In his words, Jung himself fell into an irreversible swamp. He quit KBS in October 2016 to commit fully to FCN. When asked why he chose education, he answers, “I didn’t choose education; I was dragged along to it!” Perhaps it was education that chose him.
Not long before he quit KBS, his organization won the Google Impact Challenge in 2016, obtaining the grand sum of 500 million Korean won (around $450,000) for the World’s Biggest Class Project (WBCP).
“At the time, FCN was becoming larger, but the future was still unclear,” says Jung. “Many teachers in South Korea recognized the potential of the WBCP model, but we weren’t sure how to spread it.”
“As a model, the Flipped Classroom is easier to explain and spread. Its impact shows clearly in test results. But the WBCP is a much more evolved concept; those who experience it know this concept works, but it wasn’t easy to proliferate. Fortunately, Google acknowledged its potential.”
A WBCP camp in September 2018. ⒸFuture Class Network
According to Jung, WBCP provides an educational experience where students can “cultivate the skills to live in the real world.” WBCP offers collaborative tasks where students themselves must identify a problem within their communities, and find solutions together.
For example, through WBCP camps, high school students in South Jeolla Province researched the status of disability parking in regional festivals. Elementary school students in the city of Chenan started a cleanliness campaign based on the question, “Why the heck won’t kids flush the toilet?!?!”
WBCP Fair in January 2018. ⒸFuture Class Network
Through WBCP, students collaborated with a police station to solve traffic issues near the school. Others used their records of neighborhood flora as class material. “After experiencing WBCP, you see the kids’ sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy improve,” says Jung.
“How are we supposed to do this? At first I felt helpless,” says Soo-in Yeo, a fourth grader in Saesaem Elementary School in Cheonan. Despite her initial concern, she worked with her peers to start a toilet cleanliness campaign. The students interviewed around 1,100 of their peers to understand the extent of the issue and created fun posters, including popular anime characters, to stick in the school’s bathrooms.
High school students in North Chungcheong Province planting flowers near the school in November 2018. This was part of their “guerilla gardening” attempt to prevent passerby from littering near the trees. ⒸFuture Class Network
There are many more ‘strange’ examples. According to Jung, students previously bored with school started participating more actively. They started to confront different issues related to their communities.
It’s not just the students that react positively to WBCP. Teachers are jumping on the bandwagon. Hee-sik Choi, a middle school teacher in the city of Daegu, participated with FCN to promote the WBCP model in August 2018. He helped students conduct projects related to traffic issues near the school, observing the discussions and critiquing the process.
“Teachers, please try the World’s Biggest Class Project,” Choi says. “WBCP opens up a whole other world of communicating with your students.”
Google’s funding significantly helped lower the entry barrier in scaling WBCP. Since the first student camp in 2017, FCN hosted a total of 11 WBCP camps as of December 2018. The organization also created training programs for a total of 913 teachers nationwide. In January 2018, FCN launched an online platform specifically for WBCP. In the same month, a fair was held for the public to showcase students’ projects.
Even before the Google funding, FCN was trying to spread WBCP to teachers nationwide. But, Jung says, “Google was a tremendous help in scaling our project. As of now, we have been able to collaborate with around 50 schools and over 500 students, who conducted over 100 WBCP projects. This number is scattered all over Korea, where people are carrying out all sorts of ‘strange’ projects.”
The ‘strangeness’ that Jung keeps referring to may be the change that South Korean classrooms need in the 21st century -- more than the old methods of learning accepted for too long as ‘normal.’
A teacher training camp in February 2017. ⒸFuture Class Network
FCN’s experiments -- like WBCP and the Flipped Classroom -- are different from well-known education activism in South Korea like alternative education, which creates schools distinctly separate from public education. FCN doesn’t seek an escape from the mainstream paradigm; it tries to use public education as a foundation and resource to implement immediate change.
Hurdles remain. One is changing the perceptions of teachers. “Many teachers have a preconception of how education should be. Our job is to break those notions. Many are also inexperienced in the kind of problem-solving methods that we propose.”
“But once they experience our models, the teachers don’t want to let go,” Jung argues. “They want to keep advancing to the next level of what’s possible.”
FCN continues to gain a respectable reputation in the education arena, and not just in South Korea. In 2018, it was selected as a finalist in the Solve Challenge by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2017, FCN was one of the 100 Global List of Inspiring Innovations selected by HundRED, a Finnish organization that provides information on innovators in education.
“We’re finished with qualitative development,” says Jung confidently. “We’re done verifying whether our models work. Our plan now is to expand quantitatively.”
Chanpil Jung remembers himself as a “problem child” at school. Up to college, he used to hate school “with a passion.” Ironically, this problem child has grown up to embrace school every day of his adult life. More precisely, he embraces the dream of a school changed. And he is happy doing his job -- he loves being able to grow together with the students and devise different educational strategies with new people in the field.
Every day, he wakes up at the crack of dawn and sleeps late into the night. I ask him what his motivation is to continue this grueling routine. He says, “Google once asked me a similar question. For example, do you have the tools in your programs to ensure that teachers stay motivated? I answered, there’s no such incentive.”
“To me, the real incentive lies not in external rewards and tools like money. It lies in the positive change that others show, after I have acted on something. I’m doing all this not because I’m so driven to work in education, but because I had acted once, and the kids changed in such a strange way for the better -- that I can’t let this feeling go.”
