Dir SCCCE shared on importance of CCE in Korea major Ed Fair

The Korea Glocal Education Fair 2024 hosted by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the JeollaNamdo Office of Education was held in Yeosu from 29 May to 2 June 2024. Professor Tan Oon Seng (Dean of Special Projects and Centre Director of the Singapore Centre for Character and Citizenship Education) was invited by Mr Lee Ju-Ho the Minister of Education of Korea to be a keynote speaker. Other keynoters included Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard University, Futurist Thomas Frey, Professor Paul Kim of Stanford University, and Professor Dennis Hong of UCLA.

Professor Tan gave the keynote on “Innovation in Teacher Education and Professional Development: Technological Creativity, Character Education and Social Emotional Competencies. Prof Tan advocated that in this complex world, teacher education and professional development must respond to the changing needs of education. His keynote began, firstly, with a helicopter view of the important trends that affect education such as the pervasiveness of social media, generative artificial intelligence, increasing divisive diversity, the changing profile of learners and new opportunities for innovation. Secondly, he discussed the need to fundamentally question the many assumptions under which we have been operating about our learners, how we prepare them for life and work, and how the whole ecology is helping or hindering their positive development. History shows that development and opportunities favor the well-prepared and those with the humility to learn. Advances in technology, the science of learning, neuroscience and our understanding of human development have made it most timely for educators to re-imagine pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. With reference to teacher education and professional learning Prof Tan emphasized three important clusters needed to equip teachers to prepare their students to confront the future confidently and effectively. There is an urgent need for technological creativity. Knowledge is the lifeblood of any society and the future is digital. As such, teachers need to ride on the AI wave including generative AI and re-design their roles. Secondly, character education is the key to flourishing individuals and society of the future. Teachers need to be empowered in their mindsets as well as value-sets. He asked questions such as: What are teachers’ most important values? Why do your values matter? How might your values influence your teaching of the subject matter and the way you facilitate student agency? What unique attributes do you bring into your profession? What aspects of the content you teach inspire a sense of wonder? What are the unanswered questions in your field of teaching or practice? Prof Tan concluded that the aims of education need to be refreshed to emphasize character and virtues in terms of intellectual, citizenship and moral perspectives. He pointed out that concomitant advancements in the science of cognition and emotions have unraveled key social emotional competencies and values that are critical to ensure that teachers engage in productive work with new roles as designers of the learning environment, catalysts and facilitators of learning, creators of knowledge and arbitrators of accomplishments that strengthen student agency and learning partnerships with society and industry.

The “Glocal Future Education Conference” was attended by some 200,000 delegates from Korea and internationally. Korean innovations in future classrooms and inventions that facilitate new personalized learning in future learning environments were shown.