Mini-Series: Inquiry as Public Service

This three-part series documents classroom-based research with welfare administration undergraduates in Gwangju, South Korea. Each study emerged from a semester devoted to practicing inquiry as a bridge between theory and public service.

Rather than learning research as abstraction, students engaged in situated investigations—observing parks as welfare infrastructure, analyzing accessibility as policy practice, and re-seeing their own city through the eyes of global visitors. These projects invited students to apply academic methods to lived contexts, translating reflection into reasoning and observation into professional intuition.

Grounded in document-based analysis, fieldwork, and role-played civic consulting, the studies explore how English-medium welfare education can cultivate emerging forms of policy literacy, empathy, and localized civic imagination. Together, they trace a shared question: How can EFL classrooms become laboratories for public reasoning and welfare insight?

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