Enhancing student learning through social justice education: Conceptual clarification, learning and teaching methods

This project aims at incorporating an innovative perspective of ‘social justice’ in two undergraduate courses, with innovative in the sense of bringing social justice to a more prominent place in undergraduate teaching, thus contributing to student attainment of GILO of ethical decision making. By equipping students with a conceptual lens and analytical perspective of ‘social justice’, which aims at developing students ability to form a value judgement and discern issues of fairness and justice behind, students can move beyond analytical method such as cost-benefits analysis. The project design is re-organizing the teaching contents and adding ‘social justice’ as a perspective without affecting the overall course contents, so as to explore the effectiveness of applying social justice as a form of issue analysis and ethical decision making by engaging students in conceptual clarification and learning activities. Finally, a class of 27 and a class of 26 have separately been delivered three lectures of social justice teaching unit in the first seminar and the second seminar in 2017/2018 respectively. To analyze the effectiveness of the study unit, mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative research were adopted. Quantitatively, most of the participants filled in a pre-teaching questionnaire before the teaching, while a post-teaching questionnaire were completed after the teaching. Qualitatively, two focus groups were held to explore more in-depth insights into subjects’ thinking of the study unit. The following part will briefly report the result of the quantitative evaluation.