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Dr. Tang Wai Man received his PhD in Anthropology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. His doctoral thesis is on the relationships between heroin use and transnational migration among the second and third generations of Nepalis in Hong Kong. His research interests include drugs, migration, sports and South Asian cultures. One of the General Education course that Dr. Tang taught, viz. UGEC1685 Drugs and Culture, is quite related to his research interests. He has also been teaching four other General Education courses, namely: GENA1113 Student-oriented Teaching and Seminar, UGEA1333 Multiculturalism and China, UGEC1681 Humans and Culture, and UGEC1835 Culture of Hong Kong. He is currently researching a South Asian sport, kabaddi, with the focus on two aspects: its cultural politics during the worlding process and its educative value when it is developed as a tool for intercultural education in Hong Kong.
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Teaching Philosophy
I majored in Anthropology for my Bachelor’s degree, and my first field experience was to visit a charismatic church that Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong attended. During the Sunday service, the congregation cried vehemently as they said their prayers. I was somewhat taken aback. Prior to my visit, I had taken the liberty of reading an ethnography titled “Maid to Order in Hong Kong” authored by Nicole Constable, through which I gained a sense of the complicated relationships between Hong Kong employers and foreign domestic workers. However, this close encounter gave me firsthand experience of their plight and I was driven to further understand their precarious situation – some of them believe that their misery is caused by their sins; therefore, absolving them at church gives them hope in their everyday life.
Ethnographers spend years to carry out fieldwork in a community and writing ethnographies to show the complexities of human life. During the time that I was a student, I became fascinated by such attempts to delineate human life. Meanwhile, I found that this endeavor can be actually enriched through experiential learning; that is, providing field experience to students and encouraging them to conduct field research in their community. This learning approach is called participatory action research (PAR), which I have included in my teaching of General Education courses.
PAR has three basic areas: knowledge, practice and research. Students first acquire the basic knowledge of a specific topic. Then, they partake in arranged fieldtrips, in which they conduct participant observation and interviews. After the fieldtrip, the students write a fieldtrip report, which synthesizes the collected field data and academic knowledge. Since the teacher arranges the field visits, some of the ethnographic field components are determined beforehand. After acquiring the necessary integrative skills for research work, the students are expected to carry out independent research, which means that they have to learn how to formulate a research question, arrange for the field visits, contact the informants, collect the field data, and write an ethnographic report.
Based on student feedback, this step-by-step approach in PAR facilitates a better understanding of some of the more abstract academic knowledge through concrete examples and increases their confidence when they carry out their own research work. From the perspective of a teacher, PAR is impactful in at least three different areas, namely knowledge, social relations, and affectional affiliation. For example, students learn through PAR on how to develop a systematic way to understand their everyday life, become more receptive to communicating with people of different cultural backgrounds, and intervene more in the affairs of their communities. In some cases, the students would even take action to address the problems that they identified in their research.
In this ever-changing world, students need to have a wide scope of knowledge, and general education attempts to fulfill this need. Yet, many imagine that this ever-changing world is only associated with high-end globalization with a focus on the development of the latest technologies and the growth of international regulatory institutions. However, marginalized encounters, like a Filipino domestic worker attending a church service, a Nepali drug user staying at a residential drug rehab center, and an African asylum seeker organizing a cultural tour in the Chungking Mansions, are also reflective of larger issues across multiple realms in Hong Kong, from the local to the global. Thus, teaching and learning should not be restricted by space; society can also be the classroom.
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