Helping teenage university learners in a market culture to see the “inner I”

This paper aims to share practices on curriculum design and pedagogies which aim at helping university teenage learners (living in a metropolitan environment) to see and be connected to their “inner I”. The paper will be based upon real life classroom teaching experience derived from teaching “Faith and Reason” at The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Educational principles and methods that touch upon and challenge – and perhaps also overcome – most learners’ pre-understandings and beliefs about their selves, their epistemologies, and their worldviews will be shared. The baseline and expected educational learning outcomes for the learners are that they should at least see the world with a deepened and enlightened awareness based upon their “Inner I”. The expected outcomes of this proposed paper are thus two-folded. First, educators in the field would be mutually benefitted while gaining an awareness about the “Inner I” as an essential and available building block for interreligious dialogues. Secondly, since the “Inner I” has been in the background as the foundational cornerstone for most of the core teachings of most religions, helping learners to get see it is equivalent to showing them the spirituality gateway of self-exploration, self-care, and self-development. And in relation to the context of this proposed paper, this would be equivalent to giving the youthful learners in Hong Kong an invaluable philosophical and spirituality experience, which not many of them have had when growing up in the strongly competitive, commercial, and the often very externally driven “multicultural” Market society of Hong Kong.