The purpose of this study was to investigate how parental beliefs, practices, and values of Korean immigrant parents regarding mathematics education in the United States are adjusted from the perspective of ecology of human development. This research further explored how participants’ cultural identities are affected by acculturation process. In addition, the researcher examined the transformations of parents’ perspectives on mathematics learning and achievement as they integrate into the dominant culture. The study used mixed methods to obtain information about the research participants’ experience as immigrant parents and interrelationships with their second-generation children regarding mathematics learning and achievement. A sample of Korean American parents (n = 44), whose children were currently enrolled in a mathematics course at the time or had taken at least one mathematics course within the past 3 to 5 years in middle or high school, participated in a quantitative survey; a subsample of immigrant parents (n = 10) participated in semi-structured interviews. The study utilized the Suinn-Lew Asian Self-Identity Acculturation Scale (SL-ASIA) and the Attitudes Toward Mathematics Inventory (ATMI). The results of the study indicated that even though Korean American parents shared the same nonnormative transition, they developed diverse intrinsic values and acculturation styles. Further, the parents’ perspectives on their children’s mathematical learning and achievement were influenced by traditional culture, dominant culture, and the interaction of both. The study also revealed that Korean immigrant parents used other Asian American students’ mathematical performance and learning as a frame of reference for their own children’s mathematical performance and learning; in addition, parents’ participation in children’s mathematics at home differed by acculturation levels. The main reason for the parents’ active support of and engagement in mathematics was that mathematics was the only subject which these immigrant parents adequately understood, and their aspiration for higher mathematics education was due to both immigrant optimism and pessimism. After moving to a different country, Korean parents’ abilities to perceive, conceptualize, and interact develop at different levels in new complex environments, where values, customs, and socioeconomic status contrast with those they had developed previously. These changes in intrafamilial processes and extrafamilial situations affected the development of the Korean immigrant parents’ cultural identity and reciprocal interactions with their second-generation children.

This dissertation examines Protestant narratives of post-1965 Korean American Christians, with regard to the formation of what it means to be Korean Americans. The focus of this dissertation is to find out how Korean Americans have reinterpreted their ethnic backgrounds and immigrant experiences in America based on the concept of God's chosen people in religious terms. They use this Christian identity for distinguishing themselves not only from Koreans but also from other minority groups in America. The chapter starts with an overview of the historical background of Korean Americans' pre-immigrant perspectives of America. Throughout Korea's history of despair under the colonization by Japan and the civil war followed by the national division, America has gained political, military and cultural hegemony over Korea, causing the emergence of so-called American fever, the idealization of American ways of life. This tendency motivated Korean Americans to leave their homeland for obtaining better social status and living conditions. These historical backgrounds have influenced the understanding of their post-immigrant lives in America. The following chapters discuss how Korean Americans make sense of their immigrant lives under the changing social contexts in both Korea and America. Pursuant to that goal, they investigate Protestant narratives in the sermons of influential Korean American pastors, testimonies and articles published in church magazines. In these narratives, the Christian symbols such as pilgrimage and Exodus sanctified their immigration by interpreting their transnational immigration as a sacred journey into God's Promised Land which they believed was America. Furthermore, their identification with the American Puritans and their manifest destiny to revive Christianity in America demonstrate their racial attitudes toward non-Korean ethnic groups in America. The commemorative Centennial Celebration of the Korean American church held in November, 2003 in the last chapter also serves as a stage where people weave diverse factors together to establish their group identities. For post-1965 Korean immigrants, Protestant narratives have contributed to the maintenance of Korean American identity as God's chosen people. They reflect the wish of Korean American to become a central group in mainstream American society as well as be part of American destiny as a global superpower, rather than to remain as a marginal group.

The Korean Independence Movement was a four decades long endeavor from 1905 to 1945 by Koreans to liberate Korea from Japanese colonization. Korean immigrants in America played a vital role in the movement. They contributed money, organized patriotic activities in their communities to raise awareness and issued appeals for support to the U.S. government. Throughout the years, and from generation to generation, Korean immigrants remained loyal to Korea's cause for liberation. This study discusses how this intense patriotic involvement to their homeland affected Koreans immigrants' experiences in America, namely, how such intense overseas nationalism shaped their Americanization process. Korean immigrants have told about their experiences in the form of memoirs, short narratives, interviews and speeches. These provide many first-person perspectives from which to understand Korean immigrants' changing senses of community, patriotism and acculturation. Many of these sources have come available in the last twenty years, but academic scholars have left these source largely untouched. Historians of Korean immigrant history often discuss the political components of the K.I.M. Although recognizing the importance of the Korean Independence Movement to Korean immigrants, scholars have, nonetheless, said very little as to how this movement affected them socially. This study examines how America influenced historical developments culturally by shaping the attitudes of Korea's most politically active nationalists--the Korean immigrants in America. Furthermore, this study argues that Koreans in America utilized the K.I.M. for much more than Korean independence and that their motives evolved throughout the decades. The early immigrants used the K.I.M. as a means to establish a Korean community and establish social networks while the later activists, particularly after 1919, used their demonstrations to broadcast their distinct Asian identity as well as their assimilation and loyalty to America. More simply put, Korean patriotism and Korean immigrant "Americanization," are intimately connected.

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