"Model Minority" Now Perceived as Threat: Korean Internationals in an American High School, English-Only!

Based on a five-year ethnographic study, Dr. Park traces the developments of integration, assimilation, and segregation of international students in the American school system. She investigates how American Christian high school officials implemented policies in an attempt to remedy conflicts with their (Korean) international students. These policies caused a further escalation of conflicts, tensions, and struggles.

The credibility of this book is enhanced by its adoption of a broad, interdisciplinary, and methodological toolkit to address this transnational contact as inextricably interconnected phenomena in the context of global capitalism and imperialism.

Examining these policies unraveled the uncomfortable incompatibilities between the educational and social goals of the school leadership and those of the international students and their parents. It also details the fascinating ways that the school legitimatized specific kinds of knowledge to establish its policies under the name of care and love and suggest practical solutions and policy recommendations.

In light of the urgency and growth of these concerns, this book aims at fostering the possibility of integrating international students through a rigorous analysis of the close proximity between the two groups while maximizing the understanding of the intensity of the conflicts. It focuses on the importance of language, in particular, the emergence of English as today’s lingua franca, in terms of integration as opposed to assimilation.