016), express and process their emotions (e.g., Jang & Kang, 2019), enhance their language learning (Emert, 2013(Emert, , 2014a(Emert, , 2014b, represent and reposition their identities (e.g., Michalovich, 2021a), and narrate their lived experiences (e.g., Johnson & Kendrick, 2017).…”

Digital Media Production of Refugee-Background Youth: A Scoping Review

“…For example, in a photo novella study (Berman et al 2001) involving 11-to 14-year-old youth from Bosnia who resettled in Canada, a participant filmed a bridge near her Canadian home that opened a conversation about the unforgettable bombing of a major bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, an event that was recalled by all youth in the study. In another study, situated in an afterschool media club for youth from North Korea who resettled in South Korea (Jang and Kang 2019), participants used images to convey and process emotions and stories about their past, present, or future lives. In this case, an image of a local hospital represented one participant's aspiration to become a doctor, accompanied by an image of moving cars that illustrated her determination to fulfill that aspiration.…”

“…Considered through a transnational literacies perspective, refugee-background youth's representations revealed how their lived experiences were strewn with multiple strands of connections to a variety of places (e.g., their home countries, settlement contexts, refugee camps, and places where their family, friends, or people resided), and how invested they were in literacy practices that maintained and developed those connections (Darvin and Norton 2014). Considered through the lens of embodied cognition, the value of refugee-background youth's concrete representations is recognized in that those representations formed visible traces of how youth experientially understood and communicated abstract ideas (Johnson 2018), e.g., a girl's steadfast investment in an imagined identity of a doctor represented by an image of moving cars (Jang and Kang 2019). Such visible traces of refugee-background youth's embodied experiences proved invaluable for educators, researchers, and community members in trying to understand how youth perceived their various environments, relationships, lived experiences, and hopes for the future.…”

“…Finally, studies have shown that digital media production can invite collaborative engagement among youth, researchers, and instructors, as well as users of social media sites such as YouTube, often leading to the creation of new relationships and communities in the youth's current location as well as transnationally. For example, in a study exploring a media club of North Korean refugee-background youth in South Korea, Jang and Kang (2019) explained that "the music video making played a critical role in promoting students' collaboration and their development of a sense of belonging" (Jang and Kang 2019, p. 89). Similarly, showed how incorporating a videogame produced by a 14-year-old boy from Iraq, who resettled in the United States in the preceding year, in his English Language Learning class facilitated not only his engagement in school learning and his connection with his peers in class, but also new relationships with multilingual gamers who viewed and responded to his game-streaming videos on YouTube.…”