Editorial – Partnering with our Students and Celebrating our Teachers – Peter Lau and Ronnel King
In this issue of the T&L Connections, we showcase our partnership with our students and celebrate our teachers’ achievements. Section 1 and 2 focuses on Students as Partners (SaP). SaP, as a high-impact practice, is drawing increasing attention across the globe. SaP helps engage students in curriculum design, pedagogical conceptualisation, decision-making, implementation, investigation, and analysis, resulting in higher motivation and stronger ownership for learning. It also provides an excellent opportunity for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, curriculum development, and faculty professional development.
Last November 2021, we organised an online SaP seminar series and invited global practitioners/researchers to share successful SaP projects in their universities. The shared projects included “Ako in Action” at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, “CoLabs” at Deakin University, a children’s literacy project at National University of Singapore, and “Research equals Teaching” (R=T) at Northumbria University. Follow-up interviews were arranged with the four seminar speakers to further delve into their experiences in relation to SaP. Section 1 summarises their unique SaP principles, stories, obstacles, and takeaway messages. We encourage colleagues to think about how they can engage and tap their students and perhaps even make them partners in their teaching.
Section 2 “Championing Students as Partners @ HKU” features two recent award-winning projects at our university. We interviewed two HKU colleagues and their student partners who are engaging in their SaP projects. Ms. Tanya Kempston, from the Faculty of Education, who won the HKU’s Teaching Innovation Award 2021, worked with student partners, Ms Alya prasad and Ms Mari Lam, on an innovative project, the Hear This! Radio Drama on Zoom. Dr. Julie Chen from the LKS Faculty of Medicine and her student partners, Ms Evelyn Chan and Ms Vernice Chan, worked on a Near-Peer Teaching (NPT) Initiative which won the Champion award in an inter-institutional competition, Redesign of Student Learning Experience in Higher Education 2021, organised by the HERDSA HK Branch and five Hong Kong universities. Read their exciting stories and learn more about how we can attract our students as partners.
In Section 3, we take the opportunity to express our gratitude to the Teaching Excellence Award (TEA) winners who generously shared with us their stories and takeaway messages. How do they view teaching and learning? What innovative efforts have they engaged in to make student learning challenging yet enjoyable? How did they frame effective teaching? You will learn all these tips in this section.
The final section is an invited article that continues a thread of discussion begun in the last issue of our T&L Connections (Issue 15). Our guest contributor, Professor Kara Chan, Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning), School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University, shares her experiences of partnering with industry practitioners to develop practice-informed learning materials.
We hope you can gain some insights from this new issue of our Teaching and Learning Connections. If you have interesting stories to share, please feel free to send them to us and we would be happy to feature them.
