Chapter 5: Avoiding Future Hauntings?: Teaching for Social Justice in Higher Education in the Postcolonial Context of Hong Kong

The growing literature on transnational education tends to focus on quality assurance dimensions, cultural equivalences of administrative processes, and learning, teaching, and assessment practices. As transnational higher education continues to be dominated by offshore programs offered by the major English-speaking countries, the related literature is replete with analyses of “problems” that are encountered in the “other” environment, in particular by nonlocal teaching staff. This chapter takes a more personal perspective and offers an autoethnographic account of my experiences of working in postgraduate transnational higher education programs in Hong Kong, experiences that I consider to be fundamentally linked with issues of social justice. I foreground several questions to consider in relation to perspectives on teaching for social justice in international higher education, including the following:

What complexities do I experience as a British woman teaching in a postcolonial context?

How are these complexities mirrored in the multicultural student group?

How important is it to be open to the discomfort that I experience in this context and to work with it to develop cultural capability – in myself and in students?

What are the challenges in encouraging students to critique dominant theories and consider their relevance to the Hong Kong context?