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Critical Adult Learning of Immigrant Workers: A Social Network Perspective

Why does one immigrant worker get involved in critical learning whereas another does not? This study attempted to answer the question by revealing how social ties of immigrant workers play a key role in mediating critical learning to a particular political attitude. The results of the study suggested that immigrant workers who showed a resistant political attitude, which is linked to the process of critical learning, tended to have more social ties and occupy more important socio-structural positions in their network than other peer workers. Introduction Immigrant workers to Korea come mostly from less industrialized Asian countries. Many of them are “forced” to employment in 3-D jobs (difficult, dirty, and dangerous). With this type of work, the incidences of institutional discrimination through underpayment, human rights violations, and non-social security are very high. Because undocumented immigrant workers also have no legal right to formal education in Korea, it is nearly impossible for them to access formal education. To account for this, the informal learning of undocumented immigrant workers was included as a factor. In particular, this study focused on unveiling the critical learning process of immigrant workers embedded in their political attitude because a political attitude is the value system that evaluates the social conditions surrounding human beings (Lane, 1965). Critical Theory and Critical Learning Critical theory views criticality as relentless reflection of predominant socio-economic systems that systematically exclude certain groups through distorted power relations. Thus, criticality encompasses “any attempt to understand practices of criticism, interpretation, and historical understanding of social action” (Blackburn, 1996, p.89). Based on critical theory, I define critical learning as a process of constructing self-regulative relationships with given learning conditions using the roots of the conditions that formulate learning. In order to fully encompass criticality, the meaning of self-regulative relationships should be redefined as socially contextualized self-regulative relationships. Socially contextualized self-regulative relationships with learning conditions can be built by alerting outside influences such as capitalism, bureaucratic systems, technical rationality, and grand discourses. In this respect, critical learning is the process of reorganizing one’s epistemological frame as well as the process of reflecting one’s ontological position from one’s social contexts. As such, critical learning has its orientation to emancipation through reflective thinking.