Teaching for Empowerment: Creative Use of Student-Generated Knowledge to Enrich Learning

Abstract

This paper will use the approaches and practices adopted by Dr. Aihe Wang, Honorary Associate Professor from School of Chinese at HKU, to illustrate how a student-generated knowledge project empowered students to grow into producers of knowledge by developing them as partners during the implementation process. This project provides an opportunity for students to co-construct an online database of oral history testimonies. To prepare, undertake, analyze, and document their oral history interviews, students need to be actively engaged in reading, researching, asking, discussing, interpreting and writing. At the final stage of the project, each student generates a one-page archive, and all participants co-construct an online oral history archive. 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. This study also attempts to address the active role of teachers in this learning process. Teachers should actively adjust teaching methodology based on students’ difficulties and provide support to help students develop deeper levels of thinking.