This set of resources includes an archive of contemporary Socioscientific Issues (SSI) as they manifest in Korean media and discourses, and a manual and webinar that train educators in their use. The materials were developed, piloted and refined by a group of educators at the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Sunyoung Yang in the Department of East Asian Studies. They are intended to introduce SSI topics into beginning and intermediate LCTLs classrooms—with a focus on Korean language and culture courses, but adaptable to other languages; they include English materials that were developed in parallel to serve as a model for teachers of other LCTLs.
This instructor manual provides guidance on how to implement socioscientific issues (SSI) in language classrooms, including a special focus on the topics of life with COVID-19 and eco-friendly travel.
In this manual, the authors provide detailed daily lesson plans, instructions for various activities, and supplementary materials, such as websites, articles, worksheets, student samples, and other teaching materials.
An archive of materials explores scientific issues in social contexts. It informs about how SSIs can be integrated into language learning contexts, and serves as a resource to inspire educators about classroom applications of SSI discourse, through the growing archive of contemporary narratives in daily lives. It includes materials centering on Traditional Science; Biohazards and Biotechnology; Space; Technologies, New & Old; Environment and Energy; Disasters and Apocalypse; Marine Resources; and Time.
➣ Access the Archive of Contemporary Discourses of Socioscientific Issues in Korea here: https://sites.google.com/view/ssi-discourse-archive
A webinar presents four semesters of SSI curricula and pedagogy to educators of different languages, using Korean as a case study. The instructor manual and archive of materials (described above) were presented, so that language educators who are not familiar with STEM education can implement SSIs in their classrooms. This webinar is presented by Young Ae Kim, Jieun Ryu, Sojung Chun, Seungmin Eum, Seojin Park, Sunyoung Yang (see their bios and other details here:https://cercll.arizona.edu/event/ssi_lctls/).
Webinar abstract: Language educators teach languages as well as important fields such as diverse cultures, social justice, interpersonal skills, and multimodal literacy. In addition to these areas, this project expands language education to include socioscientific issues (SSIs) such as Eastern/Western medicines, COVID-19, eco-friendly travel, and machine translation in Korean language classrooms. SSIs are closely related to STEM fields and as STEM has been gaining more currency in our daily lives, it is useful to incorporate SSIs in language classrooms. Moreover, SSIs enable us to diversify the areas of study we provide in our language classrooms while fighting against the “STEM divide.” Our students can advance their understanding of the target language by critically engaging in SSIs through multimodal projects such as writing tasks based on the guided use of machine translation (GUMT), making COVID-19 memes, or creating digitized guides of eco-friendly travel.