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Fun and useful Saturdays with Mizy Center

With the start of the new five day study week system, many students are still finding it hard to put their weekends into good use. In order to solve this problem, Seoul City has started a bright new event named “Surprising Saturday Seoul EXPO”. Seoul Youth Center for Cultural Exchange (Mizy Center) was organizing a program to proceed this event for anyone who had interest in the teenage culture. Many teenagers and adults participated in the Seoul EXPO and were pleased that they could spend their free Saturdays by doing fun activities.

 What is the Seoul EXPO?

Seoul EXPO is a program organized by Seoul City to allow students to make a good use of their free weekends. While it was sponsored by Seoul City, Seoul EXPO was processed by teenager organizations around the region. Consisted of various experience activities, Seoul EXPO demonstrated that learning about world’s cultures can be both exciting and enjoyable. In Mizy Center, these programs included ‘Learning about fair trade through games’, 'MIZY on Day’, ‘Asia food experience’ and some big activities like:

Deep-rooted World Cultural Heritage

This is a multi-cultural education program where a foreign teacher and a Korean teacher get together to explain historical and cultural stories of World Cultural Heritages. Teachers and a team from Mizy Center visit elementary schools and other youth centers to introduce valuable places around the world. Each foreign teacher is assigned to country and he/she prepares a memorable lesson of their country’s cultural heritages. To derive students’ participation and help their understanding, there are also enjoyable activities like making some cultural heritages with clay.  

Sharing the shoe of hope

As a program certified by the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), it informs of young adult’s human rights, education, and poverty problems along with development possibilities. By the inventive artistic activity of drawing hopeful messages on shoes, this program allows participants to take action in sharing these decorated shoes.

Among the activities of Seoul EXPO, I participated in the ‘Deep-rooted World Cultural Heritage’, which was held in Mizy Center. It was the first day of this year’s ‘Deep-rooted World Cultural Heritage’ program and many students and adults joined to learn about special things of Earth. On Sunday 8 April, approximately 13 students participated in the ‘Deep-rooted World Cultural Heritage’ at Mizy Center. Though this program is usually held in elementary schools or youth centers, it was held in Mizy Center just for a start. Despite that, all participants registered for the program themselves and showed their passion to participate.

Participants were assigned to a small booklet and there were 2 teachers who led the class. A Korean lecturer translated the words of the foreign lecturer and made sure that participants got the right information. The topic of the first ‘Deep rooted World Cultural heritage’ was Finland. ‘Deep-rooted World Cultural Heritage’ program has a country that each lecturer focuses on for the whole class. Since the country topic for every program is different, participants can gain a lot of information. Participants had a finnish teacher and she explained all the amazing world cultural heritages of Finland. The first session was learning about world cultural heritages. During the second session, students got the chance to make up their own cultural heritage. It was a great way to get young participants involved and discover cultural heritages.

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Fortunately, after the program, I got the chance to ask a few questions to the finnish lecturer. Through this small interview, I could notice that world cultural heritage is a very important factor in our lives.

Q. Could you briefly explain what a world cultural heritage is?

It’s something that we should preserve. It can be cultural, natural or both. It practically exists all around the world. So if I explain a cultural one, like Suomenlinna(an island in Finland), it has specific meaning because of its architecture so it shows people who made it were very skillful. World cultural heritage is about making people aware that we should preserve these kinds of places because they’re important for everyone, culturally.

Q. What would be your reason for taking part in this program?

For me, it was also about learning. Learning about Korea, getting to see what Korean kids are like and meeting other people. So, it was about learning about me and getting better acquainted to Korea.

Q. Why do you think students need to be educated about world cultural heritage?

Well, I think it is a good way of realizing that we come from different places and we are different kind of people but world cultural heritage helps to diminish those differences. Basically, world cultural heritage is for everyone. Everyone should preserve it. It’s important to have these things.

The fun activities which are organized by Mizy Center can give participants a huge amount of information. By doing these activities, students can spend their weekend times efficiently and do something that can be useful. With its original Saturday programs in other elementary schools and youth centers, Mizy Center plans to hold more activities within its center for individual participants throughout the year.