Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, through the 'Jeonbuk Studies University Education' program organized by the Jeonbuk Studies Research Center, is producing educational outcomes that uncover new values in local social and cultural assets and contribute to training skilled professionals.

The Department of Archaeology & Anthropology is now in the second year of offering the course 'Glocal Life and Culture of Jeonbuk,' which was newly introduced in the second semester of last year. The course moves beyond classroom theory by adopting a field-investigation–based learning approach, enabling students to actively explore Jeonbuk's cultural identity and the value of regionality.

This year's classes included expert lectures on Jeonju's food culture, cultural regeneration in Gunsan, and the utilization of cultural resources in Namwon. Field trips to Gunsan and Namwon followed, allowing students to observe the lecture topics in situ and experience the process of producing regional cultural content.

The Namwon field trip was planned around the core theme of 'healing' and examined storytelling tourism cases at sites including Namwon Municipal Museum and the Jirisan Herb Valley botanical garden. A subsequent talk session on tourism content planning featured student-led idea presentations.

On the Gunsan field trip, under the theme of 'regeneration,' students visited Cheolgil Village, the Modern Cultural Heritage Street, an urban regeneration forest, and Beaport to examine how modern cultural assets are converted into tourism resources and to study local reinterpretation strategies. After the trip, another talk session based on the Gunsan cases strengthened student-participatory learning.

Following the field trips, students conducted team projects to investigate various areas of Jeonbuk directly and produced reports on discovering everyday culture-based content. They analyzed the potential to transform traditional markets into tourism resources, focusing on cases such as Gomso, Jeonju, and Buan traditional markets. Surveys of representative cultural resources, including Namwon's Gwanghallu and Iksan's Jewelry Museum, were also carried out to explore the region's cultural potential and possible uses from multiple perspectives.

Professor Lim Gyeong-taek (Department of Archaeology & Anthropology), who is responsible for the course, emphasized, 'This class is designed to link humanistic inquiry with field experience so that students can newly understand the meaning of their region and experience discovering their own identities within it. It is highly meaningful that students come to realize that what had been viewed only as a territory at risk of disappearance actually possesses diverse possibilities and potential, and that they develop the ability to explore and interpret it independently.'

Meanwhile, JBNU assessed that the program has shown positive results in terms of the modern utilization of regional cultural resources and the cultivation of future talent, and plans to further expand Jeonbuk Studies–based educational content to strengthen a model in which the region and the university grow together.