Introducing Korea Through Art & Folktales | One-day Conferences

Details: Category: One-day Conferences

June 4, 2009

The 34 K-12 educators from the greater New York area who attended The Korea Society's midsummer teachers' conference were also attending a book launch for Introducing Korea Through Art & Folktales: Lessons for Grades K-6, a book of lesson plans written by Cathy Spagnoli and Anne Drillick and recently published by The Korea Society. As the conference attendees were the first educators to get a look at the new book, the day's schedule was designed to introduce its content and show them how it could bring Korean art and folktales alive for their students.

Jin Young Choi, professor of American literature (emeritus) at Jungang University and the University of North Carolina, began the program with folktales. Professor Choi spoke to the educators about the four recurring animal characters in Korean folktales—the dragon, tiger, turtle and phoenix—as well as how common folktale plots reflect the high value that Koreans place on filial piety. She also noted that Korean folktales are almost entirely unique among the folktale traditions of the world for the fact that they contain no witches, or malign, magical female figures. Grace Park, a painter and calligrapher from Potomac, Maryland, and one of the illustrators of Introducing Korea Through Art & Folktales, led a hands-on workshop where teachers learned to make the four basic brushstrokes used in traditional Korean calligraphy before moving on to paint bamboo, orchids, dragonflies and their own names in hangul. Following a Korean buffet lunch, Soyoung Lee, curator of Korean art at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, concluded the conference with a presentation on the Met's current special exhibition, Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600. Illustrating her talk with images from the exhibition's 45 works of art, Lee explained how the first 200 years of Choson Kingdom was a special period in Korean art history, a time of exceptional cultural achievements. Lee described how the exhibition's diverse collection of paintings, screens, sculpture, lacquer and porcelain demonstrate the aesthetics of the new Neo-Confucian elite and the height of artistic excellence. The teachers were especially impressed with the period's porcelain, dominated by an emphasis on simple, undecorated aesthetics.

As the conference drew to a close, each of the teachers received a personal copy of Introducing Korea Through Art & Folktales to use for their classrooms, and many expressed an interested in purchasing additional copies for their schools. Annette Cohen from P.S. 146 wrote: "Introducing Korea Through Art & Folktales will be used immediately in the classes at P.S. 146….it could be a jumping off point for our students to develop their own ‘family folktales.’ …. The art students at P.S. 146 will be excited to learn how to paint insects….I’m very excited and thrilled to have learned about Korean art and literature for social studies."

THE KOREA SOCIETY is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) organization with individual and corporate members that is...

Major Supporters

Podcast

The Korea Society

Mission