Balancing national identity and global citizenship: Hong Kong civic education in the digital age

• In Event: Digital-age education implications on student mental health, absenteeism, and citizenship, in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States

Proposal

Hong Kong’s complex identity as a global city is deeply rooted in its legacies of British colonialism, migration, and its role in the international trade system. Transitioning from a British colony to a global city within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, Hong Kong's contemporary identity formation attempts to accommodate two missions: serving as an international hub for communication, technology, trade, and culture as well as strengthening its reintegration efforts with the PRC. The balancing of these two identities has prominently manifested itself in the Hong Kong education system as discussions of how to best cultivate patriotic Hong Kong youth continue to be deliberated. While Hong Kong's global citizenship education (GCE) has historically been regarded as robust by the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study findings, its civic education at the local level has been critiqued for being either heavily nationalistic or neoliberal (Baildon & Alviar-Martin, 2020). Key to this debate was the Liberal Studies civic education subject–initially devised by the British colonial administration and officially implemented by the local government in 2009. It witnessed several reforms that reflected these conflicting agendas about balancing national and global identities (Chong, 2019). Catalyzed by the city’s 2019 protests, its most significant reform in 2020 has ushered in a new era of citizenship education in both primary and secondary school education.
As Hong Kong's formal curriculum becomes more restrictive under the 2020 National Security Law landscape, digital literacy offers a counterbalance by providing students and parents access to global perspectives. Integrating digital literacy into civic education can serve as an alternative to the nationalistic focus of the national security education (NSE) curriculum. The growing incorporation of digital technologies into civic education invites numerous opportunities (e.g., upscaling and expansion) and challenges (e.g., misinformation and surveillance).
This study aims to explore how national and global citizenship are represented in Hong Kong's 2021 national education curricula in secondary schooling, specifically evaluating whether these goals are complementary or conflicting. We consult government-published teaching materials (official curriculum documents and government-produced textbooks) and broader societal discourses (teachers, parents, and students' perspectives, regional scholarly literature, and public speeches). From a pedagogical perspective, we first determine how strategies and learning frameworks within GCE (e.g., cultural exchanges, collaborative, project-based learning, and the promotion of multilingualism) are adapted to those of the NSE. In our second analysis stage, we consider the impact of Hong Kong's increased standardization of formal curriculum on its incorporation of digital technologies, notably focusing on how digital literacy is defined. We hope to bring attention to the importance of civic education in recognizing students’ diverse identities and equipping them with the knowledge and skills needed to understand social issues at both national and global levels. [References available by request]

Authors

• Isabelle R Coloma, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Xiangqian Yu, Stanford University