Last year, HKCI continued to publish teaching kits, organize school workshops and experiential learning activities in line with the curriculum of Liberal Studies. Although our resources are limited, we believed that these three practices means mentioned above are complementary to each other. At the same time, we used different strategies to enrich teachers’ and students’ horizons of Liberal Studies, and arouse a sense of social justice among the youth. Last year, we focused on three issues, including globalization, anti-discrimination and economic development in China.

3.1 School Workshops

Since the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization was held in Hong Kong in 2005, Hong Kong people began to reflect upon the distribution of wealth under globalization. HKCI was invited by schools to talk about how globalization generates wealth while destroying the livelihood of the poor. When we analyzed the causes of poverty, we emphasized on the structural causes of poverty such as globalization, external debt, and social policy. Meanwhile we pinpointed the standard of human rights as reference for the students. Compared with the students’ stereotypings (for instances, poverty only exists in Africa, poverty is due to personal failure or lack of education), our perspective facilitated students to explore the issues of poverty.

We aimed at integrating human rights perspective for students while dealing with various issues. To facilitate students to have a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of human rights, including political, civil, economic and cultural rights, HKCI joined the preparatory committee of International Human Rights Day (IHRD) to organize a series of workshops for students.

After the workshops, many students joined IHRD’s essay competition and project learning competition. It was a meaningful process for the students to understand more about human rights through their own research and analysis.

Since the Chief Executive “election” was held in March, many schools and youth centres took that opportunity to carry out related education programmes. HKCI was invited to deliver workshops on democracy and election systems. While discussing the principles of democracy, we pointed out that economic development and political system were interrelated rather than exclusive to each other. We also emphasized that political participation is basic to human rights.

3.2 Experiential Learning

Since 2003, HKCI and the Alliance of Civic Education (ACE) have launched experiential learning activities for students to understand poverty issue in Hong Kong by community observation. Last year, HKCI and the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor organized experiential learning programme for school students to Shamshuipo. In the programme, they visited shopping malls, markets, old buildings, parks to have observations; interviewed with cleaners and compared the product price of the district. Although it is not the first time that students visited Shamshuipo, it was a new experience for them as observers. After the field trip, we discussed the causes of poverty with students.

“World Without Bystander” comprised of workshops, exposure trip and follow up activities. The theme topic of our programme was rural-urban migration in the Philippines. As there are more than 200,000 migrant workers in Hong Kong, their reasons of migration are a good starting point to understand the poverty in the Philippines. We visited slum communities to learn about the living condition of the slum dwellers and the reasons of rural-urban migration. During the trip, we visited several NGOs working for the slum communities and peasants. We also touched issues like privatization of public services, how government policies affected livelihood of peasants and labourers.
We observed there were obvious transformations among the students on the concept of poverty after the exposure trip. Participants engaged in different follow-up activities to share their experiences and learning in schools, churches and internet podcast programme.

3.3 Teaching Kit

The ACE published a teaching kit on economic development in China, namely “Economic Development in China (2)” in 2006. It contains three chapters which focus on coal mining tragedy, food safety and sweatshop respectively. We aimed at facilitating students to have reflection on each person’s social responsibilities. We also organised a book launch and seminar as in previous years.

The third volume of teaching kit on China issues had been drafted, addressing the issues of Olympics Games in Beijing, human rights defending movement and freedom of information.

HKCI continued to publish YX Newsletters to provide online resources for teachers to discuss social issues. Even though some topics of the newsletters were not popular, for example, asylum seekers in Hong Kong and political killings in the Philippines, some teachers praised that it is good to provide global perspective for students which is otherwise not available in school.

HKCI published a teaching kit on anti-discrimination. The kit addresses the concept on discrimination and illustrates the issue with respect to people with disability, ethnic and sexual minorities.

3.4 Public Education Event

HKCI joined the preparatory committee of IHRD to organize the IHRD Carnival in order to promote local and international human rights issues to the public.

We set up a counter to advocate on the issue of political killings in the Philippines. Political killings in the Philippines were escalating and most of the victims were activists who work for the grassroots people. HKCI supported the actions of the campaign to stop the killings in the Philippines, meanwhile, we felt it is important to arouse Hong Kong people’s awareness on the issue.

CHAN Sze Wan