DECONSTRUCTING KOREAMARIA: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ON LIMINALITY AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Abstract

This autoethnography analyzes the social justice teaching of a career English language teacher. Funds of knowledge theorization frames this autoethnographic study analyzing multimodal artifacts for decolonization of the researcher's teaching practice in a liminal space. This self-analysis of ontological and epistemological changes over time identifies the circulation of various literacies. A panel discussion is used to analyze a multimodal artifact created about being a migrant English teacher in South Korea, which is then discussed in the literature on funds of knowledge, liminality, and autoethnography. A digitally layered narrative artifact, a Voicethread, introduces a visual story with commentaries of reflection about teaching in South Korea as a US American. This Voicethread is then reflexively analyzed in a new discourse reflection. A panel discussion was chosen as a new discourse iteration to analyze the educator’s career. Visual self-representations, or avatars, created during their career then dialog with different aspects of the researcher’s persona on their life as a transplanted teacher of English in South Korea. This autoethnography is intended as a portrait that looks at the complex richness between the personal and the contextual. This work is helpful in documenting the ontological and epistemological changes in circulation of an Anglosphere educator decolonizing their teaching of English. This study is a counter-story of participatory knowledge construction of frontline teachers, working on the ground within and against systems of domination in English language teaching. The rigor of this study comes from a deep dive into a complex artifact to connect the personal to the cultural landscape at this point in time.