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영어

This article introduces and evaluates the purpose of general education courses in the Department of Liberal Arts. The course titled “Writing and Presentation for Problem-solving” incorporates aesthetic and interpretive understanding of poetic arts to educate students to become “ideal readers” from Reader-Response Theory. Since a decline in humanities majors over the last decades, a majority of the undergraduates in South Korea have hardly read or attempted to interpret any kind of literary works. Rather, students focus on their practical studies related to their majors due to social atmosphere or economic reasons. They consider reading and understanding poems as a difficult and complex task, which is irrelevant to their daily life. The course “Writing and Presentation for Problem-solving” reinvestigates students’ apathetic attitudes toward poetry and reexamines the goal of general education. This course incorporates poetry reading to encourage students to read and understand poems and develop their reading skills in criticism, their aesthetic responsiveness, and interpretive ability in general. Furthermore, this course allows students to link poetic works with specific social themes that suit diverse neighborhoods in Seoul. Specifically, students are assigned to replace existing poetic works on subway platforms with more suitable poetries that reflect each neighborhoods’ characteristics and cultural contents around the subway zone.