The Carleton University Korean and International Society (CUKIS) has launched a letter of appeal and agreement for the university to add a Korean Studies minor in the 2019-2020 year.
The letter was shared on the society’s social media on March 25. According to the letter, while the university has courses in the Korean language, students are now seeking courses related to Korean culture outside of strictly language courses such as politics, film, business, history, economics, and literature. This includes courses such as Korean-Canadian relations, Korean literature, and the development of the K-Pop industry.
Currently, Carleton offers seven minors in modern languages: American Sign Language, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
Mickayla Robinson, an event coordinator with CUKIS and one of the execs involvement in launching the letter, said the decision to petition for a Korean minor came about because a lot of students showed interest.
“Learning a language is always great and can help understand other cultures,” she said. “However, there is more to Korea than just the language . . . there is the culture, and there is the history, so we figured that that would be a good option.”
“We asked students what they wanted to see, and a lot of people were saying history and culture,” she added. “Because when people go to Korea, they want to go there for the culture.”
Eesha Affan, a first-year journalism student, said she decided to sign the petition because she hopes to go on exchange to South Korea.
“There’s a lot of culture that goes with any language, and so it would be interesting for me to know more about Korean culture, especially because I do want to do a term abroad, hopefully in South Korea,” she said. “It would be nice to be in a culture class about Korea and learn more about it before I actually go.”
Affan said it makes sense for Carleton to have more culture classes because the university is so diverse.
“I think it’s important to have all these cultures represented equally—we represent so many different places from across the world here at Carleton,” she said. “It’s also important that we represent that in our curriculum.”
“Other cultures can be very interesting, and it’s much easier to be able to take a class in it and get exposed to it that way,” she added. “I wanted to learn Korean in high school as well, but never really got into it myself, but I’m learning it so much faster now that I’m taking an actual course in it in university.”
Robinson also said it’s important to learn Korean culture because of Canada’s diversity.
“There are Koreans in Canada, and a lot of them have their culture but they integrate into our society,” she said. “They have to adopt our culture.”
“It would be really important to learn about their culture and where they’re coming from too,” she added.
Robinson said the letter of appeal has not been shared with the university yet because CUKIS is still waiting for more signatures.
Photo by Lauren Hicks
