NIIED will hold an Essay Contest for Guest English Teachers in Korea. The purpose of the contest is to find a way to improve EPIK, encourage current GETs and the oficials in charge, and enhance the quality of English education. GETs with excellent works will be given awards and prize money.
You can download the application as a .hwp file from the SMOE or EPIK website (by clicking on "What's new") if you haven't been given one at school. You'll find more details in the middle of that application download. The top essays will receive cash prizes, with the winner getting 500,000 won. Submissions will be accepted from October 6th through the 15th, and you'll need to get a letter of recommendation from your co-teacher.
They had an essay contest last fall, too. You can view a list of winners on the EPIK message board, post number 76. I don't think they ever released the essays publically, though the Korea Times, as it is wont to do, had a bunch of articles last year about the EPIK experience. I'd be curious to read what teachers wrote about last year. One thing that stands out this year is this line in the application, regarding additional resources (such as lesson plans) you may want to submit:
Additional addenda must be your own materials and must not have any copyright issues.
It sounds like a smart idea---though I don't think it's necessarily the foreign English teachers who are prone to stealing others' lessons---but, really, how many people design lessons that are 100% original? More often than not they supplement the textbook, and are generic activities customized for that particular class. What worries me is that EPIK, in turn, might want to copyright these resources for their own use. A reader told me that somebody in the Jeollanam-do Office of Education said the district owned all the materials created for classroom use, and thus websites like waygook.org were sharing copyrighted information by hosting user-submitted lesson plans and ideas. I've read on Dave's about schools insisting native speaker English teachers' lessons belong to the school---and thus may be used by the Korean teachers for their own demonstration classes and handouts---though I don't recall seeing anything like that in any of my contracts.
5 comments:
The fact that they have it as an .hwp file only and not a .doc file is very telling.
It sounds like a smart idea---though I don't think it's necessarily the foreign English teachers who are prone to stealing others' lessons
I started to write a long comment about this happening to me twice when I was teaching GRE/GMAT, but I decided not to subject anybody to it. It was not pretty.
WORD VERIFICATION: selly y bj
they use a number of them in a book for new EPIK teachers called something like "NET experiences and advice." we got one at orientation. they were generally bad, i thought, while flipping through them during orientation sessions. i was wondering how they got people to write them, then saw one where the writer overtly mentioned the essay contest.
When I was teaching on Jindo, the Jeollanamdo office tried to get me to WRITE A TEXTBOOK FOR THEM (without credit, of course). So, I'm not surprised that they're trying to claim the foreign teachers' lessons as their own.
I never heard anything about an essay contest, but the Jinju office of education is making "A lesson plan contest." I think that a good topic for an essay would be that after many many years of being in existance, the organizers of EPIK still don't have much of a clue about what they want all of these NETs to do after they get here.
"I've read on Dave's about schools insisting native speaker English teachers' lessons belong to the school---and thus may be used by the Korean teachers for their own demonstration classes and handouts---though I don't recall seeing anything like that in any of my contracts."
This reminds me of the attitude that most employers seem to have towards using NSETs' image for promotional purposes. Again, I've never seen anything about this in my contracts, and yet all of my employers in Korea seemed to simply assume that, because I worked for them, my image belonged to them. A friend who worked at a hagwon once saw his hagwon's bus driving down the street, and was surprised to see a huge image of his face plastered on the side of the bus. Not only had he not been compensated or asked permission, he hadn't even been TOLD they were using his picture. This sort of thing happens at public schools, too; we all know that those English festivals are basically one big photo-op. What bugs me the most is that I know some schools continue to use an NSET's image even long after he or she has left the school.
I hope that doesn't seem too off-topic, but the two things seem related to me.
And, like in Kelsey's comment, the principal of my last public school decided near the end of my contract that he wanted a new textbook that would be created entirely by the school's NSET and Korean English teacher. Again, there would be no additional compensation, and while my name might have been mentioned in the book, I would of course have had no legal ownership of the material. I refused, but I'm sure they tried to get my replacement to do it.
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