Recollecting Memories, Reconfiguring Identities, Rereinforcing Class Inequality: Schooling Stories of Alternative High School Students in South Korea.

The alternative school provides a specific institutional discourse, official and unofficial, that shapes the ways in which alternative school students participate in a particular discursive practice. The alternative school plays a crucial role in developing students aspirations by enabling them to envision a better future. Moreover, it helps students make and remake their constructions of self, as their life stories are recontextualized through alternative school experiences. This paper focuses on the way a student's alternative school experience stimulates his or her reflections on past experiences (i.e., mainstream school experiences and street experiences). It also examines how particular discourses of alternative schools (re)shape and (re)arrange a student's memories. The author explores how students continuously (re)construct their stories of mainstream school experience and their street life in light of alternative school experience. (Contains 24 references.) (Author)