As the international society has become a community, human interchange has been expanding. For political, economic and religious reasons, immigrant workers, marriage immigrants and North Korean defectorsbegan to flow into South Korea in the 1990s. Fam...
As the international society has become a community, human interchange has been expanding. For political, economic and religious reasons, immigrant workers, marriage immigrants and North Korean defectorsbegan to flow into South Korea in the 1990s. Families with members whose culture is different from that of the Koreans came to be called 'multicultural families'. Most of the children in such multicultural families have been experiencing difficulties in the course of their adaptation to the Korean culture. They generally have problems in their school life owing to their different language and culture, and many of them are discriminated upon and ostracized due to social prejudice. As such, their actions are discouraged and they harbor uneasy sentiments under stress. The need to establish programs for the provision of emotional support to children from multicultural families, to help them adapt to the new culture that they have been exposed to, has been recognized, but the support for multicultural families presently comes in the form of policies and education.
In this study, the effects of group art therapy using ancient fairy tales on children from multicultural families who are trying to adapt to the new culture they have been exposed to were examined.
Ancient fairy tales are stories that have been handed down to the present from the ancient times, containing accounts of various kinds of lives. They give insights into human sentiments, and when one faces difficulties, he or she is given hope to overcome these. They help people understand cultures, and they wield influence on the development of linguistic abilities.
Group art therapy enables a person to understand the fact that each individual is esteemed and valued through the positive support given to him or her by the therapist and the subject, and to understand the importance of cooperation and of being considerate of others. It also has positive effects on making friends.
In this study, the Acculturation Index (AI) and Social, Attitudinal, Familial, and Environmental Acculturative Stress for Children (SAFE) were applied to children from multicultural families in a study room located in Gyeonggi Province, and the 12 children in the subordinate group were divided into the experimental group and the control group. These children, who had been living in Korea for 6~13 months, had been showing passive or excess behavior, stress, and difficulty adapting to the Korean culture. Group art therapy was performed on the experimental group once a week, and each time for 60~90 min, totaling 15 times from November 2, 2008 to March 6, 2009, and through the qualitative analysis that was done at each time, the changes in each individual were examined.SPSS Win 14.0 was used for statistical treatment to examine the changes in AI and SAFE.
The results of this study are as follows. It was confirmed that the children’s stress from the efforts to adapt to a different culture was reduced, and that the children’s interest in and understanding of the Korean language and culture, and the degree of their adaptation to the Korean society, were enhanced. This was confirmed by the increase in AI and the decrease in SAFE.
Based on the aforementioned results, the following conclusions were arrived at:
(1) Group art therapy using fairy tales handed down to the present from the ancient times provided psychological support to children from multicultural families and had positive effects on their cultural adaptation. The children from multicultural families who participated in this study were experiencing stress from their cultural adaptation, with subdued actions and unstable sentiments, but after going through group art therapy, they became confident and sociable and began to think positively. The stress that they were experiencing from their cultural-adaptation efforts was reduced.
(2) Group art therapy using fairy tales handed down to the present from the ancient times provided children from multicultural families with an opportunity to develop an interest in and an understanding of the Korean language and culture by continuously providing them with stimuli thereon.
The foregoing shows that group art therapy using fairy tales, which was handed down to the present from the olden times, has positive effects on children from multicultural families in terms of their adaptation to the Korean culture.
The study has the following limitations:
(1) Since this study conducted research on only a small number of subjects in a region in Gyeonggi Province, it is somewhat hard to formulate a general conclusion.
(2) There may be errors in the conclusion of this study as the factors resulting from the children’s participation in the programs other than group art therapy were not separated.
|
