The education for international understanding(EIU) is expected to be
implemented more actively in foreign schools where students and teachers
are multi-ethnic and multicultural. In order to examine the educational
practices regarding EIU in the foreign schools in Korea, their curricula and
educational objectives were analysed based on the information gathered from
their school homepages, the on-line site of Ministry of Education(MOE) and
the research reports on the foreign schools in Korea. A survey was also
conducted to obtain more specific information on EIU in their schools. A
questionnaire was sent to the principals of 28 foreign schools and 13 of
them answered to the questionnaire, representing 46% of response rate. The
results of the analysis revealed that the educational quality of the foreign
schools has been increased as most foreign schools obtained international
accreditation in recent years. They emphasize EIU philosophy in their
curriculum goals, but, in practice, EIU is mostly implemented in social
studies subjects or extra-curricular or after-school activities rather than dealt
with across the school curriculum. Among six major themes in EIU,
cultivating cross-cultural understanding is ranked as the most important
theme by the principals participated in the survey, while the themes like respecting for social justice, peace and human rights, or understanding
globalization and global interdependence were relatively less emphasized.
Based on the literature review and the analysis of the survey questionnaires,
the following recommendations are made for the future direction of EIU in
the foreign schools: First, the foreign schools in Korea need to integrate
more EIU elements into their curricula as an 'international school' though
they are forced to prepare their students to enter universities; Second, all of
EIU themes are needed to be infused in balance in school curricula, not
emphasizing only one or two themes; Third, IB curriculum, which is closely
related to EIU, needs to be adopted at more foreign schools in Korea;
Finally Korean programs, which are now more focused on language
instruction, need to include more interactive learning such as direct
cross-cultural interaction between students at foreign schools and students at
local Korean schools.