Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC, was quoted in South China Morning Post. “These young people spend the first 25 to 30 years of their life studying for exams, and when they finally move out of their shell into the real world and realise life is not a multiple choice test, and there isn’t always a clear-cut answer to every problem, that’s already a mid-life crisis for them in a way,” he said. “It is both physically draining and mentally not healthy to spend one’s young adulthood studying for exams after exams.”
Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America — Social Science panel. From left to right: UC Berkeley's Laura Nelson, University of Michigan's Jordan Siegel, Stanford's Yong Suk Lee, USC's David Kang, Harvard's Paul Chang.
How can Korean studies faculty cultivate supportive and critical scholarly communities with graduate students? What can be done to overcome the severe constraints on Korean language training in North America? Why is there a dearth of Korea scholarship in academic literature? And how should Korean studies librarians prepare for the future in the light of new technologies and young researchers’ increasing interest in digital scholarship?
These were some of the questions examined at a two-day conference, “Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America,” convened by the Korea Program of Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) on November 1-2. Co-sponsored by the Seoul-based Foundation Academia Platonica, the conference, the first of its kind, gathered distinguished Korean studies scholars from twelve North American institutions to consider the state of the field, assess its challenges, and carry forward a vision for its future direction and potential. Its six unique panels focused not only on the major disciplines of Korean studies—history, literature, and the social sciences—but also on language education, library collections and services, and Korean Wave.
“The presentations and discussions by our fellow experts reflected the breadth and depth of Korean studies in North America,” says APARC Director and the Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin. “Our program was established at Stanford in 2001 and has since become a leader in Korean studies in North America, so it is a special privilege for us to bring together colleagues from eminent institutions around the continent to further advance Korean studies education and research in the academic and policy worlds, and to build upon our track record of action and achievements.”
“The field of Korean studies, however,” notes Shin, “has significantly changed over the past seventeen years and it isn’t without its challenges. This is our opportunity to consider frankly where we go next and how we could explore the path ahead together.”
Conference participants indeed engaged in deep conversations and shared ideas and dilemmas regarding teaching in the different disciplines of Korean studies in North America. Harvard sociologist Paul Chang listed three types of challenges facing the field: publication, academic, and professional challenges. David C. Kang, professor of international relations and director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California, emphasized the publication challenge: why is it, asked Kang, that top academic journals in the discipline of political science and international relations publish so much more scholarship about Europe than they do about Korea and Asia at large, even while the rise of Asian nations is surely one of the most consequential issues of the twenty-first century? The onus, Kang argued, comes back to East Asia scholars “to produce better and more compelling scholarship, and to better train graduate students.”
University of British Columbia's Ross King and conference participants.
Yet complex issues surround the question of how to broaden graduate coursework—and whether to do so. Korean language and linguistics expert Ross King, head of the department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, was one of several panelists who considered the obstacles to graduate training, among different aspects of academic challenges facing the field of Korean studies. King probed into how Sinocentrism and what he called the “Mandarin conceit”—that is, the notion that training in Literary Sinitic should be predicated on a near-native proficiency in modern Mandarin Chinese—are emerging as a major stumbling block to the study of premodern Korean literary culture. He also pointed to the constraints on language training in both Korean and hanmun in North America, which, he claimed, is why we can probably anticipate continued decrease in the number of ethnically non-Korean (non-Korea-educated) graduate students undertaking graduate study in Korean literature.
University of Washington's Hyokyoung Yi (left) and Stanford's Joshua Capitanio at a panel on library collections and service.
Sung-Ock Sohn, who coordinates the Korean language program in the department of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California – Los Angeles, further shed light on King’s prediction. She explained that while enrollments in Korean language classes have shown a sharp increase in American higher education institutions in the past decade, particularly at the introductory level and among ethnically non-Korean students, there is a high attrition rate of students from an introductory to advanced Korean classes nationwide.
How should the field move forward?
Participants proposed a host of ideas to that end. These included helping graduate students collaborate with colleagues in Korea; dedicating funding for junior faculty to spend periods of time before tenure conducting research and honing language skills in Korea at appropriate institutions, and for mid-career scholars to spend a year in Korea; emphasizing the application of social science theories and methods to premodern and modern East Asia; motivating scholars to apply a comparative lens to the study of the historical and contemporary experience of East Asia; and integrating linguistic and cultural diversity in Korean language classes by, for example, incorporating service learning in authentic contexts and extending the content spectrum to include topics such as Korean popular culture.
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K-pop star Siwon Choi (left) highlights closing panel on Korean Wave.
Korean Wave was the focus of the conference’s widely attended closing panel that featured K-pop star Siwon Choi, a member of Korean boy band Super Junior, and multi-platinum music producer Dominique Rodriguez, managing director of SM Entertainment USA. They spoke about the global reach of Korean pop music and some of the ways in which Korean popular culture could stimulate interest in Korean studies. Dafna Zur, assistant professor in Stanford’s department of East Asian languages and cultures, who chaired the panel, challenged her students to consider “what it means not just to monetize culture but to design culture with specific markets and audience in mind.” The Stanford Daily published a detailed article on the panel.
“We are grateful to Foundation Academia Platonica for its generous support of Stanford’s Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC and for making this conference possible through our shared vision for the future of Korean studies in North America,” said Gi-Wook Shin. “Our thanks also go to our many other friends and partners, including the Korea Foundation that has helped achieve great results through its commitment to promoting understanding of Korea in academia and beyond and its support of the overseas Korean Studies Program since its establishment in 1991.”
South Korean TV company SBS NBC filmed the conference that will be featured in an upcoming documentary about Korean studies in the United States.
Read the conference report or listen to the audio recordings of the sessions, below.
"I do think that there is a certain digital language that will be beneficial to young people, students, in the very near future," says Yong Suk Lee, deputy director of the Korea Program, in a recent interview with head of Friedrick Nauman Foundation Global Innovation Hub.
Yusuke Matsuda is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2018-19. As a graduate of Nihon University, Matsuda began his career as a physical education teacher at a private junior and senior high school in Tokyo. There, he devised a special curriculum, "Sports English", teaching his Japanese students completely in English. As an adviser to extracurricular club activities, he was able to bring the once minor track team to advance to national level track meets. After moving on to the board of education in the adjacent prefecture of Chiba and serving as an analyst of educational policies, he completed his masters in educational leadership at Harvard University. Upon his return to Japan, he worked as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers before establishing several non-profit organizations including Learning for All and Teach for Japan. In 2017, he resigned his CEO position at Teach for Japan and pursued his second masters program at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition to joining Shorenstein APARC, he is also a Country Manager at Crimson Education Japan.
Matsuda is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Community and is also a Research Associate Professor at Kyoto University. He earned his BA degree from Nihon University in the Department of Humanities and holds a Masters degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in Japan (Nikkei Business) and has published his book "Google, Disney yorimo hatarakitai kyositsu (a classroom you want to work more than Google and Disney)" in 2014 from Diamond.
The Korea Program invites junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students to apply for travel awards to attend an upcoming two-day conference organized by the Korea Program at Stanford' Asia-Pacific Research Center. The workshop titled "Future Visions: Challanges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America" will be held on November 1st and 2nd, 2018 at Stanford University.
The awards will cover accepted applicants' lodging, domestic airfares, and/or ground transportation. To apply for the travel awards, please submit your CV and 2-page statement as a single file by July 15here.
About the conference:
“Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America,” is designed to bring together leading scholars in the fields of language education, literature, history, social sciences, and library studies. Each panel will consist of three-four scholars who will be tasked with presenting a report on the state of the field. The purpose of the panels is to generate discussion around some of the following questions:
What are the research trends in each field?
What kinds of directions can we expect in the near future?
What are some of the disciplinary or other challenges in each field?
How does each field interact with related fields?
What are some of the limitations and possibilities around graduate student training?
How can faculty with graduate students cultivate supportive and critical scholarly communities?
How are junior faculty encouraged, and what institutional structures may offer better support?
Accepted applicants are expected to actively participate in discussion sessions and to engage in networking with other scholars during the 2-day conference.
In the 1990s, rural youth from poor counties in China had limited access to college. After mass college expansion started in 1998, however, it was unclear whether rural youth from poor counties would gain greater access. The aim of this paper is to examine the gap in college and elite college access between rural youth from poor counties and other students after expansion. We estimate the gaps in access by using data on all students who took the college entrance exam in 2003. Our results show that gaps in access remained high even after expansion. Rural youth from poor counties were seven and 11 times less likely to access any college and elite Project 211 colleges than urban youth, respectively. Much larger gaps existed for disadvantaged subgroups (female or ethnic minority) of rural youth from poor counties. We also find that the gaps in college access were mainly driven by rural–urban differences rather than differences between poor and non-poor counties within rural or urban areas.
This study describes the current teacher training system in China, including the prevalence of teacher training, the types of training, training content and the ways that training is delivered. The paper presents subjective evaluations of training for principals and teachers using four diverse datasets. The results show that the National Teacher Training Project (NTTP) deviates from offi cial policy objectives in several respects. The subjects of training programs and training content are not fully compliant with policy objectives. In addition, training opportunities are offered to a smaller proportion of rural teachers than urban teachers. It is found that the proportion of teachers and principals satisfied with the NTTP is lower than that for other types of training. Therefore, measures should be taken to increase training opportunities for rural teachers and to ensure the quality of training for all teachers.his study describes the current teacher training system in China, including the
prevalence of teacher training, the types of training, training content and the ways that
training is delivered. The paper presents subjective evaluations of training for principals
and teachers using four diverse datasets. The results show that the National Teacher
Training Project (NTTP) deviates from official policy objectives in several respects. The
subjects of training programs and training content are not fully compliant with policy
objectives. In addition, training opportunities are offered to a smaller proportion of rural
teachers than urban teachers. It is found that the proportion of teachers and principals
satisfied with the NTTP is lower than that for other types of training. Therefore,
measures should be taken to increase training opportunities for rural teachers and to
The development community has increased its focus on higher education over the past two decades, recognizing that education can contribute to building up a country’s capacity for participation in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy and accelerate economic growth. The value added by higher education to economies—job creation, innovation, enhanced entrepreneurship, and research, a core higher education activity—has been highlighted by an important body of literature.
Yet experts remain concerned that investing in higher education in less-developed countries may lead to a “brain drain”--highly educated students and professionals permanently leaving their home countries. In the 2016 Kauffman report on international science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students in the United States, for instance, 48 percent among a randomly sampled survey of 2,322 foreign doctoral students in the United States wished to stay there after graduation, with only 12 percent wanting to leave and 40.5 percent being undecided. In fact, high percentages of foreign students in the United States with doctorates in science and engineering continue to stay in the United States, creating a brain drain problem for the sending countries.
Because students tend to move from developing to developed countries to study, brain drain is more problematic for developing countries. In addition, given accelerated talent flows around the world and the increasing integration of less-developed countries into global value chains, the negative impact of brain drain could be further amplified. As demonstrated by the studies reviewed in this paper, the migration of high-skilled professionals from developing countries may indeed create brain drain for them, but at the same time can significantly enhance the social and economic development of their home countries, regardless of whether or not they decide to return home, thus complicating what used to be seen as a straightforward case of brain drain.
From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation and Linkage examines how brain drain can contribute to development for the sending countries through brain circulation and linkage. It provides an overview of the conceptual framework to map out high-skilled labor flows, identifies empirical cases and policies in Asia that demonstrate high-skilled migrant professionals actually make significant contributions to their home countries (beyond monetary remittances), summarizes key social and economic enabling factors that are important in attracting and motivating migrant high-skilled professionals to return or engage with their home countries, and concludes with policy implications and suggestions for further research based on these findings.
This study aims to investigate the developmental status of rural Chinese children, the extent of interactive parenting they receive, and the relation between the two. A sample of 448 six to eighteen-month-old children and their caregivers were randomly selected from two rural counties in Hebei and Yunnan provinces. According the third edition of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, 48.7% of sample children exhibited cognitive delays, 40.6% language delays, and 35% social-emotional delays. According to responses from caregivers, parenting in rural China is largely passive, lacking in interactive practices like storytelling, singing, and playing. Children-with-siblings, left-behind children, and children with less-educated mothers were even less likely to receive interactive practices. Children of caregivers who did engage in best parenting practices showed better cognitive, language, and socialemotional development; however, the public health system provides no platform for learning about optimal parenting.
