Let’s Celebrate Our Inaugural Join-the-Conversation Event!

By Vienne Lin

Going back to our wrap-up in the first issue, CoP – ITL considers itself playing the role of a middleman who keeps its community humming. And if you ask us have we hit the mark so far, I’ll say “Yes, we have!” The inaugural Join-the-Conversation event, held on 6 February 2018 at HKU, attracted nearly fifty event participants across institutions.

Internationalisation of teaching and learning has been set out as one key goal in many higher education institutions locally and globally. Yet, teachers often being at the sharp end may wonder how to make this happen. In this Join-the-Conversation event, three directors of teaching and learning centres, Prof. Grahame Bilbow, Prof. Chih Chen Chang and Dr. Eva Wong, shared with us some insightful overviews of the respective institutional development in internationalisation of teaching and learning at HKU, HKUST and HKBU.

Following the overviews, our five speakers who came from different disciplines, elaborated their internationalised teaching practices in various widths. The topics covered included:

• Dr. Chun Kit Chui’s Wastewater Treatment in Myanmar
• Prof. May-yi Shaw’s Leading Classroom towards Diversity
• Mr. Patrick Desloge’s Nurturing Global Leaders through Students’ Teaching Experience in Myanmar
• Dr. Lucia Fung’s Leveraging Diversity to Improve Classroom Learning
• Prof. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren’s On Becoming-Other Internationalisation at “Home”

Besides the content-rich presentations, some issues pertinent to internationalisation of teaching and learning were raised and answered in the panel discussion. For example,

1. What could we do to change the majority of students’ mindset to a more internationalised one?
2. What were the differences between service learning, co-curricular learning and experiential learning?

This inaugural meeting ended with remarks by Dr. Tracy Zou that CoP – ITL’s international adviser Prof. Betty Leask would be visiting us at HKU on 23 March 2018 and that those who were interested in designing their pilot projects shall not miss this opportunity.