Korea Launches Classroom Campaign to Strengthen Multicultural Inclusion

South Korea’s Ministry of Education has launched a six-month campaign designed to strengthen connections between immigrant and nonimmigrant students through shared classroom activities rather than conventional lectures on cultural awareness.

The initiative, introduced Wednesday with the National Institute for Lifelong Education, will run through February 2027. It comes as more than 210,000 students from multicultural or immigrant backgrounds attend primary and secondary schools in Korea, a population that has continued to reach record levels.

Officials are placing regular interaction at the center of the program. Schools will be offered a different participatory activity each month, beginning in October with events called Small Happiness World Cups. Students will share their hobbies, favorite foods and personal experiences with classmates, giving them opportunities to identify common interests and learn about one another in an informal setting.

In November, participating classes will be invited to join a choreography challenge titled 2026 Because We’re Together. The activity is being organized in cooperation with the youth-focused YouTube channel Heungding School. Teachers who register their classes for monthly programs through the campaign portal will also be entered into drawings for snack boxes, an incentive intended to help turn the activities into inclusive classroom events.

The campaign draws on findings from the 2024 National Multicultural Acceptance Survey. According to the survey, younger Koreans who regularly interact with people from different backgrounds recorded a cultural openness score of 69.77 points, compared with 53.38 points among older adults. The ministry’s approach reflects the view that repeated, everyday contact can help students build respect for differences more effectively than abstract instruction alone.

Support for educators is another part of the initiative. A digital crowdsourcing platform will allow teachers to exchange classroom strategies and practical advice for working with increasingly diverse groups of students. The goal is to create a nationwide pool of techniques that have been tested by educators in real school settings.

The program also builds on Korea’s Multicultural Education Portal, which provides multilingual information for parents in as many as 15 languages. Available materials cover areas including school enrollment, credit systems and bullying prevention, while the portal also offers tools for assessing the Korean-language proficiency of students who are not native speakers.

By combining student activities, teacher collaboration and family resources, the campaign seeks to make inclusion part of routine school life. Its success will depend on whether schools can turn short-term events into sustained relationships among students as classrooms become more culturally diverse.