How teachers experience teaching social justice with multiple perspectives in new senior secondary liberal studies

Abstract

Inspired by the phenomenographic theoretical framework, this study examines the Hong Kong teachers’ experiences generated from teaching New Senior Secondary Liberal Studies, with a particular focus on how, in a Liberal Studies classroom setting, that teachers handle and discuss the concept of “social justice” from multiple perspectives with regard to a wide range of contemporary controversial issues.

This is a qualitative research, collecting information mainly by interviews. The researcher refers to the principle of phenomenography to investigate the different conceptions of social justice and multiple perspective thinking resulted from teaching and learning of Liberal Studies. The researcher also has lesson observation to analyze how two Liberal Studies teachers develop and deliver their social justice lessons, and what the instant response in class and following written replies are.

The researcher finds that there are six different ways of thinking about teaching social justice among these interviewed teachers. In fact, when the researcher proceeds to analyze the interviewed teachers’ understanding of multiple perspective thinking in the context of teaching social justice, he notices that teachers’ thinking can be categorized into the same six qualitative different kind. The interviewed teachers show identification with traits of these six different ways of thinking simultaneously, named as the follows: social justice and multiple perspective thinking as “knowledge”, “examination strategy”, “ideological beliefs”, “personal sense”, “action”, and “personal ideal”. In this research, it is found that every interviewed teacher shows identification with all the six ways of thinking; it is just that they tend to show more preference for one to two particular ways of thinking. Besides, on the usage of issues as examples in the teaching, it is noticeable that all the interviewed teacher somehow used the Occupy Central incident (Umbrella Movement) which took place in Hong Kong in 2014 as an example in their teaching of social justice, and that there is a tendency of the teachers seeing the incident from the perspectives of the six ways of thinking, so after the discussion of each way of thinking, a part on the teaching of Occupy Central incident will also be added.

In this study, the researcher wants to offer some insights on how teachers can analyze and become more reflective about existing discourses about teaching social justice and multiple perspective thinking in classrooms, and hence the possibilities of supporting them in making some differences in their beliefs and practices. On the curriculum development level, the research result reveals how teachers may teach abstract values in a secondary curriculum, and predicts that for other abstract values other than social justice, such as “patriotism”, “responsibility”, “freedom”, it is likely that the teachers would show similar six ways of thinking when they teach these values. On the teacher level, it is shown in the research result that if teachers are alerted to the six ways of thinking when teaching social justice and multiple perspective thinking, they would be more able to broaden their own teaching philosophy, hence design and undertake teaching activities which enrich and benefit the learning of both themselves and the students.