Teaching Across Borders: Multilingual Teachers at the Margins in South Korea and the U.S. Education

This qualitative study investigates how multilingual teachers in South Korea and the United States navigate, negotiate, and resist structural constraints within linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms. Drawing on semi-structure interviews with ten educators—five in each country—the research employs a comparative thematic analysis grounded in the Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) framework and informed by Border Thinking (Mignolo, 2000). Findings reveal that teachers in both contexts engage in significant invisible labor as they reconstruct pedagogies for linguistically heterogeneous classrooms, resist cultural erasure within nation-centered curricula, and challenge monolingual assessment regimes that marginalize multilingual learners. Despite differing policy landscapes, teachers across both sites share common struggles and enact agentive practices that foreground linguistic justice, cultural affirmations, and inclusive instruction. However, these efforts often occur in isolation and without institutional support. The study emphasizes the need to recognize multilingual teachers as epistemic agents and calls for systemic reforms in curriculum, assessment, and teacher preparation that affirm the realities of multilingual education across global contexts.