Between Self and Community

Download or read book Between Self and Community written by Junehui Ahn and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-14 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea’s shifting socialization terrain.