KONA Volunteer Teaching
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English Through Storybooks II Compiled by William Urbanski
A Story of Adapting and Learning
— Shilpa Rani, India The current COVID-19 pandemic has proven to have a devastating effect on interpersonal relationships since social distancing has become the norm all around the world. But here is a story of how the very same pandemic brought people together.
On the day of volunteering, the volunteers joined a
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As Darwin has been said to have stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” KONA volunteers have brought people together even in situations of drastic change, like the COVID-19 pandemic, by adapting and continuing their work for the community.
KONA, 2020, and Me
— Kevan Hudson, Canada In October 2019, I left South Korea after living in the country for fifteen years and returned to my native land of Canada. Before leaving, from 2015 to 2019, I volunteered with KONA and thoroughly enjoyed my time with the organization. However, I thought my volunteering with KONA had sadly finished when I came back to Canada. Then in 2020, the current pandemic hit Korea and the
February 2021
▲ Zoom session with the Gwangju Children’s Home.
The founder of the KONA volunteering program, Professor Young-im Kim, has been kind enough to allow my son, Adhrit Pradeep, to volunteer, too. He now presents a science topic for discussion each week. KONA has been an integral part of his childhood. Even though we live around 5,000 kilometers from Gwangju, we have been able to be a part of the KONA family and have been cherishing our time together.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
I moved back to India (my home country) two years ago, after being a volunteer with UNESCO-KONA. Apart from occasionally messaging to find out how KONA families were doing, there was no other reason to keep in touch. On one such occasion, I was made aware that due to social distancing rules, the students were learning online. Since KONA follows the technique of teaching through stories and also follows a scheduled teaching-learning pattern, they were able to easily adapt their program to online learning. KONA has been doing volunteer work at the Gwangju Children’s Home (광주애육원), twice a month. On my request, I was asked to join their sessions.
Zoom chat from their respective homes in different countries, including Korea (KONA families), and foreign volunteers from Japan (Yoshiko), India (myself), Canada (Kevan Hudson), Britain (Tiana), and the children at the Gwangju Children’s Home in Gwangju. Due to there being a large number of people, we split into breakout rooms and read and learned from one another. At the Gwangju Children’s Home, the children were usually split into two groups, with each group having its own student leader who assessed and organized the learning each week. But twice a month, they were allowed to present what they had learned in the form of a presentation to others. They were then corrected and motivated to learn through various activities.
TEACHING & LEARNING
In the first part of this two-part series, we heard stories from three volunteers at the KONA Storybook Center, a UNESCO-associated volunteer organization in Gwangju that promotes cultural exchange and English learning through storybooks. The volunteers in last month’s article hailed from Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Now, we will hear experiences from three more KONA volunteers, who are from India, Canada, and Korea.
1/26/2021 10:08:02 AM
