Seoul education chief vows 'inclusive' classrooms

Cho Hee-yeon, superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, pledged to put his utmost efforts into creating inclusive classrooms for minorities and students of multicultural backgrounds, while emphasizing the successful implementation of digital textbooks.

Speaking at a press conference at the Education Office on Tuesday to mark the 10th anniversary of his inauguration, Cho highlighted his goal of bringing diversity and inclusiveness to schools across Seoul, addressing the importance of ensuring "differences" among students don't turn into "discrimination."

"To prevent differences from becoming discrimination, I vow to put my full effort into providing special support for minority students. We will establish a multilingual support network for Korean language education for students of multicultural backgrounds to remove any language barriers, and continue to find and develop areas where multicultural students' special talents can shine by expanding our career mentoring program," Cho said.

Schools in Seoul have seen a dramatic increase in the number of students of such mixed heritage. As of last year, there were 13,049 such students out of 380,439 elementary school students in Seoul, accounting for 3.43 percent of the total elementary school population, according to the Seoul Education Office.

Students of multicultural backgrounds are defined by law as schoolchildren who have one parent who is a foreign national or naturalized Korean and one parent of Korean nationality.

While the total number of students in Seoul has decreased by 32 percent since 2012 when statistics on students of multicultural backgrounds first began to be tallied, the number of such mixed heritage students has increased by 272 percent, raising the need for programs to support them.

Cho announced a number of major accomplishments in supporting students of multicultural backgrounds, such as operating a back-to-school support program since March to preemptively respond to problems faced by those who have communication difficulties. The back-to-school support program for students of multicultural backgrounds is designed to ensure educational opportunities for such children through integrated case management support linked to schools, education departments and local agencies.

As communication issues can lead to academic difficulties, psychological and emotional problems as well as classroom conflict, active support is needed, he added.

To eradicate disparities and inequality in the classroom, Cho said the Seoul Education Office has promoted a policy providing different forms of support so that differences in gender, race, nationality, ability/disability, economic status and pace of learning do not hinder students' academic abilities and educational opportunities.

"We expanded educational welfare to ensure that all students have equal educational opportunities. Free school meals, which were expanded to elementary and middle schools in 2014, were extended to kindergartens in 2022," Cho noted.

Responding to parent concerns about the immediate and long-term effects of exposing students to electronic devices with the implementation of digital textbooks, Cho said there is "always light and darkness in new technology" and that he would "focus on actively pursuing the positive aspects of digital textbooks while complementing the deficiencies or negative side effects of artificial intelligence in education."

South Korea has pledged that digital textbooks will go into use in schools by 2025, with tailor-made technologies for each subject, helping students and teachers learn and teach efficiently. Such technologies include: a computer-based learning system that uses artificial intelligence to provide humanlike lessons, the metaverse and extended reality, created by the interactions between computer-generated graphics and wearables.

Emphasizing that such a project is the first globally, Cho said that the problem of young children lacking literacy ability due to early encounters with gadgets will be improved through other sectors such as by encouraging them to read physical books.

Looking back at his 10 years as the longest-serving superintendent of Seoul's education system, Cho expressed his gratitude to those in the education circle for working together for a better future for children, vowing to make school grounds equal and fair environments for all students.