A Cross-Cultural Study on Student Engagement and Resistance to Critical Literacy in a TESOL MA Classroom

This paper reports on a qualitative examining the cross-cultural reasons for student engagement and resistance to critical literacy in a three week summer TESOL MA course that was part of a Korean/American university faculty exchange program. Of particular interest was the unique diversity of the class which consisted of 13 subjects from 9 different nations. Using student and instructor reflective journals, field notes on classroom observations, and the course terminal paper on student's philosophies of education as research corpora, results of the study revealed that students resisted instruction in critical literacy for ideological and epistemological reasons. Nonetheless, the data also showed that while all students resisted some theories in critical literacy, all students nonetheless engaged the course content in meaningful ways.