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Case Studies:  Examples of Class Activities


Here, you can read some brief descriptions by teachers in our project of their class activities.

An e-book is planned to describe the process of developing and implementing these activities in more detail. Stay tuned!

In Philosophical and Socio-cultural Issues in Education, the teacher focused on raising students’ awareness on how racial discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes work in education and beyond, and emotionally identifying with how racism negatively affects people’s physical and mental health, students’ educational outcomes, and society and economy broadly. In the specific class developed for this project, students watched a video about an ethnic minority student, who was born and educated in Hong Kong, sharing her experience of racism in a school setting where she was tutoring. Students experienced the emotions and feelings of an ethnic minority student who encountered racism. They were asked to imagine themselves in her condition to empathize with her. The project also influenced other activities in the course. For example, a guest speaker of Indian heritage working for the Asian Development Bank was invited to give a lecture on various educational issues using examples from different countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The students had the opportunity to interact and engage with her during the session, increasing a sense of identification and empathy. 

In the psychology course Multicultural Minds in Communication, the teacher focused on increasing students' positive emotional and real-life engagement with various activities. In the specific class period where she used the pre- and post-survey, she asked students to watch an emotionally engaging film about a multicultural school team project that "went wrong," and asked them to try empathizing with different characters in the film, to increase empathic engagement with people of different cultures. Other activities were influenced by the project as well; for example, she increased activities that allowed students to communicate with students from other cultures, including completing on-Zoom ethnographic interviews with students from two different cultures (at Georgetown University, in the USA, and Tilburg University, in the Netherlands), instead of article presentations she assigned students to create play-acted videos of solving cross-cultural miscommunications, and she asked students of Georgetown University to engage with those videos via blog comments and replies from EdUHK students.

For Economics for Public Policy, the NGO “Eldpathy” presented an online experiential workshop aimed to increase empathy for the difficulties faced by the elderly, which was supplemented with discussion and videos about how the elderly across the world deal with similar issues. The experiential workshop promotes empathy for the elderly, especially those of low SES / living alone, which is linked to videos of elderly labor in South Korea, emphasizing the global nature of the plight of such individuals. After the workshop, discussion focused on how the exercise of understanding the plight of underprivileged individuals, including specifically sympathizing with them, can influence policymaking around issues of urban living, and how policymaking itself can be more sympathetic via structural methods (e.g., consultation, co-production, collaborative governance).

In Traditions and Practices of Music II: Chinese Music and World Music, the course focused on increasing students' global awareness and real-life engagement in music through hands-on activities with guest speakers and performers, including Koji Matsunobu (Japanese music) and the Africa Centre Hong Kong (West African music). Two units of Japanese and West African music were provided to two groups of students in BACAC and DD (BACAC+BEd). The guests shared insider experiences of performing music, and the students were able to taste what it is like to live in those countries as cultural bearers. A variety of activities were included in the multicultural units, such as noh dance and singing and Afrobeat ensemble performances. Noh was developed more than 500 years ago. Its aesthetics emphasizes slowness and subdued expression. Students experienced and participated in patterned movements in noh dance and singing of a wedding song. The guest performers from the Africa Centre Hong Kong provided a workshop on instrumental music performances using the instruments available at EdUHK. Students were given an introduction and first-hand experience of collaborating and working with real musicians from West Africa. They learned key concepts of African music through the co-creation of an ensemble performance. These activities provided students with physical and affective ways to engage in music from other cultures and develop a heightened awareness of culture-specific expressions of music. Students continued to explore other examples of world music (such as music from India) throughout the semester. 

In a General Education Interdisciplinary Course, Ideals and Reality: Urban Environments, the course content enabled students to explore the notions of what an ideal life might be and how an ideal city should function from an interdisciplinary perspective. Since "multiculturalism"/ "globalization" is one of the dominant themes in the field of Urban Environments, a field trip was arranged during one of the sessions to the Kowloon Mosque and Islamic Centre situated in Tsim Sha Tsui. A guest lecture followed by a tour of the Mosque was arranged by the gracious host. The guest lecture focused on raising students’ awareness and positive emotions about the contributions made by the ethnic and religious minorities in Hong Kong and focused on increasing students’ empathy with the challenges they face while critically analysing the relationships between the realities of life and an ideal city.

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