Implementation of Service-learning Engagement through Chinese Story Telling and Writing

This is a Service-learning course.

 

This course is an interdisciplinary course offered by Department of History and Language Centre. This course combines oral history skills with advanced Chinese narrative and reporting writing skills. It integrates theory and practice, such as key concepts and methodologies in oral history and ethnographic studies, strategy of narrative and investigation theory in Chinese storytelling and writing, interview preparation and reporting. As an interdisciplinary course, it would lead students to compare and contrast the two disciplines (history and literary) and integrate the methods and perspectives. The course also invites guest speakers such as social workers or professional trainers from NGOs, to teach students how to communicate with the elderly. Students will design and implement a Creative Community Service-learning Project to serve the elderly and society in Hong Kong or Mainland China.

 

This course provides students with an opportunity to reach out to the elderly in the community. It aims to reinvent and innovate the tradition of storytelling and listening as students take down stories narrated by the older generation, preserving the culture and memories of a generation with words, and inheriting the wisdom and experiences passed down to them. Through these oral records, the students are able to understand the community identity of different groups of people and have a glimpse of the collective memories of generations before. This will enable them to have a better understanding of their community and learn from the life experiences of people from diverse backgrounds. The course will also cultivate the social awareness and sense of social responsibility of students by connecting them with people from all walks of life in their community. Students will write an individual online journals about their service-learning experiences in this course and reflect on how they connect between the service users, the trainers and social Others and the world around them. Finally, students will produce a Chinese booklet/multimedia output (e.g., a few pages of leaflet/a 5 minutes video), as a gift to those seniors, which record their personal history, collective memory and self-identity of the service users. The course ultimately improves the students’ ability to solve problems, communicate and work together as a team as they put into practice what they have learnt by serving the community.

 

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