The Tile Makers and Matchers

By Vienne Lin

Thinking of my old school days, students seemed to have limited say about how we wanted to be taught. It’s like when you play Tetris, whatever Tetrominos are going to fall will fall. Students with less flexibility would find it hard to digest what is passed down. Blocks of knowledge would be stacked, instead of cleared. But time has changed. Nowadays, students are encouraged to participate fully and be the constructor of excellence in teaching and learning.

An international conference – Co-Constructing Excellence: Recognising, Scaffolding and Building Excellence in University Learning and Teaching, hosted by the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) on 18 to 19 December 2018, provided a platform for multiple stakeholders, ranging from academics or education developers, to students, to administrators, to create a coherent picture of what teaching excellence means. Thank you to all 120 higher education professionals from 15 countries who joined us!

Among these 120 participants, CoP – ITL also presented its work in the poster session, discussing how we build capacity for tertiary teachers in internationalisation of teaching and learning through a communities-of-practice approach. We were also very glad to hear nine of our members and four of our co-leaders who spoke about their wise practices in the oral paper presentations, poster and join-the-conversation sessions. And congratulations to Dr. Shelen Ho from the University of Reading Malaysia and Mr. Gavin Coates from HKU on receiving the Best Paper Presentation Award and the Best Poster Presentation Award, respectively. More details can be found on Dr. Tracy Zou’s article about “Achieving impact through co-construction: Successful conclusion of CETL’S international conference 2018”.

Going back to the game of Tetris, clearing four blocks at a time is excellent. What about teaching and learning? We hope that teaching (the tile making) is not fixated on the teachers’ side and learning (the tile matching) on the students’. Rather, we hope to see that empowered students would go further and become the tile makers themselves and that teachers could be supportive facilitators, or even the tile matchers. And so is the role of teaching and learning. It is not static, but dynamic.