Engaging Students in Public Discourse through Researching Public Policies and Writing Letters to the Editor

In this talk, we report on a General Education Capstone course we have designed at a university in Hong Kong. The rationale for this course lies in empowering our students to engage in public discourse on the important policy issues affecting them and their fellow citizens, while at the same time facilitating the acquisition of language skills related to effective research and argumentation. As such, students work closely with the instructors individually or in small groups to identify a policy issue, research that issue by writing to the government department concerned under the Code on Access to Information, and, in doing so, develop a strong and coherent argument in the letters section of the South China Morning Post. Drawing on data we have collected from the course activities, including, documents of works in progress, published letters, and students’ reflective journals, we identify 5 frequently used strategies for developing arguments on public policies and demonstrate how the activities and pedagogical goals of the course align with the personal development of our students as citizen scholars, who can articulate their position on diverse social issues related to current government policy and, more importantly, offer potential solutions. More broadly, we therefore see our course as contributing to discussions on how we, as language educators, can provide our students with a stimulating and effective means by which forms of citizenship can be communicated, despite what appears to be wider public disenfranchisement with governance in this context.