Trading Spaces: School Edition

Immersion Education Once More

Remember when my school went camping in the Korean mountains for two weeks to commemorate the middle of the fall semester? Well, keeping consistent with these mid-semester trips, after the first half of our spring semester, we headed to Jeollabukdo (a province about four hours from Seoul) to work on a farm for 11 days. According to our workbook, the purpose of this trip was to “know our land and our grass, live a life in harmony with nature, and foster autonomy and community.” I love this hippy school to no end.

In addition to this, our 11 days was broken down into three sections:

1. Rural volunteering – for six days we volunteered on a local farm in Namwon near Silsangsa temple. The wife of one of our teachers went to school at the temple when she was younger, so she had some connections to the locals and helped us set up the trip. We helped out with various tasks on the farm, many of which included unskilled labor, but we also learned a few tricks of the trade from time to time.
   
2. Cooking wild plants and exploring Namwon – when we weren’t volunteering, we went on walks and explored the nearby area. On some of these walks, we learned about edible wildlife and learned how to cook with some of the local plants. As I had been watching a lot of Chef’s Table recently, I was particularly excited about this part of the trip. It seemed that all of the chefs featured in the documentary maintained strong ties to local agriculture in order to source the best ingredients and find unconventional flavors, so I took careful note during these sessions.
   
3. 518 Gwangju Uprising Education – the last two days (and a few afternoon) of the trip were spent learning about the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, when the citizens of Gwangju took up arms against the government after a local student protest turned violent. As Gwangju was close to where we were working on the farm, we studied this historical event in great detail by visiting Gwangju for a few days. Our last day in the city would be on the anniversary of the uprising, May 18^th.
   

Similar to our camping trip, the students were broken up into five groups. I was put in charge of Team Three, a group of eight girls ranging from 8-18 years old. For most of the trip, we would work and learn with our groups, but for certain tasks with higher difficulty, the younger students would be broken off into a separate team.

With a more relaxed and less “roughing it” style than the camping trip, this promised to be a great experience for students and teachers alike.

Rural Volunteering

The farm that we volunteered on was massive, so there was a large variety of different tasks that we did, though many of them ended up falling into the category of “weeding.” We weeded the areas around the Korean peppers, the garlic field, the onion field, and any other section that the farmer thought was needed. Seeing as we brought about fifty volunteers to his farm, it was unavoidable that this would fill some of our time. For these tedious exercises, the students filled the time by singing songs and trying to communicate with the English teacher, which made the time go by faster for me at least. A lot of the younger students I rarely taught during the normal school year ended up using the time to practice their English while working too! It’s definitely a different feeling interacting and speaking English with students outside of a classroom setting, and we were able to connect and relate in ways different than would otherwise be available with me at the front of the class. I think the students felt a lot more comfortable using imperfect English, and it was wonderful to hear them speak their minds without the filters that the classroom and their peers end up creating. Though on one occasion, the weeds stood about three or four feet tall, so that was an adventure in itself without the extra time fillers.

While some students weeded, we also planted a few different crops. We did sesame, spicy peppers, and I believe pumpkin, tomatoes, or potatoes (I wasn’t part of that group). We also had a group of students who went to the nearby temple to learn about permaculture, though I never really found out what that entailed. The young students made signs for the different crop fields, and we cleaned out a warehouse on one occasion. I think one group had an entire day of moving rocks unfortunately as well.

On the last day before leaving for Gwangju, we had a celebration with the farmers that involved fruit, seaweed snacks, music, and singing. Every student stood up and said a few words of thanks and what they had learned from the experience, and we celebrated a successful volunteering project.

Overall, it was nice to see a progression from the beginning of the trip until the end of how scared the students were to get dirty. While some remained terrified of dirt, a few of the others embraced it and put their hearts into the work rather than worrying about getting their clothes a little bit dirty. The experienced showed which students were willing to fully but into an experience to get the most out of it, and I think it paid off for them. While the work the farmer assigned to us volunteers wasn’t particularly difficult, it was something completely different from what the students were used to and it exposed them to a side of food they rarely think about – where their meals come from.

Cooking and Exploration

For three days, we spent part of our daylight hours foraging for edible plants and learning how to cook with them. On the first day, we watched some presentation in Korean that must have described upwards of twenty different local plants that we could eat, but I got none of it so I relied on my team as we wandered the nearby dirt roads in search of sustenance. Everything we picked up tasted vaguely of raw bean sprouts, so we kept eating seemingly random leaves. Looking back, it would have been really easy to poison me on this trip. Each team brought a basket with them on the walk and we collected as many plants as we possibly could so we could eat dinner that night. After foraging, we ended up making a wild plant bibimbap which was semi-delicious and slightly tasted like beansprouts.

The next time we cooked wild plants, we only focused on one type, called the acacia tree. However, it seems that the Korean version of this tree is different from the popular search results version on Google, so maybe don’t eat acacia flowers based on this post unless you know for certain that they are edible. ANYWAY, we gathered an enormous basket of white acacia tree flowers, which looked a lot like a bowl of popcorn but tasted again like raw beansprouts. They were probably the best wild plant we had eaten, but they did all taste fairly similar. One of the students even ate them raw out of the basket recreationally during the walk. We ended up mixing these flowers with tofu and a few other ingredients to make a dumpling filling, using Vietnamese rice paper rolls as the dumpling wrapper. All other groups tried to make dumplings, but my team stayed true to our ingredients and made ours like Vietnamese summer rolls, resulting in a sturdier and better product in the end. In my opinion, these were much better than the bibimbap from the earlier day.

The last time we cooked wild plants was on our day off from work on the farm. As a result, we had a whole day to gather and prepare our food, so we made a party out of it and had a “wild plants party.” This was a deceptive name, because in Korean, this phonetically sounds like “pool party,” but I was not disappointed. The morning was spent planning a menu, where each team planned two to three dishes to share with everyone else. The teams then split up to go grocery shopping for staples while the other students foraged for wild plants. The afternoon was spent nonstop cooking, and the end product was beautiful. I was so surprised with how great everything looked and tasted – we had wild plant kimbap, anchovy rice balls, fried rice, fruit salad, chicken rice, egg sandwiches, pasta, scrambled eggs, fruit soup, vegetable sandwiches, wraps, tteokbokki, kimchi rice balls, toast, pancakes, and salad. One of our artsy students dressed up the plates with edible flowers to make everything look absolutely amazing.

While the students cook rice and spam/sausage/tuna-based dishes during the other days of our trip, I was surprised to see the creativity and execution of the menus that they planned for the wild plant party. There are a few students who took the lead for their teams that were really creative, and one student in particular who was amazing at plating. As a bonus, I got to show some of the students knife skills to help them cut vegetables easier!

In addition to cooking with wild plants, we also spent some days exploring the surrounding area. Immediately next to the farm was Silsangsa Temple, one of the oldest temples dating back around 1,200 years. We also walked a 24-kilometer path called Jirisan Dulegil and explored a park in Namwon called Gwanghanlu, where we had a funny photo contest with our small groups.

518 Gwangju Uprising

Our education about the 518 Gwangju Uprising (also known as the May 18^th Democratic Uprising) started with a movie called May 18, depicting a citizen’s experience joining and dying for the cause. We also watched a separate documentary about the revolt before heading over to Gwangju to learn about it at the actual site of the event.

Essentially, in 1979, President Park Chung-hee was assassinated and a coup had placed a non-elected leader in office. However, this “President” was really just a figurehead, as the head of the military had the true power in ruling the nation. This man, named General Chun, aimed to control the nation’s democratic movements by declaring martial law. Troops were dispatched to various cities and universities to shut down democratic protests, which were largely repressed during the previous presidency and becoming more popular with the coup. When the troops arrived in Gwangju, students protested their presence and were met with violence. The military troops shot and beat protesters in a show of unprovoked force, which caused civilians to band together rather than roll over. In the next days, they chased the troops out of the city, only to be completely defeated when reinforcement troops arrived to handle the situation on the 27th.

In just 10 days, the government reported 144 civilian deaths, but the actual toll fell somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. The government also played the uprising off as a band of rebels trying to overthrow the government in order to reduce foreign involvement in the matter and keep the rest of Korea uninformed about the military action, but a German journalist by the name of Jurgen Hinzpeter managed to sneak in and out during the action and report on the real news. Photos, video, and firsthand interviews revealed to the world and the rest of Korea what had happened in Gwangju and the following years saw democratic progress and a properly elected President by 1987. Many people point to the May 18^th Democratic Uprising as the turning point towards democracy in South Korea.

After we finished working on the farm, we headed to Gwangju, arriving in time for the eve of the 18^th ceremony on May 17^th. The following day, on the actual 18^th, we visited the May 18^th Liberty Park and museum as well as the May 18^th National Cemetery. At the park, we watched another documentary and explored the museum, learning more about the tragedy and how the news was spread outside of Gwangju with the assistance of Jurgen Hinzpeter. We saw photos of the victims and the reality of what had happened in the very city we were visiting sunk in. We topped it off by visiting the National Cemetery, where all of the citizens who died during the uprising were buried. The cemetery was sectioned into an old and new area, with the new area housing a few hundred government-declared veterans while the old area housing countless more fatalities. I spoke with a Korean teacher who told me that it was very hard to qualify for a deceased to be moved to the new part of the cemetery, so most of the citizens who died during the uprising lay at rest in the old area.

Learning about this event during the actual anniversary in the actual city where it happened holds a much larger impact than simply learning it in a textbook in a classroom in Seoul. I commend our school for planning this trip and the curriculum around this time of year, and I think the students really understood the magnitude of what happened from this experience. One of our youngest students who is known to be a bit of a troublemaker was even brought to tears during one of the documentaries. It’s so easy to dismiss these events as part of the past when learning about them in a standard classroom, but bringing the students to Gwangju during the memorial ceremonies is a memory many will surely keep for a lifetime.

Reflections

Although this trip felt less intense and physically taxing than the two-week camping trip we took last semester, it was still an extremely valuable part of our students’ education experience. I tried so hard to keep this essay brief but failed miserably because there was so much I wanted to say.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve signed on for another year in Korea with this school, and trips like this played a major part in my decision to stay. And although the school has cut back on salaries with difficult financial times, I’m still learning and experiencing new things on a constant basis. So I’ve decided to take the pay cut and simply budget a little better in order to work with these creative teachers and wonderfully unique students a little bit longer.

The trip reminded me a bit of a trip I took in high school with my AP English Class small group when we were reading Walden. Initially, I hated reading and discussing the book in the classroom, but when we independently decided to take a weekend and drive all the way to Walden Pond to see and experience it ourselves, the experience supplemented the lesson so much that I still hold positive memories of the book.

I hope that trips like this with lessons as deep and detailed as the ones we’ve been teaching will have the same effect on these students.