The Language Teacher
01 - 2001

Hand in Hand: Looking Toward the Second Asian Youth Forum

Kip Cates, Takayama Chika, Alice Lachman, & Bill Perry



The first Asian Youth Forum (AYF) was held in the fall of 1999 at the Olympic Park in Seoul, Korea, as part of the Second Pan-Asian Language Teaching Conference (PAC2). The Forum brought together some 50 young people from Asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines) and the West (Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, USA) for four days of academic seminars and social events aimed at promoting Asian awareness and international understanding through English. It was a unique opportunity for students to travel with their teachers to a language teachers' conference, and to have space for their own sessions, as well as a chance to interact with the teachers in the daily sessions. The program also included social events, cultural visits, a tour of Seoul, and homestays with Korean families.

Interview with Kip Cates, organizer of the first Asian Youth Forum

The following interview with Kip Cates provides insights into his inspiration for youth forums, an overview of the development of the AYF idea, and his vision of the future of such gatherings of young people.

Perry: How did the AYF idea emerge?

Cates: During the 1990s, a number of officers and key people from JALT, Korea TESOL and Thai TESOL began to look beyond their own countries and teaching situations, and began flying off to each other's conferences to see what was happening with language teaching in the rest of Asia. This led, soon after, to the signing of sister agreements between JALT, Korea TESOL, and Thai TESOL, which involved the exchange of newsletters and journals, and officers in each organization attending each other's conferences. With growing contact, this led to the idea of having a series of Pan-Asian Conferences (PAC) sponsored in turn by the three countries involved (Thailand, Korea, and Japan). The first one was held in Bangkok in 1997, the second in Seoul in 1999, and the third planned for Kitakyushu, Japan in 2001. While I couldn't attend PAC I in Bangkok, I was involved in promoting the sister organization agreements and the idea of the PAC conferences. In 1993, I was invited by Korea TESOL to come over as a featured speaker to introduce the new area of global education to Korean teachers of English at their national Korea TESOL conference.

Due to the good response I got, I began going to Korea each year to attend their annual conference, to further promote global education through my presentations, and to better get to know Korea, Korean culture, Korean teachers and Korean EFL. When the first planning meetings were held about the 1999 PAC II conference in Seoul, I suggested we ask teachers from around Asia who were planning to fly to Korea to attend this conference to each bring along some students from their countries. That would allow us to hold anÅ@Asian Youth Forum at which young Asians could meet, study, and socialize together -- in English -- as part of the PAC II pan-Asian conference. The organizers liked my idea, asked me to take the project on as coordinator, found some interested Korea-based teachers to help, and assisted our team in getting things up off the ground.

Perry: Were there youth exchanges like this around the world you were hoping to model?

Cates: Yes. All my life, I've been involved in various ways with youth exchange of various kinds, so the AYF was an amalgamation of my experiences: As an 18-year old Canadian university student majoring in French back in Vancouver, I took part in a six-week intranational exchange summer program between 50 French Canadians (from Quebec) and 50 English Canadians. This was organized by the Canadian government as a way to promote friendship and mutual understanding between young French and English Canadians. I remember being impressed with the idealism behind the program, with the power of face-to-face contact between young people from different parts of the country, and with the program's organization (we spent the mornings studying each others' languages, the afternoons doing joint sports and social activities, and slept together in the same dorms).

My first experience with an international youth exchange program came in Europe in 1977. While trying to get a job working in Germany, I managed to get hired by the German government as a summer camp counselor on a European youth program in Sweden. For five months, I was part of a small multinational team in charge of running a summer holiday camp outside Stockholm for young people from all around Europe. Every two weeks, we had up to 150 young people (age 15-25) from 15 countries (France, Spain, England, Holland, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Belgium . . .) who arrived in Sweden for a two-week summer holiday of hiking, canoeing, frisbee, volleyball . . . and disco dancing every night. While these young people were expecting just a fun summer camp experience, we staff members had been explicitly instructed by the German government that the purpose of the camp was to promote European awareness, friendship and understanding between young people in Europe, and to help them develop into future citizens of a united Europe. It was stressed that the program had a strong peace education component and was founded in order to prevent the kinds of European prejudice, hate and violence that led to World Wars I and II. Five months of working on this European youth exchange program seeing daily examples of cross-national friendships (and romance!) certainly proved its worth to me. After Sweden, I went on to work for a further three months on the same youth exchange program at a ski hotel in the German Alps.

Several experiences in Japan deepened my involvement with international youth exchanges. One was my first job in Japan (1979-1982) with the Kobe YMCA, which had thriving youth exchange programs and a global outlook. Another came once I'd settled in Tottori (after a year in the UK and two years in the Middle East) and had started working in global education. I was asked to be a program design consultant for Yokohama City, which had arranged for young people from six of its sister cities (Manila, San Diego, Bombay . . .) to fly in to Yokohama for a three-day international youth event. It was a great experience to help design the event, adding components that went beyond the usual "here are some tourist sights in my city" that many youth exchanges stop at. Instead, I persuaded the organizers to ask each group of students, before their departure for Japan, to take slides of one social problem in their city and to present it in Yokohama. Seeing these great presentations (the Philippine kids documented pollution in Manila, the Indians took a video of the slums in Bombay) and the friendships that grew up between the young people from those six countries inspired me with the possibilities this kind of program had for international understanding, social awareness, and cross-cultural learning.

My involvement with Japan-Korea exchanges began also in Tottori when I discovered Tottori University had a sister university in Korea that no one knew much about. With a bit of pushing, I managed to arrange a pen-pal program between our Japanese students in Tottori and Korean students at our sister university. This led to a 10-day student tour of Korea that I organized for 10 of my Japanese students and two Japanese colleagues. Having the chance to organize this trip and to plan what experiences to expose my Japanese students to in Korea was a precious experience. Our trip eventually featured a few days in Seoul, a visit to the Independence Museum in Chonan, a three-day homestay in Taejon with families of the Korean sister university students and meetings with other Korean universities' students in Kyongju and Pusan. The trip was an emotional roller coaster in some ways, which exposed my Japanese students to some terrible things (the Independence Museum showed some of the atrocities the Japanese military did in Korea from 1910-1945) and to some wonderful things (a three-day homestay with a Korean family).

The whole homestay experience was incredible. We arrived on the train in Taejon to find the Korean host families waiting for us at the station and our very nervous Japanese students almost panicky about what was going to happen. We called out our students' names one by one and sent them off ("Sachiko! This is your host family for the next three days, the Kim family. Bye-bye and . . . good luck!"). Then, for the next three days, we watched them grow to become best friends with their Korean student counterparts and their families. Three days later, we all met up at the train station again to leave for the next destination, and everyone was crying "Mr. Cates, do we really have to leave?" with Japanese students hugging the Korean host families they'd dreaded only three days before. It was like night and day. Three days before -- fear, anxiety, total strangers. Three days later -- hugging, crying, best friends. And everybody's English was much, much better! That was one of the moments I realized the power of youth contact, homestays and exchange to overcome the hate and bitterness of the past -- the same thing I'd seen back in Sweden with my German government summer European youth camp experience. Peace educators sometimes quote this saying: "International understanding develops by allowing people to meet." Much of my thinking about the AYF and its ideals were influenced by my experiences described above.

Lachman: What were your dreams for the AYF?

Cates: My dreams for the AYF were to create a unique experience for young people from different countries in Asia that would allow them to come together, to meet and to develop cross-national friendships as they explored topics such as Asian cultures, mutual stereotypes, social issues, international understanding, and world citizenship -- all in English within the framework of a major Asian language teaching conference. I hoped this experience would help the participating Asian youth to see English as a language for international understanding, as a window to the world for learning about other peoples and cultures, as a medium for thinking, studying and acting on important global issues, and as a means of communication, not just with native English speakers, but with other young Asians.

I also hoped the AYF would give young Asians involved a chance to voice their thoughts, dreams and ideas about language, culture and issues -- in English -- to language teachers in Asia through the student presentations they made at the PAC II conference. My aim was to reverse the traditional one-way teacher-to-student communication style found in many classrooms, to empower students to talk back to teachers about their ideas and experiences, and to allow teachers to hear and discuss, for the first time ever in a major international language teaching conference, the opinions of young Asian language learners.

Lachman: In retrospect, were your dreams realized?

Cates: Yes, yes, yes! On the whole, I was really pleased with how well our dreams came to fruition and with the positive outcomes the participants mentioned. I only wish we could have had more students from more Asian countries take part.

Lachman: What do you envision for the ATF's future?

Cates: A second AYF has already been decided on for the PAC III conference in Kitakyushu, Japan in 2001, and is now in the early planning stages. This PAC III AYF will allow us to build on our experience in Seoul to design a second stimulating AYF in a very different context here in Japan. I see a variety of possible ways in which the AYF could develop further. There is much work to be done here in our part of the world, Asia, to promote Asian awareness, mutual understanding, and international friendship among Asian youth.

I believe English language teachers in Asia can play an important role through promoting the AYF, its ideals and its view of English as a language of Asian communication and understanding. I would love to see an AYF held each year at every major Asian language teaching conference -- Thai TESOL, Korea TESOL, JALT -- so that as many young Asians as possible could have the chance to meet, talk, learn, bond and grow together through English. Given the sad history between Japan and Korea, the mutual ignorance and prejudices that still exist, and the upcoming World Cup that Japan and Korea will share in 2002, I believe that the AYF has a special role to play at this time in promoting peace and mutual understanding between Korea and Japan. AYF events that allow young Koreans and Japanese to meet have a special meaning, importance and urgency. I would love to see the AYF idea of bringing students along to language teacher conferences become a regular aspect of international conferences around the world. I feel this would enrich the conferences themselves, stimulate the teachers who attend, and allow a great deal of international understanding and global communication among the young people who take part. I'd therefore love to see our AYF work inspire other regional initiatives: initiatives, for example, like an LAYF (Latin American Youth Forum), MEYF (Middle East Youth Forum), EYF (European Youth Forum), etc.

Finally, in our modern wired electronic world, there is a whole realm of possibilities to explore for putting the AYF and its ideals onto the Internet and World Wide Web. We already set up a Website for the 1999 PAC II Seoul AYF <http://asianbridges.com/pac2/ayf/> which has a lot of promise. I'd like to see this extended further to allow young people from throughout Asia -- no matter where they may be (Japan, Laos, China, Malaysia, North Korea) -- to communicate with one another electronically -- in English -- to further the AYF ideals of Asian awareness, cross-national friendship, intercultural learning, international understanding, world citizenship and regional youth cooperation on global issues.

Lachman: What have we learned?

Cates: I believe that all of us who took part in the 1999 AYF at PAC II in Seoul, Korea, learned a great deal. Those of us who organized and ran the AYF experienced, anew, the magic that happens when young people from different countries are allowed to meet. Our learning ranged from new insights into international youth exchange, program design, cross-cultural communication, and the importance of teamwork, to the administrative nuts and bolts of arranging buses, homestays, meals and flights. We learned a lot about our host, Korea, about language and culture learning, and about each other. Most importantly, I think we learned about the challenge -- and value -- of working with young people within the context of youth exchange programs, and the potential this kind of program has to promote real international understanding among young Asians through the medium of English.

A Student's Reflections on AYF

Takayama Chika
4th-year student, Miyazaki International College

The Asian Youth Forum 1999 was held in Seoul from September 30 to October 3. Of the Asian students, most came from Japan, many from Korea, one from the Philippines, and another from Vietnam. However, surprisingly, we also had some extra guests from Europe and America, students of the Up with People Organization. This program was aimed at widening our Asian knowledge and to make students realize how much we don't know about Asia and its culture. It was also aimed at studying the culture of Korea. The homestay was a truly good opportunity to feel the uniqueness of Korean people and their culture by experiencing it directly. The program encouraged students to speak only in English as an international language throughout the program. The meeting with some multilingual students and teachers gave us an impetus to have more ambition to study English, as well as other languages. It was the very first time for me to visit Korea although I'd been dreaming of going there for quite a long time. For this reason, I was overwhelmed when hearing about the AYF in class.

The preparation meeting was exciting and also serious. Thinking about the terrible actions done by the Japanese soldiers in the past, we were worried that people might not be nice to us, just because we were Japanese. We practiced a phrase in Korean: "Do you speak English?" not "Do you speak Japanese?" Despite our concern, things went smoothly. What made me feel most at ease was that the host families did speak English. Incidentally, my host brother was really fluent in English and was going to Canada to study abroad. I was truly curious to know why he was so good at English even though he hadn't been in any English-speaking country before. On the second day, I was impressed by the exhibition at the National Ethnography Museum. The costumes and ceramics of the ancient dynasties were exquisite enough to take my breath away. The third day became the most memorable day for me during this program. I had been pretty nervous from the morning, knowing that I would have to give a presentation in the evening at the PAC2 teaching conference, which was the conference for English teachers happening at the same time. I was going to give a presentation about the history of Asia.

This was still a sensitive topic (this is what I felt in Korea), and it greatly interested me. (In fact, I was planning to visit some museums about the Japanese occupation during the war.) Finally the time had come, and I had to sit in front of the audience with other AYF students. Seeing my nervous face, a Dutch girl sitting beside me taught me the word bauch, which means stomach in Dutch. She said that she always wrote it down on a paper before a presentation and breathed deeply. I have to say, it worked! I breathed truly deeply and spoke in a relatively comfortable voice, despite the fact that I'd just heard a shocking presentation by a Korean student, saying she had a negative image towards Japanese people before the AYF. To be honest, I was not calm at all by the end of the speech. The fact that I was saying something about history in front of Korean people made me really feel anxious. After the presentation, a Canadian woman came over to me and said that she had grandchildren both in Korea and Japan. I was amazed that she told me that she understood the ideas I was talking about and wished for a better relationship between Korea and Japan. Her words were a great, unexpected reward for me. The time I spent in Korea was really great and unforgettable. It was impressive enough for me to think of going back there during the coming winter vacation. After attending the AYF, I visited the former Japanese prison in Seoul, which was so horrifying that I nearly forgot about the Forum.

I was astonished to see many school children there. I asked the guide if it's common for Korean children to visit such a place as a part of their field trips, and he said, "Yes." I assume that it is really shocking for the Korean students to learn about the brutal events that actually happened to their ancestors. Seoul has several places that recall the former occupation by the Japanese. I wondered, then, how the Korean students attending the Forum could have overcome their complicated feelings towards Japanese and being with us.

We have quite a similar situation in Hiroshima. Many travelers from the United States go there and feel shocked, and also meet many junior high school students who visit the Atomic Bomb Museum as a part of their school trip. These two museums are similar in the sense that both of them exhibit the unfair killing of people during war time. But the significant difference is that almost everyone has heard or even studied about the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima. Clearly, many Japanese do not know about the famous prison in Korea. Although it is a Japanese custom to concentrate on the present time, we also have another custom, to learn lessons from the mistakes of the past (Onko-chishin). After visiting Korea, I thought that the Japanese people truly need to study more about what really happened in Korea so that we won't make the same mistake in the future. I believe that Koreans and Japanese will be able to establish a firm and amiable relationship, after overcoming the great trauma produced by the severe historic incidents. Then, it will be possible to have true reconciliation and to abandon the horrible perpetual wars.

Teacher comments on the impact of the AYF

Alice Lachman
Saitama Women's Junior College, Tsuda College

The Asian Youth Forum was a powerful opportunity for students from all over the world to be together for an intensive experience, using English, sharing cultures, and exploring differences. I brought nine women students to Seoul. Five of them were third-year students from Tsuda College, and four of them were second-year students from Saitama Women's Junior College. All of them had to earn the funds necessary for the travel and registration fees. Most of them had previous study abroad experience and some English language ability, although it varied greatly. We weren't sure what would emerge from the five-day student forum in Korea, but we knew that it was an opportunity not to be missed. And we were right! Natsuko, one of my junior college students, participated in a student panel discussion for teachers at the PAC2. She concluded, "The 21st century is just around the corner. We need to think seriously about our role as young people in Asia. We need to think about the problems we will face and how we can begin to solve them."

For our group of nine women, the AYF was a first step in what Natsuko argued to be three ways to approach this challenge: "to cultivate friendship, to learn languages, and to learn history." The preparation, participation, and the ripples of continuity that still flow from the AYF experience reflect her stance. We cultivated friendships at many levels: Japanese and Korean, Japanese and Asian, and Japanese and European. Staying in Korean families provided rich conversations late into the night with many generations. Also, deep connections were created between Japanese and Japanese. In my case, the junior college and university women bonded in their adventures. For example, in our preparation for the AYF, all of the women met on the weekend at my apartment, and the university women brought along one of their Korean exchange students who taught us survival Korean. She also coached us about cultural behavior, especially as we cooked and ate together that evening. And the students discussed the key issues for the conference and how they would share Japanese culture with the other students at the Forum and their host families. One woman confessed how little she knew about Japanese history after all these years!

The relationships created from this experience also crossed lines of status. Students and teachers shared meals and many informal moments, and teachers bonded with teachers for future collaboration and professional development. Each of us felt we were participating in the birth of something powerful for us and for the future of humankind. And English was the medium of communication. Being fluent in English, being tolerant towards differences, and being willing to take risks, offered students and faculty an unforgettable experience. The PAC2 AYF, with all its many dimensions, has provided ripples of continuity. For example, after AYF, the Up With People students gave a performance in Odaiba. We went to see them to support them. A month later in December, one of the UWP members, Jenny from India and Sweden, spent a week in my home, and my students hosted her graciously in English. Her visit to my junior college campus gave other students an insight into how useful English can be for international communication. And AYF students and my students remain connected by E-mail or visits. This May, long after my junior college students had graduated and started working, one of the AYF Korean women students came to Tokyo for five days and she stayed with them. Other Korean AYF students plan to visit in the near future. Before we left Seoul, we committed to sharing with colleagues, students, and families the spirit of the AYF.

As a result, both my university students and junior college students published articles and photos in the campus newspapers. Also, my junior college students created a huge poster and display for the culture festival in November, and that poster was shared again at the CUE conference in Tokyo the following May. At that time, one of my AYF university students came to talk with teachers about her experience in Korea. And as an outcome of her AYF experience, another of the students is planning to major in Peace Studies in graduate school next year. Together with the AYF home page and linked video coverage, student home pages and student and faculty-produced videos of the AYF 1999 serve as an invitation to other colleagues around the country to join the Asian Youth Festival in Kitakyushu in 2001 at the Pan Asian Conference.

Bill Perry

Miyazaki International College

I traveled to the AYF with 10 of my students from Miyazaki International College. It was an incredible experience for me after over 20 years of attending teachers conferences without students present; this was the first time that students and I were able to experience the excitement of a conference together. The students not only had a chance to interact with teachers and students from other cultures, but also gave interesting and insightful presentations. That added dimension helped many English teachers and administrators become aware of the importance of having a student component to these professional meetings. All of us made connections that we might have thought impossible before the Forum.

The homestays with Korean families were, without question, the most important feature of the program. Many of my students made close friendships with their host families and remain in touch with them The Japanese and Korean students, in particular, spoke out on many occasions throughout the AYF about the stereotypes they had had of each other prior to the program. We all learned about Korean culture and history through the music, food, museums and long conversations with each other, and, at the same time, had opportunities to talk about our own cultures and experiences.

It is my hope that this kind of activity, youth crossing boundaries within Asia and engaging in open discussion, will become a priority for colleges and universities across Japan in the near future. I am certainly looking forward to the next AYF in 2001 in Kitakyushu and will make every effort to encourage other teachers and students to join it.

Conclusion

In the closing ceremony at the AYF in Seoul, we sang together, "Hand in hand we can start to understand, breaking down the walls that come between us for all time." With the committed efforts of Kip Cates and Peggy Wollberg (the on-site organizer for the first AYF), and the faith of participating students and faculty, the AYF at PAC2 in Korea, was a concrete step toward making this world "a better place in which to live." The AYF in Kitakyshu 2001 will be another chance to reach a wider spectrum of students and teachers around Asia and to continue on the difficult road to world peace and mutual understanding.



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