Practitioner Inquiry · Language Education · Korea

When care becomes curriculum: a pedagogy of trauma, access, and English language teaching in South Korea

What does it mean to teach English when the language itself is a gatekeeper — and when your students are still carrying unresolved grief?

Practitioner research note  ·  Submitted to TQR Annual Conference 2024  ·  Theme: Qualitative Inquiry; Access Denied?

In South Korea, English is rarely just a language. It is a threshold. Pass the test, and employment interviews become accessible. Fall short, and an invisible gate quietly closes. For the university students I work with, this high-stakes relationship with English shapes everything — their anxiety, their silence, their willingness (or reluctance) to speak at all.

This post reflects on a practitioner-inquiry I conducted across 2022 and 2023, asking a question I couldn't stop returning to: how do we teach a language when the language itself is implicated in the harm our students are carrying?

The landscape students arrive in

The cohorts I worked with arrived in my classroom at a particular moment of collective exhaustion. Covid's disruption to face-to-face learning had produced an entire generation of students who self-identified, in strikingly high numbers, as introverted — students who had spent formative social years largely indoors, in individual study pods, on screens. Reentry into communal classroom life was not simply a logistical shift; it was an emotional one.

Layered beneath this were older, deeper traumas that Korean students do not discuss easily in institutional settings. The sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014 and the Itaewon crowd crush of 2022 are not merely historical events for this generation — they are sites of unresolved collective grief, events in which state and institutional failures were highly visible, and in which young people bore disproportionate loss. These events exist alongside the ongoing reality of a country technically still at war, a fact that shapes the cultural psyche in ways that rarely surface in English language lesson plans.

"Access for the sake of access or inclusion is not necessarily liberatory, but access done in the service of love, justice, connection, and community is liberatory and has the power to transform."

— Mia Mingus

The TQR conference theme that frames this work — Access Denied? — asks us to examine who qualitative inquiry reaches, and who it leaves behind. But the same question applies inside our classrooms. When access to English proficiency is gatekept by standardized testing in an environment of collective unprocessed grief, we have to ask: access to what, exactly, and for whom?

Competitive cooperation and the burden of normalcy

One of the more complex dynamics I encountered was what I began thinking of as the paradox of competitive cooperation in Korean educational culture. Students work alongside each other in communal study environments — PC bangs, study cafes, shared dormitory tables — and yet their outcomes are individually ranked in ways that produce intense pressure. The cooperative surface masks a competitive underpinning that students are rarely encouraged to name or examine.

This extends to English language learning specifically. The cultural phenomenon sometimes described as "English as self-colonization" captures something real: the pressure to master the colonizer's tongue as a condition of participation in the global economy is not a neutral pedagogical challenge. It carries a particular freight for Korean students, whose educational institutions have positioned English proficiency as both a democratizing force and — paradoxically — a mechanism for further stratifying opportunity.

What a pedagogy of care actually looks like in practice

In response to these realities, I began designing lessons that treated embodiment, emotional presence, and translanguaging not as supplements to "real" English learning, but as central to it. The data for this inquiry consists of teacher lesson plans alongside students' own reflective analyses of how these activities affected their learning process and their confidence.

Several approaches emerged as particularly meaningful to students:

Soft fascination meditations drew on attention restoration theory — the idea that gentle, diffuse attention (watching light move, listening to ambient sound) restores cognitive capacity in ways that directed focus cannot. Beginning class with brief meditative exercises created a moment of decompression that students consistently identified as enabling rather than distracting.

Translanguaging — the practice of drawing fluidly on a student's full linguistic repertoire rather than treating Korean and English as separate, non-communicating systems — was incorporated not as a remedial accommodation but as a principled pedagogical stance. Students were invited to think across languages, to find the Korean word first if that's where the thought lived, and to trust that meaning-making in two languages simultaneously was legitimate intellectual work.

Curated music playlists offered what I can only describe as affective scaffolding — they shifted the emotional register of the room before we asked students to take on the vulnerability of speaking in a second language. Several students noted in their reflective writing that music made the classroom feel less evaluative.

Structured conversations about generational trauma and injustice were perhaps the most delicate element. These were not therapeutic interventions — I am a teacher, not a counselor — but they created permission to speak about experience rather than only about grammar. Students who had rarely used English to say anything that mattered to them began to do so.

What institutions do, and what they fail to do

The analysis of student reflective work illuminated something I had suspected but had not yet articulated clearly: the institutions designed to "level the playing field" in Korean education often inadvertently reproduce the hierarchies they claim to disrupt. Testing regimes that promise objective assessment of language ability in practice reward the cultural capital that enables test preparation — private tutoring, hagwon attendance, family resources. The students who arrive in my classroom without those resources do not lack ability; they lack access to the specific training that the test rewards.

A pedagogy of care is, in part, a refusal to treat this structural reality as invisible. It is a commitment to restoring and supporting students rather than adding another layer of merit measurement to an already saturated system.

Why this matters for qualitative inquiry

This practitioner-inquiry sits squarely within the TQR conference's concern about whether qualitative research reaches those who most need its tools. The students in this study were not passive research subjects — they were analysts of their own learning. Their reflective writing, which forms a core data source for this work, asked them to evaluate the teacher's lesson plans for their actual usefulness: did these activities help? Did they grow more confident? Did they find themselves using English differently?

Their answers were not uniformly positive, and that matters. Some students found the meditations awkward; some found the trauma discussions uncomfortable. But many described a classroom that felt, for the first time, like a space designed for their flourishing rather than their filtration. That distinction — between education that sorts and education that restores — seems to me one of the central questions qualitative inquiry can help us investigate.

If this work points toward anything, it is this: caring is not the soft alternative to rigorous teaching. It is, for many students, the precondition of learning at all.