KF뉴스레터-[Bridging the World] Teachers Share Diversity of Experiences via APTE

[Bridging the World] Teachers Share Diversity of Experiences via APTE

Features > Teachers Share Diversity of Experiences via APTE

Teachers Share Diversity of Experiences via APTE

The Korean Ministry of Education’s Asia-Pacific Teacher Exchange for Global Education (APTE) was launched in 2012 to promote understanding of multiculturalism in Korea amid the steady increase of students from multicultural families. The program also seeks to enhance the educational potential of teachers to guide students from a range of backgrounds.

Since Korea held its first teacher exchanges with Mongolia and the Philippines in the program’s first year, the APTE program has sent Korean teachers to Asian-Pacific countries and invited teachers to Korea from partner countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, and Thailand. With the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 restricting human contact, the APTE program went online with teachers from partner countries jointly devising teaching plans and conducting videoconference classes with students in other countries.

Over the past ten years, the program enabled 731 Korean and 847 foreign teachers to participate in off- and online exchanges. The teachers shared their thoughts on global problems and raised students’ understanding of other cultures through global citizenship education. The APTE program offers teachers the experience of being “different” in the country of their deployment. Such a direct experience helps teachers understand and teach different students in their classrooms. In this respect, the APTE program is a pioneering model of international exchange in elementary and secondary education.