Hosts World's Biggest Lifelong Learning Festival in October
Yeonsu-gu of Incheon hosted the 5th International Conference on Learning Cities (ICLC) at the Songdo Conventia from Oct. 27-30, with some 2,000 representatives and officials from 229 member cities of 64 countries attending.
While the world's biggest lifelong learning festival ended about two months ago, Yeonsu-gu is seeking to maximize its impact on the local community. The district government had invested time and efforts for more than a year to hold the event successfully amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
To this end, Yeonsu-gu is putting a lot of efforts into sharing its experiences with the local community and leaving them as a valuable legacy of Yeonsu-gu. It is holding various internal and external evaluation meetings, conducting surveys and preparing for the publication of a white paper on the event.
Through the four-day conference, Yeonsu-gu has gained recognition as one of the world's major lifelong learning cities. This status further enlarges the global profile of Yeonsu-gu, which is one of the world's key biotechnology hubs.
In the process of preparing the ICLC, Yeonsu-gu hosted the inaugural general meeting of the Asia-Pacific Learning Cities (APLC) and attracted the APLC secretariat to Yeonsu-gu. Yeonsu-gu Mayor Ko Nam-seok was appointed as the first secretary-general of the APLC. These are part of the fruits of the time and efforts the city poured into the event.
The Yeonsu Declaration was made by sharing the roles of health and education with distinguished scholars in the global community such as recovering learning deficits and jointly responding to infectious diseases. The declaration is also expected to be evaluated as a new model for the sustainable development of education such as lifelong learning.
In particular, under the theme of “From Emergency to Resilience: Building Healthy and Resilient Cities through Learning,” Yeonsu-go has been striving to prepare to host a substantial international conference by realizing the frugal and efficient spirit of the UNESCO while satisfying its status as the world’s largest lifelong education international conference.
The unexpected re-proliferation of COVID-19 reduced the originally expected size of offline participants as VIPs’ offline visits were replaced with support signatures from them including the President of Korea. However, Yeonsu-gu believes that it has yielded some desired results by attracting non-face-to-face participants through online platforms and metaverse services.
Yeonsu-gu focused on realizing the convergence and combination of offline and online education by using Virtual Incheon, a three dimensional (3D) virtual online international conference system developed by Incheon such as running an online conference hall program that offers foreign language interpretation and translation services, live session streaming services and uses networking systems.
On top of that, it drew attention from the international community by minimizing the use of plastic containers and paper cups during the event and holding all meetings as paperless meetings with electronic documents without paper documents.
The ICLC Global Citizens’ Lifelong Learning Fair held as an affiliated event on October 29 and 30 also provided various attractions and entertaining contents at 154 booths in nine theme halls, attracting more than 10,000 citizens. So a lifelong learning fever gripped the event venue in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Above all, Yeonsu-gu citizens could feel as a strong sense of pride as Yeonsu-gu successfully hosted the UNESCO’s largest international conference on lifelong learning held every two years as a small local autonomy unit with a population of 400,000 people. This will go down in history as a milestone of Yeonsu-gu.
Participants had deep and meaningful discussions about related to lifelong learning in 24 sessions such as the special session, the entire sessions, and the parallel sessions took place until late at night in two days during the 5th UNESCO ICLC which ended on Oct. 30.
First of all, from 10 a.m. on Oct. 28, a special session under the theme of “the UNESCO’s Seven Principles for Future Education” kicked off the second day of the 5th UNESCO ICLC as a summit forum with ambassadors to Korea and the UNESCO. David Atchoarena, head of the UIL, suggested that strategic development be promoted in various fields such as equality, health, and citizenship as well as strategies for simple lifelong learning along with a need for various scholarly perspectives following keynote speeches by French Ambassador to Korea Philippe Lefort and Ko Young-rim, chairman of the Jeju International Culture Exchange Association,.
Alejandro Gomez Lopez of Bogota, Colombia, stressed that citizens should be educated as experts at the national level and that COVID-19-related medical information should be shared with others while Kwak Sang-wook, head of the Korea Association of Lifelong Learning Cities, said, “We should now cope with daily changes caused by the pandemic with a new paradigm.”
The second full session titled “Urban Resilience: Strengthening Community and Regional Learning Systems,” premised that the loss of learning in the pandemic era will cause more damage to the vulnerable and drew a consensus from participants with an agreement to reflect worsened situations in education policies.
“In response to various crises, we need to provide all social and age groups with accessible education and services and employ various strategies,” emphasized Ofelia Angelo Guerrero, Mexico’s vice minister of education and technology. Greg Brackenridge, mayor of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom explained about Digital Campus and Community Champion for citizens’ safety and communications.
On Oct. 29, the third day of the 5th ICLC, a college session involving domestic and foreign colleges and universities was held as a special session, leading to nine parallel sessions and the final full session, with meaningful discussions across races and generations in the COVID-19 era.
Ibis Garcia, a professor at the University of Utah, spoke about examples of community formation that allowed citizens to directly participate and practice in various ways, including donating goods to colleges, working on artwork, and planting flowers, and took lead in a serious discussion on how games can be a means of learning and technology learning can be done through a game-oriented curriculum.
In the parallel session I where a detailed discussion took place, a heated discussion was held among four non-face-to-face debaters including Louis Rice, head of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments under the theme of “A city that transforms into a space for health and well-being.” Aminata Goloko of Mantes-la-Jolie, France, and Angelica Alvarado of Huejotzingo, Mexico among others had a debate about promoting access among learning sectors for health.
Later, in the parallel session II, Elmhajib Abdallah of Chefchaouen, Morocco made a presentation Chefchaouen’s policy through which an advisory group is trying to take a gender-equal approach to healthy life and work in the urban environment after the establishment of an equal and fair opportunity committee under the theme of “Health Education to Respond to Climate Change.” Focusing on the theme of “Promoting Healthy Life and Work in Urban Environment,” Beijing Mayor Kan Huang announced the Green Beijing Policy in the region under the title of “To Urban Society from Individuals to Groups.”
In addition, in a debate titled “Health and World Citizen Education,” Mayor Apostolos Kalogiannis of Larissa, Greece emphasized the roles of young people in lifelong learning and Yeonsu-gu Mayor Ko Nam-seok shared “Balconi Concert,” a case of Yeonsu-gu, with the global community along with the importance of a platform to deliver accurate information.
In the final full session titled “Market Forum Report on GNLC Strategy,” the mayor of Mexico City stressed, “Periodic cooperation and coordination are needed among cluster coordinator cities and we need to zero in on technical topics such as well-being, inclusion, literacy campaigns, technology and migration.”
The conference reporter’s briefing session introduced the results of discussions on lifelong learning, global civic education, inclusive education, climate change, health, and well-being. The participants’ session schedule ended late on Oct. 29 with the adoption of the Yeonsu Declaration containing 28 provisions.
