UNESCO experience in Korea

Launching a new international understanding education program for Korean schoolchildren that had no precedence, that the new Education Minister was taking personal interest in, and that the Ministry of Education was sponsoring but only with less than $10,000 for the initial year – all this sounded to me as interesting challenge worth stepping up to. I got recruited by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO to take charge of the program.

The original concept agreed between UNESCO and the Ministry of Education was to ask foreign staff of diplomatic missions and cultural centers based in Seoul to volunteer to visit schools and talk to students about their country’s culture. While the response was mostly favorable, it soon turned out that these people were either too busy to participate or too formal to make interesting classes for schoolchildren.

With such a small budget, short preparation time, and no other staff than myself, nobody might have blamed if the first school term had ended in a mere gesture of trying to start. However, having experienced treatment as “half foreigner” in my own country of citizenship just like in similarly homogeneous Japanese society, I knew the value of the program for Korean society and was committed to make it a success. I managed to convince the Ministry that we should shift the target of our volunteer recruitment to overseas college students and spouses of expatriate businesspeople. At the same time, I added it as a main goal of the program to provide foreign volunteers with opportunities to learn about and participate in Korean society, in order to change the reliance on one-way giving to a more sustainable process of mutual benefit.

Class contents had to be made more interactive and interesting for students. With many colleagues’ help, I produced a handbook with ideas and examples and organized training for both foreign volunteers and Korean interpreters. Happy school teachers and volunteers spread words of mouth and the program was featured by many national media, which significantly helped broaden our volunteer base.

Satisfied with the instant success, the Ministry committed ten times the budget for the second year, and UNESCO assigned two staff under me. Foreseeing a bottle-neck in the process of matching school teachers’ and volunteers’ needs, which was being done manually by telephone and e-mail, I brought in a contractor to develop an internet-based system that could automate a large part of the process. Furthermore, I started preparing for taking the program outside of Seoul where this program would have more value. One experiment organized a caravan of volunteers that toured around rural schools. I also started contacting regional universities that had overseas students and was interested in serving as regional coordinator for the program.

I left Korea after completing the second year, but the Cross-Cultural Awareness Program is still running with basically the same formula and now considered as one of UNESCO’s flagship activities in Korea. This successful experience gave me self-confidence, which has stayed with me ever since.