UC Berkeley

The proliferation of new media has created significant changes to how students interact with cultural diversity in the twenty-first century. No longer limited to interactions available only in their local contexts, many students connect online to highly diverse places, peoples, and texts. This dissertation describes these interactions as twenty-first century multicultural learning. Although multiculturalism is typically defined locally according to a nation’s populace, this empirical case considers the increased salience of transnationalism and the growing importance of linguistic and cultural flexibility in an era of globalization. While recognizing seminal multicultural education scholarship that is foundational to this study’s evolution (Banks, 2009; 2013; Hernández-Sheets, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Lee, 1992), this study proffers a reexamination of multicultural learning in a rapidly changing communication landscape.

This study features DramaCrazy.net, a free website on which people posted, watched, and discussed Asian dramas. Data collection focused on DramaCrazy’s Korean dramas forum and spanned two months of almost daily visits to the site from May through June of 2013. Data included peripheral observations, Web traffic estimation data, over 200 screenshots, and eight printed discussion threads. Content analysis of publicly available data (Brett, 2010; Farnel, 2015; Hine, 2014; Hughes, 2012; Thelwall, 2008) allowed for close analysis of “archives of naturally occurring, non-reactive, online interactions” (Hewson & Laurent, 2012, p. 183). The forum’s majority was adolescents who lived in diverse locations outside of Korea. A central finding was that these youth pursued multicultural learning and identity construction through their reading and composition of digitally mediated texts. They generated knowledge about Korean language, history, and contemporary culture, as well as information about their local contexts. Their literacy and language practices also involved digitally mediated self-representations that signified belonging to diverse locations and multiple affiliations.

Through a semiotic approach to examining meaning-making practices wherein “choice is the basis of and the expression of meaning” (Kress and Selander, 2012, p. 267), I discuss these adolescents’ literacy and language choices as meaningful to their understanding of themselves and others. Their participation in the forum involved imagining, analyzing, articulating, and remixing their cultural identities, social worlds, and connections to global others. They composed transcultural self-representations that disrupt a fixed categorical logic of identity that persists in school policies and practices (Kim, G.M., 2016a; 2016b). These complex cultural identities highlight a need for more student-centered definitions of culture in education research and practice. As culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1994) and culturally responsive (Gay, 2000) pedagogies have become the established approach of many teacher education programs, these asset-based pedagogies require updating to include ways that cultures are learned and lived by students through digitally mediated, transnational, literate practices. In a spirit similar to Paris and Alim’s (2014) “loving critique forward” this study aims to advance multicultural education research in general, and literacy and language studies in particular, through its documentation of transcultural digital literacies and languages.