Selective (Un)Telling of Difficult Knowledge of U.S. Wars in Children’s Literature: The Korean War as a Case Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Sohyun An
Author(s):  
Dafna Zur

This chapter turns to children’s literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberation of Korea from its thirty-five-year colonization. In the five years between 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula experienced the euphoria of liberation, the arrival of the United State Military Government in Korea, the hardening of ideological positions, and the ensuing mass migration up and down the peninsula, as well as the official establishment of two separate and mutually intolerant regimes. Children’s literature provides a fascinating counterpoint to these historical shifts by showcasing powerful nationalist tendencies that set the tone for a new beginning, while simultaneously presenting strong undercurrents remaining from the colonial past. Most significantly, this chapter looks at the much-celebrated and freshly liberated child-heart and questions the extent of liberation in light of a newly forged relationship between Korea’s new young citizens and their liberated land.


2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Browne Hutchinson ◽  
Anne Rose ◽  
Benjamin B. Bederson ◽  
Ann Carlson Weeks ◽  
Allison Druin

The challenges encountered in building the InternationalChildren’s Digital Library (ICDL), a freely availableonline library of children’s literature are described. Thesechallenges include selecting and processing books fromdifferent countries, handling and presenting multiplelanguages simultaneously, and addressing cultural differences. Unlike other digital libraries that present content from one or a few languages and cultures, and focuson either adult or child audiences, ICDL must serve amultilingual, multicultural, multigenerational audience.The research is presented as a case study for addressingthese design criteria; current solutions and plans forfuture work are described.


Author(s):  
Heike Wieters

Chapter 3 is a case study on CARE’s work in Korea during and after the Korean War. It traces CARE’s response to a presidential aid appeal in the United States, shows how American NGOs competed for donor dollars and media attention. In addition, it depicts the difficulties private humanitarian players encountered in a foreign setting involving a refugee crisis and a tight web of players with different stakes, meaning military players, Korean and United States government agencies, United Nations organizations as well as diverse foreign aid agencies.


Author(s):  
Erin Hogan Rapp ◽  
Melissa Landa

This chapter presents the results from a collective case study of 23 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a Children's Literature course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. It explores how course instruction in and around high-quality, culturally diverse children's literature facilitated both displays of culturally competent dispositions and cultural knowledge of self and others. The chapter also describes how the preservice teachers under study applied their culturally competent dispositions as they rehearsed selecting texts, planning activities, and asking questions to their future students. The Cultural Competence for Teaching Framework provided a useful metric to evaluate participants' displays of cultural competence across the course of the semester. Within this chapter, the authors describe how they embedded cultural competence education inside the course including a description of the activities, texts, and pedagogy used.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suhi Choi

Abstract Since its fiftieth anniversary, memorialization of the Korean War has taken place in towns and cities across the United States. As a case study of this belated memory boom, this essay looks at the Utah Korean War Memorial, erected by local veterans in 2003 at Memory Grove Park, Salt Lake City. Situated in both the local and national contexts of remembrance, the memorial resonates largely with three mythical scripts, with themes of resilience, local pride, and the good war, all of which have allowed veterans to negotiate tensions between individual and collective memories. This case study reveals in particular how the official commemoration of the war has shifted local veterans' rhetorical positions from potential witnesses of subversive realities of the war to uncritical negotiators whose legitimization of the very process of mythologizing memories has ultimately alienated them from their own experiences during and after the war.


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