The Asia Society, recognizing the lack of popularly available materials on Korea, has done a terrific job producing several documentaries appropriate for younger students. Their 1988 series Discover Korea is composed of three videos, each accompanied by a teacher’s guide and poster and each focusing on a different aspect of Korean society: Family and Home, School and Community, and Geography and Industry. All three are similar in format, focusing on the experiences of one or two children in order to make broader inferences about the entire society. The entire series is aimed at students between fourth and ninth grade. The family in Family and Home, the first video in the series, seem to have come straight out of 1950s American television. This video deals with numerous Korean traditions and contains some very entertaining moments (most involving the main character’s teeny-bopper older sister), but I fear that students will come away from this video feeling that all Korean families are as beautiful and scripted as the one portrayed. This film should be tempered with other documentaries and readings. For a more realistic view of Korean families, check out Families of South Korea, part of the Families of the World series fo elementary school students I have recommended in the previous issues.

The Asia Society next produced School and Community, an endearing documentary focusing on a late elementary school aged girl, her male friend, and her teenage brother (all of whom are more realistic than the Family and Home characters). We follow all three of them as they go to school, run errands, attend various activities (such as Tae Kwon Do and violin lessons), and play outside. Unlike the other videos in the series, this documentary takes place entirely in an urban center. Geography and Industry, the final film in the series, follows a young boy as he travels around South Korea, visiting his uncle in the southwest countryside and traveling on a bus to the northeast mountains. Along the way, he meets a young girl from a tourist town called Yosu in the southern-most part of the peninsula and tells her about the industrial town of Ulsan in southeast Korea where he lives.

All three of these videos are only 15 minutes each, perhaps too brief for students to absorb very much information about Korea. The teacher’s manuals, each over forty pages, somewhat correct for that shortcoming by providing detailed background information about each subject, a list of recommended readings, an annotated script with explanations, supplementary essays, and even a few fun activities for the classroom. Of the three included posters, I am partial to Geography and Industry’s two-sided poster about the Korean Tiger, featuring different types of tigers and legends in which they appear.