This study investigates how a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s secondary school teacher developed and implemented global citizenship education by adapting a spiral teaching model of empathy, experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities in two teaching cycles. One key aim of Hong Kong’s education reform is to prepare students for challenges in a globalization age. This case study used action research on two different cohorts of about 36 students in two school years’ teaching cycles (2013–2014 and 2014–2015). The students were taught by a secondary school teacher with an aim of cultivating their empathy through experiential learning in authentic contexts. The author participated as a researcher who observed and facilitated the evaluation. The learning topic is ‘understanding poverty’ in this interdisciplinary junior secondary PSHE subject. The findings reveal that through an adaptation of empathy learning model, even junior secondary school students can develop perspective-taking empathy with experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities. Also, whereas the first teaching cycle started with experiencing different contexts of poverty before having classroom inquiry learning activities, the second teaching cycle started with exposing students to multiple quantitative and narrative descriptions of poverty and to investigate stories of those affected by poverty before having experiential learning of different contexts of poverty. There was a higher level of empathy by those students who were exposed to prior background and conceptual understanding before engaging in authentic learning. But the two cohorts of students could achieve the learning objectives of seeing through others’ perspectives, making imagined connections between their lives and the lives of others who are less fortunate, linking the local and the global by analyzing how the global economic restructuring affects the local lives, and fostering their willingness

This chapter examines the role and nature of values in civic education curricula in the Asian global cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Using a qualitative, comparative case study approach, we situate civic education in broader contexts and analyze the ways values are represented in Singapore’s Social Studies curriculum and the Liberal Studies curriculum in Hong Kong. Through our analysis of syllabus documents and broader societal discourses, we found several common core values across the two settings that simultaneously represented nationalist and global neoliberal discourses of citizenship. Rather than emphasizing political or civic concerns, curricular and societal discourses worked together to underscore self-management and the creation of orderly national societies attractive to global capital and necessary for economic growth in a competitive global economy. However, we found distinctions in each syllabus regarding approaches in values instruction. Documents in Singapore emphasized teaching values through transmissive methods, whereas, in Hong Kong, the Liberal Studies curriculum advocated a more deliberative pedagogy. The chapter poses broader questions regarding narrow, utilitarian forms of citizenship and possibilities for reimagining more critical forms of citizenship education in a globalized world.
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