“Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong”: A Unique Intersection of Service-Learning, Personal Narratives, and Second Language Acquisition

Service-learning (SL) is widely understood as an experiential learning pedagogy that moves students beyond the classroom to actively apply academic knowledge and develop civic skills. By working with NGOs and other public organizations, students learn and practice course contents by working on a genuine community need. This paper presents a case study of an SL course called “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong”, offered in the first semester of 2022-23 at a self-financed tertiary institution in Hong Kong. While most English teaching units would resort to teaching English as the academic focus of their SL courses, the subject team adopted innovative instructional and assessment designs: students were required to plan and deliver storytelling workshops, practice story circles, draft personal stories, and record podcasts for asylum-seeking refugee children. Combining SL pedagogy, personal narratives, and digital literacy, the subject successfully motivated students to use English as their second language in a multicultural setting (the service recipients are from six different Asian and African countries originally). Adopting a multimodal narrative inquiry approach, this paper examines students’ twelve drafts and revisions of Covid-19 stories and the refugee children’s seven drafts and revisions of personal narratives. The former were students’ exercises at the initial stage of the course (Weeks 2-6) while the latter were co-authored and co-edited by students and refugee children after the student-led workshops (Weeks 11-12). To triangulate the research, semi-structured interviews are conducted with five student representatives to find out their major takeaways regarding language acquisition.