North Korea remains one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented countries in the United States. The problem is twofold. First, North Korea is a very isolated and closed society, which makes accurate and reliable information about the country difficult to obtain. Second, history and politics influence Western portrayal of North Korea, which is often one-sided and narrowly focused on negative issues such as the nuclear weapons program. While both challenges have eased in recent times, American students largely remain uneducated about North Korea, lacking the proper context with which to understand and interpret today's current events. Uncovering North Korea seeks to fill this gap and strives to bring more accurate information and objectivity to the study of North Korea in U.S. high schools and beyond.
Uncovering North Korea
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Please login to review this resourceI'm constantly worried about the necessity of background information when I begin teaching something new to the classroom. I will use parts of this curriculum guide when discussing Korea after I finish the novel Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.
One of the larger points I make during the curriculum unit on Korea is that the lose of one culture - or the lose of part of a particular culture, when readers of history are most kind - have effect on the future. After studying Korea, and East Asia, the area went through centuries of peace and prosperity, culminating in the development of culture, prior to the Second World War and the events that led to it.
It is important, if we are to make that argument, to discuss the dramatic transformation that Korea has gone through within the last 80 years after such a long period of general peace. This unit begins to answer some of the questions about events and ideas that led to the Korean War and the split that we see in Korea today.
While I found the later chapters less important for my purposes, the first few chapter units helped indicate how North Korea became what it is today.
