Community For Enhancing Intercultural Learning Experiences

THE SESSION

This Community supports and promotes the efforts of faculty and staff to enhance the intercultural learning experiences and competence of students at HKUST. Findings of a survey of UG students regarding their intercultural learning experiences (conducted in 2017), as well as those from a study of faculty and staff and their understanding of student expectations of these experiences (conducted in 2019) indicate a need for attention to these issues.

In the past year, various events, meetings and training sessions, were held online and off. Community members have taken this training and enthusiasm forward into their own work. In this meeting, Tina Ko, Student Advising Manager, and her students from School of Science will report on training conducted in her department. May Liao from CLE will report on an idea co-created with a group of students that won the award for ‘Most Innovative Idea’ during the “#U2.1: Co-creating a Competency-based Future” program in June. Graham England, also from CLE, will report on plans for a film festival, Diversity = Strength, in the new Shaw Auditorium in February 2022.

We hope you will support these and other initiatives in the coming year.

WHO ARE WE?

Melissa Megan, Principal Coordinator
Melissa is a Senior Lecturer in the CLE. Melissa has been living and interacting interculturally for about 30 years, 22 of those having been spent at HKUST. Melissa is a proponent of Internationalisation at Home: ‘…the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments’ (Beelen & Jones, 2015), and hopes this is what this Community can work towards achieving at HKUST.

Beatrice Chu, Coordinator
Beatrice is an Educational Developer and heads up the professional development programs and initiatives at CEI for faculty and frontline teaching staff. She has over 20 years of experience working in different sectors in tertiary education. Beatrice was trained as a physicist, and her current interests are innovative instructional approaches and programs that facilitate students' knowledge, skillset, and mindset for the 21st century. She involves in multiple intercultural teaching competence initiatives at HKUST.