Column
Educational Cooperation Program for Latin America in 2023
Korea within the Colombian Education
and its Development Direction
I would like to begin this article by recalling the international conference on Korean culture for Colombian specialists in school textbooks held in 2017 in Seongnam-si, Republic of Korea where I was a speaker presenting on "Integrated Curricula and Contexts: Colombia vs Korea." This international conference was organized by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS), paving the way for an in-depth study of the contents regarding Korea in the textbooks published by the publishing house for Colombia and Latin America. Before this conference, there was hardly any information about Korea in the Colombian and Latin American curricula. Nevertheless, it took six years before I took part again in these conference. During this time, exponential progress was made in the understanding of global curricula in Latin America.
In October 2023 in particular, I was invited to participate in the " Educational Cooperation Program for Latin America" which also took place in Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea and where I gave a presentation on "Korea within Colombian Education and its Development Direction." In these seminars and conferences, the participating Latin American guest countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Argentina, Ecuador, and Paraguay) were able to appreciate the progress and impact of the programs promoted by AKS to make their culture known. We were amazed to see how Korean culture has built an outstanding gateway in Latin American curricula.
For Colombia in particular, the inclusion of Korean contents in our curricula has not only entailed determining some topics about Korea that can be arbitrarily included in our curricula; this practice has also involved an entire process of development, analysis, evaluations, and debates with the stakeholders in order to determine the guidelines adopted by the Secretariats and Ministries of Education in Colombia where the publisher is invited to reflect on education in terms of curriculum issues. It is worth noting that the support of AKS has been highly valuable. In the presentation, I outlined the debate regarding the different concepts behind the reflection on the organization and meaning of school curricula as well as how the curriculum should be organized in Colombia and in countries where we operate in order to integrate the contents regarding Korea meaningfully and purposefully.
It also focused on the meaning of the question that we are constantly asking ourselves, meaning people who work in the field of education and who design educational resources at the national and international levels: What should we teach, and how should we teach? In terms of whether we teach disciplines or areas, Camilloni (2010) states, "We cannot give up teaching science in school." In that sense, we agree with Camilloni (2010) that the disciplinary rigor of science should not be lost, as one way to lose disciplinary rigor is not to teach it. As curriculum specialists in Latin America, we have worked on curricula by areas, disciplines, and interdisciplinary, spiral, and global curricula, among others. Nonetheless, I will highlight the importance of thinking about the global curriculum in terms of the inclusion of Korean culture since, until before this program, only China and Japan were mentioned when Asian cultures were studied in these latitudes.
More generally speaking, the curriculum is understood as a political and social agreement reflecting a common societal vision while taking into account local, national, and global needs and expectations. In other words, the curriculum embodies the educational aims and purposes of a society. Therefore, contemporary processes of curriculum development and review increasingly involve public debates and consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. Curriculum design has evolved into a highly debated topic—often with conflicting perspectives—among policymakers, experts, professionals, and society as a whole. The complexity of curriculum development processes and range of issues underlying the “what” and “how” of teaching, learning, and assessment pose major challenges for policymakers and curriculum developers. As curriculum development processes are influenced by both local needs and broader transnational trends, it is crucial to draw a broad, international perspective on curriculum issues, trends, and approaches (UNESCO, 2021).
In this sense, a local curriculum interacting with a global curriculum or vice versa requires an integrative holistic view. Camilloni (2010) introduces a concept linked to the meaning of the curriculum in terms of content.
Content refers to everything taught. Heterogeneous in nature, content includes information, habits, attitudes, values, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and the like. Content is information and mastery of strategies and is multidisciplinary; therefore, decisions about how content is presented and organized are fundamental in shaping student learning. Nevertheless, since the curriculum requires content acquisition, mastery of cognitive operational strategies, development of competences, world-view, learning within contexts, and understanding of local and global contexts, the challenge is to define what is taught about global knowledge and problems, what is taught about local issues, and what is communicated through dialogue with these contexts as well as the disciplines in which they are studied. (Camilloni, 2010).
According to this approach, content about Korea is integrated, especially considering the fact that we share a common history and that our teaching is based on David Ausubel's meaningful learning, demonstrating the importance of taking into account the student's previous knowledge in new knowledge by readjusting and reconstructing both pieces of information in this process. New knowledge should sequentially and progressively integrate both local and global knowledge. Furthermore, our work is based on Noam Chomsky's and Vygotsky's learning in context approach in our textbooks and the contexts are both local and global due to the fact that we are educating global citizens. In addition, Korea has become a leading country with a global perspective to be taken into account in the content of disciplines such as social sciences and literature.
We are currently working with the editorial team on the guide to the book Mambrú by Rafael Humberto Moreno Durán, benefiting from the Korean translation of this novel—a literary guide with photographic and journalistic component, the visual representation through a manhwa. We are also working on a literary-musical guide to K-Pop in three sections, combining audiovisual, literary, pictorial, philosophical, and psychological material: a) BTS and its relationship with Herman Hesse's Demian; b) BTS and Romantic painting and Nietzsche; and c) BTS and Jung's psychoanalysis. This group is taken into account due to the fact that not all K-Pop groups—according to the research of language editor Daniel Correa—add educational value. Likewise, we are compiling Korean and Colombian myths in order to find what brings us together and what makes us unique in terms of the cultural identity of each nation; by compiling these myths, we are able to print a readable book focusing on such theme and approach.
AKS researcher Hyejung Park has been instrumental in supporting all these developments and our communication with AKS. We arrived in Korea on 16 October 2023 for this international conference, and from that day until 21 October we learned so much about a culture that is familiar to us as a result of the program. We were welcomed by a group of researchers with absolute disciplinary rigor led by the director of the center, Nanhee Ku, who also led the project to disseminate accurate information about Korea with her excellent management and leadership.
As an entity operating under the Ministry of Education, the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) was founded to promote Korean studies by means of research, education of Korean culture, exchanges, and expansion of Korean studies. Briefly, its main goal is to promote Korean knowledge and to improve the image of Korea. There, we learned that Korea mainly focuses on investing in education and Korean culture. Consisting of several development foci such as seminar on world textbooks in order to include accurate information about Korea, analysis of foreign textbooks, training in Korea for foreign textbook experts, seminar on textbooks, visits to other countries to improve content about Korea, development of materials to help improve knowledge about Korea, assistance to private organizations in other countries, international textbook library and website, and proposals regarding the means of cooperation to develop textbooks and ancillary materials in social sciences, this program enables Korea to promote its culture and become known throughout all continents.
The Division of Understanding Korea Project for disseminating accurate information about Korea, the Center for International Affairs of the Academy of Korean Studies welcomed us and introduced us to a program with strong academic and cultural component. Professor Yeongchan Oh, PhD, OH lectured us on Korean history and cultural heritage. During his lecture, Professor Yeongchan Oh documented Korea's national treasures and population and the statistics of the Korean War from a disciplinary point of view.
I was pleasantly surprised by Emeritus Professor Hyegyeong Jeong's lecture on the Pleasure of Korean Food as the topic of ethnic cuisine and slow food was a novelty since Latin America is influenced by the fast, plentiful, and unhealthy Western food. Regarding this conference, I would like to highlight the expert's presentation on the history and culture of Korean cuisine and topics related to food in terms of the cosmos concept and to the philosophy behind the importance of cosmology based on the principle of yin-yang and the five elements of the universe, and the cosmology of the five colors and flavors contained in Korean cuisine. Furthermore, Korea is a country that—as part of its gastronomic culture—focuses on food prepared to ensure the well-being of consumers and promotes the development of food related to initiation rites and the development of seasonal foods, and is a culture where vegetarian cuisine related to the gastronomy of Buddhist temples plays an important role. This is all significant in terms of opening up new opportunities to enrich knowledge of these Korean gastronomic concepts with a philosophical, cultural, and historical sense in order to promote the consumption of healthy and slow food in Latin American countries.
Finally, the seminar, lectures, and visits to cultural and historical cities and places show that Korean politics is based on economic growth, social justice, and education based on a cultural and economic expansion policy, and that they work towards the recognition of their culture in projects existing only in Korea from the point of view of cultural expansion and recognition. Therefore, I would like to express my appreciation to the Project Division for disseminating accurate information about Korea and to the Centre for International Studies and the Academy of Korean Studies for focusing on the core issue of expanding their culture and education, for giving continuity to their programs and ensuring their continuity even with the change of governments, for supporting us and allowing these meetings, for preserving their country’s history, for Korea’s ability to recover from wars and invasions in less than 50 years and to transcend itself, and for the global impact achieved with the programs I have referred to in this article.
In October 2023 in particular, I was invited to participate in the " Educational Cooperation Program for Latin America" which also took place in Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea and where I gave a presentation on "Korea within Colombian Education and its Development Direction." In these seminars and conferences, the participating Latin American guest countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Argentina, Ecuador, and Paraguay) were able to appreciate the progress and impact of the programs promoted by AKS to make their culture known. We were amazed to see how Korean culture has built an outstanding gateway in Latin American curricula.
For Colombia in particular, the inclusion of Korean contents in our curricula has not only entailed determining some topics about Korea that can be arbitrarily included in our curricula; this practice has also involved an entire process of development, analysis, evaluations, and debates with the stakeholders in order to determine the guidelines adopted by the Secretariats and Ministries of Education in Colombia where the publisher is invited to reflect on education in terms of curriculum issues. It is worth noting that the support of AKS has been highly valuable. In the presentation, I outlined the debate regarding the different concepts behind the reflection on the organization and meaning of school curricula as well as how the curriculum should be organized in Colombia and in countries where we operate in order to integrate the contents regarding Korea meaningfully and purposefully.
It also focused on the meaning of the question that we are constantly asking ourselves, meaning people who work in the field of education and who design educational resources at the national and international levels: What should we teach, and how should we teach? In terms of whether we teach disciplines or areas, Camilloni (2010) states, "We cannot give up teaching science in school." In that sense, we agree with Camilloni (2010) that the disciplinary rigor of science should not be lost, as one way to lose disciplinary rigor is not to teach it. As curriculum specialists in Latin America, we have worked on curricula by areas, disciplines, and interdisciplinary, spiral, and global curricula, among others. Nonetheless, I will highlight the importance of thinking about the global curriculum in terms of the inclusion of Korean culture since, until before this program, only China and Japan were mentioned when Asian cultures were studied in these latitudes.
Global curriculum or local curriculum?
This is another question for discussion in terms of whether to prioritize the teaching of local content, or whether to teach global content to develop global citizens, and of course why include content about Korea in our books and curricula.More generally speaking, the curriculum is understood as a political and social agreement reflecting a common societal vision while taking into account local, national, and global needs and expectations. In other words, the curriculum embodies the educational aims and purposes of a society. Therefore, contemporary processes of curriculum development and review increasingly involve public debates and consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. Curriculum design has evolved into a highly debated topic—often with conflicting perspectives—among policymakers, experts, professionals, and society as a whole. The complexity of curriculum development processes and range of issues underlying the “what” and “how” of teaching, learning, and assessment pose major challenges for policymakers and curriculum developers. As curriculum development processes are influenced by both local needs and broader transnational trends, it is crucial to draw a broad, international perspective on curriculum issues, trends, and approaches (UNESCO, 2021).
In this sense, a local curriculum interacting with a global curriculum or vice versa requires an integrative holistic view. Camilloni (2010) introduces a concept linked to the meaning of the curriculum in terms of content.
Content refers to everything taught. Heterogeneous in nature, content includes information, habits, attitudes, values, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and the like. Content is information and mastery of strategies and is multidisciplinary; therefore, decisions about how content is presented and organized are fundamental in shaping student learning. Nevertheless, since the curriculum requires content acquisition, mastery of cognitive operational strategies, development of competences, world-view, learning within contexts, and understanding of local and global contexts, the challenge is to define what is taught about global knowledge and problems, what is taught about local issues, and what is communicated through dialogue with these contexts as well as the disciplines in which they are studied. (Camilloni, 2010).
According to this approach, content about Korea is integrated, especially considering the fact that we share a common history and that our teaching is based on David Ausubel's meaningful learning, demonstrating the importance of taking into account the student's previous knowledge in new knowledge by readjusting and reconstructing both pieces of information in this process. New knowledge should sequentially and progressively integrate both local and global knowledge. Furthermore, our work is based on Noam Chomsky's and Vygotsky's learning in context approach in our textbooks and the contexts are both local and global due to the fact that we are educating global citizens. In addition, Korea has become a leading country with a global perspective to be taken into account in the content of disciplines such as social sciences and literature.
In which direction are we heading in terms of the integration of Korean content into the Colombian curriculum based on the concept of a global curriculum?
In my presentation during the seminar, I explained how we have articulated the Colombian curriculum in social sciences, natural sciences, and digital content for the platforms regarding the contents of the Korean curriculum we are interested in. We have made progress in reviewing what can be done together.We are currently working with the editorial team on the guide to the book Mambrú by Rafael Humberto Moreno Durán, benefiting from the Korean translation of this novel—a literary guide with photographic and journalistic component, the visual representation through a manhwa. We are also working on a literary-musical guide to K-Pop in three sections, combining audiovisual, literary, pictorial, philosophical, and psychological material: a) BTS and its relationship with Herman Hesse's Demian; b) BTS and Romantic painting and Nietzsche; and c) BTS and Jung's psychoanalysis. This group is taken into account due to the fact that not all K-Pop groups—according to the research of language editor Daniel Correa—add educational value. Likewise, we are compiling Korean and Colombian myths in order to find what brings us together and what makes us unique in terms of the cultural identity of each nation; by compiling these myths, we are able to print a readable book focusing on such theme and approach.
AKS researcher Hyejung Park has been instrumental in supporting all these developments and our communication with AKS. We arrived in Korea on 16 October 2023 for this international conference, and from that day until 21 October we learned so much about a culture that is familiar to us as a result of the program. We were welcomed by a group of researchers with absolute disciplinary rigor led by the director of the center, Nanhee Ku, who also led the project to disseminate accurate information about Korea with her excellent management and leadership.
As an entity operating under the Ministry of Education, the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) was founded to promote Korean studies by means of research, education of Korean culture, exchanges, and expansion of Korean studies. Briefly, its main goal is to promote Korean knowledge and to improve the image of Korea. There, we learned that Korea mainly focuses on investing in education and Korean culture. Consisting of several development foci such as seminar on world textbooks in order to include accurate information about Korea, analysis of foreign textbooks, training in Korea for foreign textbook experts, seminar on textbooks, visits to other countries to improve content about Korea, development of materials to help improve knowledge about Korea, assistance to private organizations in other countries, international textbook library and website, and proposals regarding the means of cooperation to develop textbooks and ancillary materials in social sciences, this program enables Korea to promote its culture and become known throughout all continents.
The Division of Understanding Korea Project for disseminating accurate information about Korea, the Center for International Affairs of the Academy of Korean Studies welcomed us and introduced us to a program with strong academic and cultural component. Professor Yeongchan Oh, PhD, OH lectured us on Korean history and cultural heritage. During his lecture, Professor Yeongchan Oh documented Korea's national treasures and population and the statistics of the Korean War from a disciplinary point of view.
I was pleasantly surprised by Emeritus Professor Hyegyeong Jeong's lecture on the Pleasure of Korean Food as the topic of ethnic cuisine and slow food was a novelty since Latin America is influenced by the fast, plentiful, and unhealthy Western food. Regarding this conference, I would like to highlight the expert's presentation on the history and culture of Korean cuisine and topics related to food in terms of the cosmos concept and to the philosophy behind the importance of cosmology based on the principle of yin-yang and the five elements of the universe, and the cosmology of the five colors and flavors contained in Korean cuisine. Furthermore, Korea is a country that—as part of its gastronomic culture—focuses on food prepared to ensure the well-being of consumers and promotes the development of food related to initiation rites and the development of seasonal foods, and is a culture where vegetarian cuisine related to the gastronomy of Buddhist temples plays an important role. This is all significant in terms of opening up new opportunities to enrich knowledge of these Korean gastronomic concepts with a philosophical, cultural, and historical sense in order to promote the consumption of healthy and slow food in Latin American countries.
Finally, the seminar, lectures, and visits to cultural and historical cities and places show that Korean politics is based on economic growth, social justice, and education based on a cultural and economic expansion policy, and that they work towards the recognition of their culture in projects existing only in Korea from the point of view of cultural expansion and recognition. Therefore, I would like to express my appreciation to the Project Division for disseminating accurate information about Korea and to the Centre for International Studies and the Academy of Korean Studies for focusing on the core issue of expanding their culture and education, for giving continuity to their programs and ensuring their continuity even with the change of governments, for supporting us and allowing these meetings, for preserving their country’s history, for Korea’s ability to recover from wars and invasions in less than 50 years and to transcend itself, and for the global impact achieved with the programs I have referred to in this article.
