Researching Korean children’s schooling attitude and practice in China: An ethnographic approach

The ethnographic study reported in this article documents an ethnic Korean elementary school student’s schooling attitude and practice behind the model minority stereotype in a bilingual Korean school in Northeast China. Using an ethnographic approach, this article focuses on observation and interview methods, which recount how the student attempts to negotiate in peer network home and school demands of schooling and struggles to obtain academic status and maintain ethnic language in daily school life. The article highlights the importance of giving children a voice perceived as a complicated phenomenon revealing the interplay between objective environment and subjective agency. The research results indicate the challenges that China’s 55 minorities face in order to achieve economic upward mobility while sustaining ethnic identities and culture at a time of transition and change, and lead us to argue that ethnic child voice is an important avenue for researchers to understand school experience among ethnic minorities within the asymmetrical power relation-ships between majority and minorities. Copyright © 2009 Brill.