South Korea is working with the United Nations to foster a sense of global citizenship here and abroad through a teacher exchange program that brings foreign teachers here and gives Korean teachers a chance to visit classrooms in dozens of countries around the world.

Some 57 teachers from Singapore, Russia, the United States, Australia and Britain completed a three-week program last Tuesday with a wrap-up session and closing ceremony at the offices of the U.N.-affiliated Asia Pacific Center of Education for International Understanding.

The participants taught in dozens of classrooms around the country, trading teaching tips with Korean colleagues, making new friends and learning a thing or two about Korean culture.

The program was organized by the APCEIU to foster a sense of global citizenship and international understanding among teachers, who can then impart those lessons to their students.

The organizers were well aware of the lofty aspirations of the program, but insisted the program is anything but utopian.

“Korea is changing. It is becoming multicultural very rapidly. Moreover, Korea is deeply integrated in the global economy. We are living in the 21st century and, to be competitive in the future, we should foster in our children this sense of global citizenship,” said Lee Yang-sook, chief of the APCEIU’s international teacher exchange team.

The APCEIU, which is under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, organizes a slew of such teacher exchange and training programs. They partnered with the Ministry of Education to implement this exchange program, titled “Teaching Abroad for Global Competency.”

The APCEIU’s director, Chung U-tak, explained that the program is in line with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Education First Initiative, a U.N. initiative with “utopian” goals of its own: Ensuring primary education for children everywhere around the world.

Ban launched the initiative in September 2012 to help U.N. members meet the Millennium Development Goals, such as achieving lower child and maternal mortality, better health care, higher income and environmentally safer societies.

“The birthplace of this program is in fact East Timor,” Chung said. “The Education First Initiative is a very interesting program. It is designed to foster, among other things, a sense of global citizenship. The APCEIU as a global hub for fostering the value of global citizenship is focused on implementing this program and ones like it,” Chung said.

Chung said that Ban went to East Timor in August 2012 before the initiative’s official launch date to visit a primary school there with UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, because of East Timor’s history of civil war. For the past decade the country has been struggling with development and working to overcome grinding poverty.

By Philip Iglauer (ephilip2014@heraldcorp.com)