Teaching for Empowerment: Turning Passive Learners to Active Knowledge Producers

Abstract

This article is a case study of the Common Core course CCCH9005, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which a student-generated oral history project is integrated into the course design. Through this case study, I seek to demonstrate how this project enhances students’ critical thinking abilities and empowers students to be knowledge producers for a student-built oral history online archive. Background: CCCH 9005 has been offered at HKU since the beginning of its Common Core Curriculum. A main objective of the course is to turn students from the passive learners to active knowledge seekers and producers. As one of her teaching innovations, Dr. Aihe Wang (the course coordinator and lecturer) designed an oral history project for the students, which is closely tied to the content of the lectures and course materials. She experimented it in 2017-18, gaining successful results and enthusiastic feedback from students. With these as the base, the teaching team formally launched a project in 2018-19, entitled “Pilot Project on Student Generated Knowledge: An Oral History Online Archival Database,” which won a Teaching Development Grant. The initiative and practice that develop and promote teaching and learning: This project develops a model of student-generated knowledge database which deepens the engagement of students in an active learning environment. It provides an opportunity for students to co-construct an online database of student-generated knowledge recording their family histories during the Cultural Revolution. This project strives to inspire students to explore, document, and critically reflect on their family experiences during the Cultural Revolution and its impact on individual lives. The fundamental objective of the project is to empower students to learn more actively and participate in the writing of the history of modern China. Methods of evidence collection and analysis: To prepare, undertake, analyse, and document their oral history interviews, students need to be actively engaged in reading, researching, asking, discussing, interpreting, and writing. To develop the project, students need to engage the sources assigned by the course to contextualize and critically examine the history testimonies. Through this process, students could understand how history is continuously constructed, complemented, and contested. In the next step, students need to design a research proposal, undertake the interview, and conduct disciplinary research. At the final stage of the project, each student generates a one-page archive, and all participants co-construct an online oral history archive. Discussion on the effectiveness of the initiative and practice: Through this project, the students become important preservers of their family history. After a trial of our project in the Spring Semester of 2018, many students expressed that the project empowered them to put fragments of family history together, finally understanding how the revolution had impacted their families and their own lives. In addition, through the critical study of their family members’ experiences, they recognized interrelatedness of self, family, and society, as well as history and presence. This thus mirrors the ultimate goal of our course -- to help students grow into independent, critical thinkers.