“What’s Next?”: The Development of “Glocal” Citizenship in Co-Curricular Learning Experience

By Tiffany Ko

“I always ask my students towards the end of their [overseas] trips: What’s next?” said Mr. Tony Chan, the former Assistant Director of Student Affairs and Director of Leadership Quality Centre (LQC) of HKBU.

If you have participated in our recent Join-the-Conversation event: Creating High-Impact Learning Experience through Internationalising the Co-Curriculum, you may well recall the above articulation from Tony. In the presentation, he shared an inspiring story from the Service-Learning Global Internship Programme (SLGIP) to illustrate how an overseas attachment opportunity could create far-reaching impact on students’ personal development and social awareness. In another face-to-face interview with Tony, he remarked that he and his team were eager to replicate the success by reforming their training and learning in co-curricular programmes. Drawing from Tony’s presentation and interview about internationalising the co-curriculum, this article hopes to offer readers some food for thought.

A Beautiful Coincident
In the SLGIP, which engages HKBU students in providing short-term services to NGOs outside Hong Kong, two students were assigned to run a summer camp in 2017 for an organisation serving children with hearing impairment in Taichung. Both students, back then, had neither communicated with people with hearing challenges nor had much knowledge about the Taichung community. Thanks to the seven weeks of training and mentoring from the host, the participating students integrated well into the service community. They also acquired elementary sign language—a handle that would allow them to communicate with the needed of all ages and cultural backgrounds.

While Tony considered it a nice ending to their internship, one of the participants surprised him in a year after. The student signed up for another LQC programme about seeking seed funding for community service initiatives. She proposed publishing picture books for children with hearing loss in Hong Kong in order to raise the public awareness of their social welfare. Although there was no evidence showing a direct relationship between the internship and the student’s later orientation in community service, the series of unplanned events illuminated the potential of a well-planned and well-guided overseas attachment experience which could help develop students’ “glocal” citizenship.

The “Local –> Global –> Local” Model
The above experience has inspired the LQC to (re)develop overseas programmes with the following characteristics:

• Objective: Programmes aim to develop students as “glocal” citizens who become well-informed about the globe while bringing the best they have learnt from the host organisations/cities/countries back to the Hong Kong society.
• Structure: Programmes will have 3 phases. Phase 1 provides students with Hong Kong-based training that develops their awareness of some local issues. Phase 2 arranges overseas field trips and service opportunities for students to consolidate their understanding of different social issues. Phase 3 encourages returning students to design solutions or related advocacy activities.
• Prototype: The Change-Makers Programme (also a CoP – ITL pilot project led by Tony) was launched to translate the theories into practice. With “animal welfare” being the theme of AY18/19, students first learnt about the situation of street dogs and cats from a local NGO in fall 2018. Some of them then enrolled in a trip to Johor Bahru, Malaysia to take care of abandoned animals in January 2019. The participants rounded up the programme in April 2019 by running handicraft booths, film shows, and sharing sessions on HKBU campus to raise funds for a relevant local NGO (for details, please go to https://sa.hkbu.edu.hk/lqc/gv/global-vision/change-makers-programme#about-cmp).

Acknowledgments
The feature story draws on an interview with Mr. Tony Chan who generously shared with us his experiences and insights, and we hope we have done justice to the wisdom of his practice in the internationalisation of teaching and learning.