If you went through the US education system, this course is probably the first close look you had at Korean history. What if we change that? What if we create as a class a basic set of resources for secondary education teachers, who want to teach a few classes on Korean history?
My view of the final project is that at the end of the semester we have a series of materials freely available online for teachers and students of upper middle and high school who want to learn more about Korean history; and maybe we’ll even attract a curious college student or two!
This set of resources can take many different forms: podcasts or short video documentaries, lists of links of useful open access material, annotated bibliographies, lesson plans, summaries of events and lists for further reading are just a few options available.
We will spend some time in class discussing and exploring different formats. Questions to bear in mind:
- What would you as a high school student have liked to use as a historical resource?
- What types of course materials or contents would make you want to read or hear more about Korean history?
- What makes for good history course materials, from a historian’s point of view?
- What would a teacher like to work with in the class?
- What is available free, or in the library?
- What happens if we recommend materials that are not free, but require an access fee (database, subscription service) or need to be bought through a library? (Who will miss out?)
- If we cannot cover everything, what are the most important stories to cover from more than 2000 years of history on the Korean peninsula?
- How can/should we study a country’s history if we don’t speak or read its language?
There is only one major constraint: whatever we put out there needs to be connected to primary sources: as historians, we need to place primary sources at the heart of of this project. This means looking at texts and objects created by the people of a certain place and time, which inform us about how those people thought about the world around them and their place in it. In particular for the history of Korea it is important we listen for the voice of the people of the peninsula, and read carefully, and “against the grain” those who claim to speak on Korea’s behalf.
Because texts about and from Korea were written in (literary) Chinese, Korean and Japanese, we are limited for our project to what is available in translation. Archaeological excavations provide useful materials, too, but need context and interpretation, and many reports are not published, or not in English. This will necessarily create limits on our project.
