‘Asian fails’ and the problem of bad Korean boys: multiculturalism and the construction of an educational ‘problem’

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith the current preoccupation with the ‘Asian success’, much less attention has been given to considering the experiences of other migrant groups from East Asia in Australia. This paper focuses on a case study of a school addressing the problem of a group of Korean-background boys and their educational underachievement, truancy and misbehaviour. The paper argues that these processes entail particular discourses around the Asian learner and the ‘Asian fail’. It argues that the practices through which educational ‘problems’ are fashioned tell us much about the ‘professional vision’ of teachers and wider multicultural schemas of perception. At the heart of these processes is a seemingly innocuous form of cultural pathologising: the translation of a set of behaviours into attributes which shift responsibility for the problem onto the students’ ethnic background and yet allow for the articulation of teachers’ pedagogic agency.