The project connects 10 HKU students with 10 students from the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia, a U21 partner, in a virtual collaborative exchange to identify and share practices of coping with stress and well-being within the campus environment and drawing from resources in the wider community. Through experiential learning activities including collaborative “yarning” methodology-led storytelling, conceptualising and creation of artefacts, and producing a short-film, students learn about self-identity and well-being, and the differences and convergences across two contrasting contexts, while deepening intercultural understanding, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and design-based learning.

Recently, HKSAR has established the Countryside Conservation Fund to promote sustainability at countryside. Though such fund does not cover education, education about countryside and the dilemma it faces could synergize the effort.
Fishponds in Inner Deep Bay are listed as a priority area and are facing the land use conflicts among development, fishing and conservation. Land use conflicts, like many other sustainability issues, are socially controversial scientific issues.
Socio-scientific issues (SSI) highlight the importance to incorporate multiple perspectives to make decisions and judgment with scientific ground and humanity values. Given the mainstream emphasis on either conservation or development at countryside, the voice of the minority groups, who are the stakeholders being influenced directly, has rarely been heard.

In order for students to have a better understanding of the conflicts, site-visits to the fishponds will be organized in a common core course (CCST9035 Making Sense of Science-related Social Issues). In addition to introducing the environment and ecology of the fishponds by the conservationist, we would like to bring the respectful Mr. LAI, who was the former president of New Territories Fisheries Association for decades, to share his experiences and perceptions. The field trip will be organized to invite conservationist and the local fisherman to share their experiences and knowledge in the hope of providing a platform for discourse on the complicated sustainability issues and to give the students a glimpse on the real-life complex sustainability issues. The fisherman could also spread his voice to the students.

The project will invite 50 out of 120 students to join the field trip on voluntary basis. A total of 2 identical field trips will be organized and the number of participants of each field trip is counted based on the capacity of the vehicle (28 seats) that can enter the fishponds. The assessment will be incorporated into the course work to produce visual media in a group (e.g. poster, video), with a common theme among the whole class. Participation to the field trip is voluntary and the students can choose this particular case as the topic for the visual media coursework.

ARCH4715 Special Topics in Sustainability is an upper level landscape course that explore various topics of sustainability. Every semester’s topic can be different, and previously it also involved topics that student got to travel to examine the issue(s) being studied.

Working with the Covid-19 pandemic situation that our Fall 2021 curriculum will primarily be taught based in Hong Kong without travel, it is hoped that this semester’s ARCH4715 Special Topics in Sustainability will anchor with a local sustainability topic that fosters students’ learning in the real landscape. Therefore, we plan to explore the topic of “New Models in Village revitalization in Hong Kong” in ARCH4715 in the coming Fall semester to get students to anchor their advanced study with the local village landscapes and to work with the real communities of villagers.

Village revitalization is one of the mechanisms to develop a sustainable countryside. It is an advanced topic studied at the upper level of the landscape undergraduate program, as it touches upon sustainable development, conservation, and community engagement. While the topic of village revitalization itself is well-researched, and as a mechanism widely implemented. In recent years, many village revitalization projects in Hong Kong are initiated and led by non-profit organizations (NPOs). While there are plenty of lessons learnt from the NPO-led model of village revitalization, there are also new trends and thinking developed in recent years that are worth exploring. For example, the idea of “commoning” emphasizes on collective stewardship of resources, bringing in new management mechanism and values to village revitalization. Also, there are case studies of government-led incentive-based programs that foster villagers’ interest to participate in rural heritage and ecological conservation, in turn revitalizing the village.

In Fall 2021’s ARCH4715 Special Topics in Sustainability, students will first be guided to examine various types of village revitalization schemes used in different rural development projects via desktop research. In the second phase of the course, students will engage in this GHLEC project to work with local villages to explore the feasibility of the various types of village revitalization schemes they studied in the beginning of the course. Students will have to understand the local contexts of these villages they work with, and to hear the villagers’ voices and find ways to incorporate their needs. These are the real-life situations and conditions that students will learn how to correlate to their classroom studies. At the end of the course, students are to come up with a set of guidelines and recommendations for these villages to consider or implement village revitalization. There will also be a student-led dissemination conference for students to share the findings to villagers and related government units, such as Countryside Conservation Office (CCO). These project-end deliverables aim to allow students to synthesize the classroom learning with the practical aspects of village revitalization.

“The success of this experimental pilot research scheme will allow an expansion of the project’s scope and other similar projects and greater collaboration between other universities with Rotary Peace Centres at the University of Bradford (UK), Duke University and University of North Carolina, International Christian University (Japan), University of Queensland (Australia), and Uppsala University (Sweden). As groups of 3 – 5 students will work with each Peace Fellows, we plan to run research projects in tandem with different start and finish dates. This will allow flexibility for students to fit the research projects to their own programme’s demands, but also give us insights to optimise the timing of these co-curricular projects.

The project addresses the important issues of peace and conflict in an increasing volatile world impacted by Covid-19 and the unstable geopolitical context. Developing students to think critically about these ‘wicked’ and ill-defined issues across geographical and disciplinary boundaries and working in modest ways to make an impact will boost students’ agentic capacities. The assessment tasks as deliverables expands students’ voice to communicate through various media. Therefore, we expected sustained student interest in this type of project after the pilot to support continued implementation.

The project aligns strongly to HKU and Common Core’s mission around interdisciplinarity, internationalisation, and impact in undergraduate education and our focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in the areas of reduced inequalities, and peace, justice, and strong institutions. It also addresses new T&L focus on developing undergraduate research capacities. This project builds on top of the success and experience gained from implementing the HKU-Dayalbagh Educational Institute (DEI) project, which was successfully funded by GHELF in 2018 and continues to run until now, and the HKU-University of Queensland (UQ) virtual exchange project funded by GHELF in 2021, which is midway through its pilot implementation and ahead of schedule. Plans to run the HKU-UQ exchange in its next iteration is already underway, with the exchange expanding beyond its pilot scope to involve more students and a three-way exchange between HKU, UQ, and Griffith University and other funding sources now available without reliance on further GHELF.”

In Hong Kong, the prevalence of dysphagia in older adults has been shown to be as high as 60% in aged care facilities. Swallowing difficulties present challenges including malnutrition, dehydration, aspiration pneumonia. It is essential for medical students to learn about the mealtime experience and needs of this population.

Culinary medicine is a trending field that combines science and culinary arts to create food that is delicious, appealing, and promotes wellness. Scholars believe that hands-on cooking sessions could made a greater impact over traditional lectures for teaching nutrition and dietetics in medical schools.

In collaboration with a pioneering social enterprise, this project launches a Japanese Engay(easy-to-swallow) Food experiential workshop in Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine to help MBBS students relate to the needs of dysphagic patients through a hands-on texture-modified food cooking experience. This activity also supplements the credit-bearing Medical Humanities (MH) Programme as part of MBBS Curriculum.

https://asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/medu.15056

The growing significance of psychosocial factors in talent development has highlighted the importance of addressing thesocial and emotional needs of gifted individuals in gifted education. Collaborating with the CAISE (Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education) at the Faculty of Education, this course aims to develop student educators’ awareness on the unique social and emotional needs of gifted individuals and competence to respond to such needs. Student educators will first learn about the social and emotional needs of gifted individuals. Then they will work in cross-disciplinary teams to design and conduct workshops to strengthen the development of this important aspect among gifted individuals at primary school level as well as their parents. On-going feedback and reflection will be provided and facilitated.

The goal of this project will be to conduct a soundscape study of the village and surrounding environs of Mui Wo in Lantau. We will teach students fieldwork methods of recording and documenting the local sound environment. We plan to participate in a workshop on acoustic ecology and environmental awareness conducted by the Fiddlehead Folklore Institute (based in Mui Wo), and also a guided tour on the theme of environmental conservation organised by Lantau Society. Ultimately students will produce a multimedia website and sound-map with the goal of documenting and sharing their research findings to the wider public.

Borrowed Landscape is a collaborative design and build summer workshop taking place in Geneva, engaging HKU and EPFL students, government bodies, associations and communities. The intention is to examine, understand and act upon the complexities of multi-scalar territorial conditions, seen as perspectives but also embodied in space. The workshop is situated within the frame of Sino-Swiss relations, where cultural exchange will be experienced through the examination of texts such as the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden and the works of sinologist and philosopher Jean-François Billeter. Using survey drawing as a tool to identify affordances, students will question our spatial practices through the design and making of a 1:1 timber construction that responds to these potentialities on the embankment of the Leman Lake Arc. The collaboration is foreseen to take place over at least two years, with iterations to be built upon the research already carried out.

As part of the CAES2002 course HKU students learn the Digital Storytelling methodology before facilitating workshops for marginalized learners in other countries. This project represents an exciting opportunity to make our student-facilitated workshops an integrated part of a well-regarded Peace and Conflict Studies course. Our students will work alongside small groups of young community leaders to help them script, voice and assemble video productions. As these learners come from extraordinarily difficult backgrounds our students benefit by sharing diverse perspectives. This grant, although relatively small, will offset the cost of internet access for these marginalized learners making this learning opportunity possible. f a 1:1 timber construction that responds to these potentialities on the embankment of the Leman Lake Arc. The collaboration is foreseen to take place over at least two years, with iterations to be built upon the research already carried out.

Architecture students will survey a textile factory in Guangzhou (Guangdong, China) for 10 days, experimenting with analogue tools and digital technology to produce a short movie about the spatial implications of women’s labour in China.
They will conduct interviews to uncover the connections the workers have to near and far, the economies of their working conditions, the network of communities that support them and the families they take care of elsewhere.
They will document and scan the space and the women’s activities using architecture tools (photography, video, drawings, 3D scan).
The research will be collected in a booklet and displayed in an exhibition in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
The movie will be distributed digitally on a dedicated website.
The project will set up the basis for further research projects on the intersection between architecture, gender studies and technology in Hong Kong and Mainland China.