Literacy Culture and Language Education

Gaps and Opportunities in the South Korean Digital Content Creation Landscape As the digital content creation industry in South Korea continues to expand—with the market projected to reach $2.69 billion by 2030 and growing at 15.9% annually—both the saturation of popular niches and the surging global demand for Korean cultural content create unprecedented opportunities for educators, students, and content creators alike. While many established South Korean content creators focus on language learning, travel, beauty, and lifestyle, significant gaps remain that present valuable opportunities for educational innovation and cultural bridge-building. This analysis explores seven notable gaps in the current South Korean digital content landscape, identifying areas where educators can develop innovative curricula, students can pursue meaningful research projects, and content creators can contribute to cross-cultural understanding. From interactive language learning that integrates cultural co...

Androgyny as Gender Subversion in Countercultures Introduction: Flowers in the Hair, Politics in the Body The dance between masculinity and femininity has always been political. From the hippies of the 1960s to K-pop idols on TikTok, the softening of masculinity unsettles power structures. Androgyny is rarely just a style choice; it is a visual, performative critique of discipline, hierarchy, and conformity. This chapter explores how androgyny functions as gender subversion in countercultural spaces. Through the lenses of Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, I examine how bodies, fashion, and communal spaces have challenged dominant norms—sometimes liberating, sometimes captured by consumerism. Hippies and the Softening of Masculinity In the wake of WWII, masculinity was codified: Mad Men suits, Cold War stoicism, militarized ideals. The hippie movement of the 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against this rigidity by feminizing male bodies: long hair, flowing robes,...

Androgyny as Counterculture: From Hippie Hair to K-Pop Glow The dance between masculinity and femininity has always been political. When I think back to the hippies of the 1960s and early ’70s—long hair, flowing robes, floral prints—it wasn’t just about fashion. It was a conscious softening of masculinity, a refusal of Cold War stoicism and Mad Men suits. Hippie androgyny was more than aesthetics; it was a challenge to a world defined by militarized masculinity. Marcuse and the Hippie Body Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School philosopher beloved by the New Left, offered a framework that still resonates. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), he argued that advanced industrial societies keep people passive by creating false needs through consumerism. People think they’re free when in fact they’re trapped in cycles of buying and obeying. The hippie body—feminized, free-flowing, refusing to march in military uniform—was one way of pushing back. Marcuse’s idea of “repressive desublimation” ...

Trust as Cosmopolitan Literacy: Boundaries, AI, and Student Growth One of the conceptual frames that continues to guide my work is cosmopolitan literacies —the idea that literacy is not only about decoding texts but about learning to live with difference, complexity, and shared vulnerability. Within this frame, trust is not simply a matter of believing in students’ abilities; it is a relational practice of acknowledging uncertainty while still extending dignity and responsibility. This past Spring semester of 2025, I found myself reflecting on how trust operates in my large first-year English classes. I’ve encouraged my students to use AI tools for assignments. For many of them, the tasks I assign would be challenging even in their native language. AI makes the material more accessible—it allows them to explore, to read widely (even if in Korean rather than English), and to get excited about our major. And yet, I worry. Is AI feeding them shallow or incorrect information? Am I “che...

This is the third section, Data Collection & Analysis, of the Methods Chapter for:  Dialoguing with the Algorithm : An Autoethnographic Study of Midlife Voice, Uncertainty, and Teacher Identity in a ChatGPT Exchange . by:  Maria Lisak EdD ( How to cite ) Data Collection & Analysis There were several points in the the various documentation around my ChatGPT exchange on syllabus design as well as my inner dialog with self that could be mined for analysis. In the Findings chapter, each incident, or moment, is explained, analyzed and interpreted in three stages : data context and selection rationale as well as the excerpt itself and an initial interpretation; analysis of AI response pattern as developed during iterative journaling;  and finally interpreted through a theoretical anchor as outlined in Chapter 2’s Voice, Reflexivity and Dialogic Becoming. Here, I map out the data sources and the different analytical procedures in motion. Data Sources The focal dataset is...

This is the second section, Researcher Positionality, of the Methods Chapter for:  Dialoguing with the Algorithm : An Autoethnographic Study of Midlife Voice, Uncertainty, and Teacher Identity in a ChatGPT Exchange . by:  Maria Lisak EdD ( How to cite ) Researcher Positionality: Navigating Cultural and Institutional Contexts This positionality statement situates my autoethnographic account within the intertwined cultural, institutional, and personal contexts that shape my engagement with generative AI in Korean EFL higher education. The first section introduces the historical, social, and pedagogical features of the Korean EFL landscape, highlighting the hierarchical, relational, and policy-driven forces that influence classroom life. The second section positions me—an aging, white, foreign woman with long-term professional experience in Korea—within these dynamics, tracing how my cultural hybridity, gender, and age inform my pedagogical practice. The third section examines ho...

This is the first section, Autoethnography, of the Methods Chapter for:  Dialoguing with the Algorithm : An Autoethnographic Study of Midlife Voice, Uncertainty, and Teacher Identity in a ChatGPT Exchange . by:  Maria Lisak EdD ( How to cite ) Autoethnography Overview of Approach This study adopts a layered autoethnographic methodology, drawing on a single stream of reflective material—AI dialogues, pedagogical notes, analytic journaling, and field-level observation—developed through sustained engagement over time. Each of the three inquiries in this research program (Lisak, 2025a, 2025b, and the current study) re-examines the same base material through a different conceptual lens, allowing key themes to surface, settle, and evolve across repeated analytic passes. The first inquiry, Designing with AI: Reflective Inquiry (Lisak, 2025a), framed the dataset within practitioner research, focusing on the pedagogical design implications of AI use in EFL contexts. The second, Design...