Teaching global citizenship education with teaching models of empathy and critical literacy: Case study of Hong Kong secondary schools

This paper examines how Hong Kong SAR secondary school teachers develop and teach global citizenship education with teaching models of empathy and critical literacy. Action research has been employed with two Hong Kong secondary schools in two school calendar years to examine how teaching models of empathy and critical literacy can be designed and implemented in junior secondary schools’ PSHE subjects on two selected topics of understanding poverty and knowing about ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. The findings show that teachers develop students’ empathy towards others by engaging them with learning cycles of experiential learning and reflection, and teachers develop students’ critical literacy by analyzing different texts on a same topic so as to enable them to see beyond their own perspectives and assumptions. The findings have got implications for understanding how to implement global citizenship education in junior secondary education, in particular for educators who aim at engaging the learners in reflective and critical analysis and seeing how to build up the linkages between local and global among the learners.