Interdisciplinary Service Learning

I teach at an international school in Seoul, South Korea - about 60 km or so from the border for North Korea. In the 11 years I have lived here, North Korea has become "an issue" more times that I'm comfortable with, but FAR fewer than most of my American and Canadian friends would believe. International news coverage of what happens in North Korea is biased and inflammatory. It really is.  Sometimes I'll get a panicked email from someone back at home asking if we are OK and I will literally have no idea what they are talking about.  For the most part, day to day life in Seoul is unaffected by the political strife in North Korea. However, the situation is still relevant. It's a world issue. A human rights issue. And it's close to us.

Last year we had a speaker from Liberty in North Korea come to talk with our Middle School students about his organization.  He brought with him a North Korean friend, Jessie, who had escaped from North Korea several years ago and has been acclimating to life in South Korea ever since.  This is the service that LINK provides ... they help defectors start over. It's a harrowing journey, and we are only privy to a small part of it, but enough to know that these people need our support.  Here is Jessie's incredible story:




As my awesome team started to think about how we could get our students involved in LINK, we knew we needed a way to cultivate empathy in our students.  Even though the situation in North Korea is "local" enough for us, it's still sensationalized in the news. Our students already have too much misinformation about what's happening over there and they need real information to put it all into an appropriate and meaningful context.  "In the Shadow of the Sun" is a novel written by Anne Sibley O'Brien who actually attended Seoul Foreign School as a student. The book is a political escape thriller set in North Korea. We are hoping to read the book with our students to lay a foundation for inquiry with our students. We hope that reading it will open their minds to asking questions and finding answers.

Right now, our plan is to combine some literary analysis of this story with using rates, ratios and percentages to do some comparing of resources in North Korea with those same resources around the world including and especially here in South Korea. By building understanding and empathy for North Koreans, we are hoping to initiate some service learning opportunities related to LINK.  Right now, it looks like the primary means of supporting this organization is through funding however, we are hoping that the amazing folks at LINK will return to our school and help our students find ways to serve this community in a more direct manner.  I'm not sure what that will look like, but I'm excited to see how this interdisciplinary unit develops, especially related to service learning.