South Korean English language teaching (ELT) has typically been represented as an arena dominated by excessive competition, test preparation, and the mastery of linguistic forms (Choi & Park, 2013; Park, 2009). These notions have been compounded by stereotypical depictions of Korean students as passive learners incapable of critical thinking (Shin & Crookes, 2005). While research suggests that top-down reform policies have failed to impact the culture of Korean English education (McGuire, 2007; Shin, 2012), the possibility of a relevant arts-based language and literacy curriculum in Korean ELT has not been explored. This paper reports on a classroom inquiry project designed to engage counter-literacies (Pennycook, 2010) and transgressive expression (Duncum, 2009) through an arts-based English curriculum in an economically disadvantaged neighbourhood on the outskirts of Seoul.

This project came about in response to a school mandate to use an English medium newspaper as the centrepiece of a literacy curriculum for Korean high-school students with low to intermediate English proficiency. We drew inspiration from the Front Page project in which visual artist Nancy Chunn wrote and painted across The New York Times front pages every day for one year. She described these actions as a “speaking back” to the voices of power heard in authoritative media outlets. With the hopes of encouraging literacy practices that move beyond decoding and comprehension, we asked students to “tag up” newspapers by writing or drawing across their front pages. Drawings, graffiti-like slogans, and other multimodal representations suggest nuanced understandings of how participants felt positioned as consumers of media texts largely absent from the texts themselves. The opportunity to “tag up” these newspapers in a classroom environment evoked complex responses to editorial, economic, and political power in ways typically excluded from a more formal language and literacy curriculum. We argue that this dialogic, irreverent, and colourful exercise provided a medium through which learners positioned at the periphery of Korean education could respond to authority through a variety of artistic forms. This short unit offers a starting point for the implementation of an arts-based approach to multimodal and multilingual literacies. In particular, we suggest that counter-literacies in an arts-based language and literacy curriculum offer avenues for marginalised students to develop unique political voices in classroom spaces and beyond.