'24-25 Wrap-Up

CADA's website has finally launched!

Moving forward, this website will be used for students and organizations who are interested in joining or collaborating with CADA. We will also use this blog to share our major milestones and events.

The first blog post is a wrap-up of the initiatives we have done during the past academic year (2024-25).

From a solo project to a school club

This year, I had the opportunity to expand my individual service work into an official school club. I made this choice after I realized that it was crucial for me to receive other people's opinion and inputs to make this project truly successful; by giving this initiative a real name (CADA) and launching a club, I was able to find like-minded people at our school who also aim to foster cultural diversity in our community.

Going beyond just hosting cultural education workshops

As I started our club at school, I hoped that our fellow students would also get a chance to better understand the importance of cultural diversity within Korean society. To that end, CADA hosted a school-wide discussion event under the topic of 'Fostering Inclusion in South Korean Society'. Despite our club being very new in our campus, more than twenty students voluntarily participated in this open conversation. The participants frankly discussed topics such as cultural diversity, racism, and prejudice against foreigners rooted in our society, exploring ways we could create a more welcoming environment for non-Koreans and immigrants.

Another activity we hosted was a fundraising event. In March, our club sought to support the Jeju Migrant Center by running a quiz game on “Migrants in Korean Society,” as well as selling baked goods. The event raised about 120,000 won, and although the amount wasn’t enormous, it was very rewarding to see students use this opportunity to deepen their understanding of migrants in our country.

Advancing Multicultural Education Workshops

Over the past year, CADA has hosted workshops at various child care centers. Thanks to the dedication of our club members, we have provided multicultural education to more than 75 children so far.

As CADA hosted these various workshops, I began to identify a few areas for improvement. The first was the need for hosting regular, consistent workshop sessions. Each time we held a workshop, I felt a great sense of fulfillment seeing how the children learned more about cultures from around the world. Yet I wondered what we teach them would actually stay with them even after the lessons. The truth was that, without these workshops being consistent, the impact of our workshops will fade over time.

The second issue was that while our workshops covered a wide range of topics, they sometimes lacked depth. Through this project, I’ve learned that “culture” itself is truly complex. When we talk about a culture in broad strokes, we may end up unintentionally excluding its various subcultures. Therefore, as we teach children about various culture in each cultural spheres and regions, I hope we can avoid oversimplifying or inadvertently leaving out certain cultures.

Taking these points into consideration, I decided to develop CADA’s multicultural education into a structured, year-long curriculum. Hence the launch of our Cultural Education Curriculum (CEC): a series of seven workshops covering seven different cultural regions. This was developed to help our partner child care centers and welfare facilities implement ongoing multicultural education. Moving forward, we plan to expand this project in cooperation with a variety of local organizations and, ultimately, to spread our curriculum to other regions across Korea.

CADA will continue to strive to achieve diversity in our community. Wish us the best of luck in our future endeavors!