2023 sejong korea trip

With time and practice, these storytelling skills eventually transfer to our everyday interactions in the classroom as my students learn to recall moments of achievement or conflict, to label their feelings, and to connect with others through verbal expression. Eventually I include oral storytelling more extensively in a unit of study about travel and transportation and each student records a story on video about a vacation or trip they took with loved ones. By the time we record their stories, their vocabulary and comprehension has increased to include more details, more sequential thoughts, and a more defined beginning and end.

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As these video stories are shared with family and friends, there is a consistent outpouring of appreciation. Connections are made between students with similar experiences and parents begin hearing their children’s voices in a new light. What a child recalls about a recent vacation often differs from the parent’s idea of what the highlights should have been. This process allows parents to see what children are valuing at that age. Ice cream with the entire family often trumps the location or purpose of the trip itself as children tend to value the relational moments more than anything else. Although there are some predictable patterns that emerge, listening to a child’s perspective is something I continue to learn from each year.

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During a recent educational trip to South Korea, the value and importance of storytelling was further brought to light for me. Everywhere we traveled, we were presented with stories of how South Korea worked through difficulty and formed its identity and while the history of the nation was inspirational, there were two specific instances of storytelling that I found to be especially impactful.

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The first was at the Korean War Museum where there was a display of photographs from the beginning stages of the current Korean conflict. Part of the exhibit included a video screen where veterans shared stories of their experiences during the initial years of the war. In my preparation for this trip, I read books with multiple perspectives on the first years of the Korean war. I knew entering into the exhibit that history, especially history of war, can be multifaceted and complex

and that our understanding of such events can and should evolve with the introduction of perspectives, but as I listened to the stories being shared by Korean veterans, in their own words, with their own voices, I found that my concern over right and wrong became secondary to my connection with them as people. The desperation that comes with starvation, the determination to protect home, family, and ways of life are moments and feelings that transcend what is right and wrong on a political level. Instead of pointing me in a moral direction, these stories challenged me to consider what is truly valuable in my own world and how my own actions can influence the situations I find myself in.

The second example of the value of storytelling occurred a few days later at the 5.18 Memorial Park in Gwangju. Part of what was striking about the information presented was not just how desperately the citizens of Gwangju fought for their rights, but how important it was for their stories to be told, preserved, and proven true. At the end of a particularly moving media presentation we were presented with the quote “forgotten history will be repeated” and I felt myself clinging to that sentiment as we laid tribute at the memorial and walked amongst the graves of the citizens who died during the massacre.

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Our guide explained that even now there are those who believe the Gwangju Massacre was a North Korean propaganda or conspiracy campaign. Still others, despite the physical evidence, still believe that the civilians fired first, making the government's heavy military response some type of twisted self-defense. The citizens of Gwangju have worked extensively to preserve the proof of the events of the massacre, but what left the deepest impression was not the government’s involvement or the history presented, but the stories of what people experienced during that time. There was a pregnant woman who could not run fast enough to evade the gunfire and died futilely attempting to protect her unborn baby. There was a deaf college student who was the first to die, not because he was protesting, but because he did not hear the warnings yelled in his direction. There was a first grader, whose grave lies amongst the rest, although his body has yet to be found…

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I honestly do not know what it is like to believe in something so deeply that the risk of losing life, friends, and family is somehow worth the resistance, but I do know the desperation I feel as a mother to protect my children. I can understand a mother’s instinct to protect her baby with the last of her strength. I can relate to the need to continue searching for a child’s body forty years later in order to honor his life, but also possibly with the smallest shred of hope that he may just be lost, and not dead. And I have experienced, within my own family, the ways that disabilities can detrimentally shape a moment simply because grace is not given for extra help and service to a differently abled person. These are stories I connect with. I relate to them deeply not because I can identify which parties were right or wrong, but because these stories and moments are innately human, and so am I.

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And so I enter a new school year with a greater sense of responsibility for the task of teaching children to tell their stories. There may come a time when this generation of children use artificial intelligence to organize their ideas and communicate for them, but despite these technological advancements, I hope we, as educators, can continue to prioritize the skills that children need to share their experiences with their own voices and in their own words. Their perspectives may not always be right or unbiased, but their perspectives still hold value because they are human, and their stories will connect them to a greater humanity in a way that nothing else will.

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Traveling to South Korea was an invaluable time of listening for me. Hearing what stories are told, retold, and preserved over time in the South Korea community left me inspired to listen more intently to those around me and to hone my own skills of communication. What it means to be a student of history, a writer, and an educator has taken on new meaning for me as I examine which life experiences connect me to others, and how I can strengthen those connections, not just for myself, but for my students and my community at large. Moving forward I will be looking to encourage and preserve the art of storytelling among young children and to elevate their voices and experience in an ever-changing world.