• Aphasia refers to an acquired disorder of language functions that affects the ability to understand, speak, read, and write across various performance levels from word, sentence, to discourse. People with aphasia (PWA) are affected not only in communication, but also social functioning and quality of life. In qualitative phenomenological research, lived experience is a representation of the experiences and choices of a given person in the daily life, and the resultant knowledge that one gains. Each year in Hong Kong, there are over 20,000 new cases of stroke, of which up to 38% are affected by aphasia.
• Due to inherent communication difficulties, neurological and cognitive problems, as well as physical hurdles, PWA face extra barriers amid the pandemic that cause disparities in health services. In the past two years, many PWA have avoided going out amid the pandemic; this caused different degrees of regression of communication skills and social performance, as well as reduction of social well-being among PWA. How exactly PWA have been struggling amid the pandemic and limited in their capacity to keep abreast of the evolution of COVID remains under-examined, not just locally in Hong Kong but globally. In other words, the needs of PWA (and their family members or loved ones) during and after the pandemic is not fully understood; this seriously limits their social engagement and re-integration to community activities.
• The first part of this project (Year 1: 2022-23) will document, investigate, and report the challenges in communication and social engagement PWA faced under COVID-19. In particular, students can design and conduct structured interviews with PWA to share their views on this topic. They will also work with different related stakeholders of aphasia (e.g., caregivers or healthcare professionals such as social workers, nurses, doctors, paramedical therapists) to reflect on support/training offered to PWA in different clinical settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes, out-patient or university clinics, or community support groups.
• Part 2 of this project (Year 2-3: 2023-25) will focus on plans and strategies to engage PWA to social activities through both virtual and face-to-face platforms. In particular, apart from collaborating with recreation staff and/or allied health professionals in community centers and/or local support groups in Hong Kong to design, structure, and modify activities for PWA members, students will tailor-make and conduct cognitively-stimulating exercises, group activities, and/or communication tasks in different community settings to engage PWA. If applicable, students will also design and implement exercises or workshops for PWA members to use small, handheld, and adaptable aids to support their communication and basic activities of daily living.
• Through participating in this experiential learning project, students will not only gain hands-on practical experience in interacting with PWA and caregivers (and therefore gain a better understanding of the clinical communication symptoms of aphasia and family burdens described in classrooms/textbooks), but also improve their communication skills with different healthcare professionals who provide intervention to stroke patients. Students will also benefit from working with different healthcare professionals to tailor-make social and communication activities (to be conducted either virtually or in-person) that suit the specific needs of clients. The ultimate goal of this project is to allow more student speech therapists at HKU to learn aphasia from a different and more holistic perspective and to reveal dimensions of aphasia management outside the typical clinical context.
• Our interviews and reports will be publicized through social media and videos to raise public awareness of speech therapy and aphasia. These project-end deliverables aim to allow students to synthesize the classroom learning of aphasia with the practical aspects of hands-on interactions with PWA and other stakeholders of management of this disorder within the unique context of COVID-19.

According to the fifth report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if people are to prevent climate change from causing global climate disasters, rapid, far-reaching actions that would effect unprecedented changes at all levels of the society are essential. Among these levels, education is one of the most important channels to make sustainable changes. Thus, a proper understanding of nature and the environment is an important foundation for establishing appropriate environmental behaviour, hence effecting changes. In order to cultivate this behaviour among the future generations, it is essential for teachers to not just understand the importance of environmental education, but also to learn about its myriad methods of application to enhance teaching effectiveness.

Collaborating with Outdoor Wildlife Learning Hong Kong (OWLHK), this course aims to nurture ecologically knowledgeable and reflective student educators who can unravel the beauty of nature and make an educational impact to the future generations. Our student educators will first learn about the theoretical knowledge of Environmental Education and the reflective learning cycles in experiential education in both the nature and classrooms. Then they will work in cross-disciplinary teams to put their knowledge into practice – designing and facilitating secondary school students’ learning process in an outdoor environmental education learning programme.

Students will be assigned to work in groups to (a) experience outdoor environmental educational programme themselves, (b) design and conduct an outdoor environmental educational programme, including pre-departure training, during-outing activities, and de-briefing sessions for a group of local Secondary 3 students. The final programme materials may be used by the OWLHK staff for future educational programmes for other schools.

Tai O is a remote village with over 30% elderly and over 40% household living below the poverty line. Remote location and poverty are the main barriers for elderly in Tai O to access dental care. During the project, HKU dental students will provide dental examinations, preventive and simple restorative treatments to the participating elderly. In a train-the-trainer approach, teenagers in Tai O will be empowered by HKU students to take leading roles to promote self and community oral health, participate and assist in the delivery of oral care. Through oral-care delivery and home visits, HKU students can understand the social issues citizens in Tai O are facing.

Undocumented children and orphans are vulnerable to exploitation and denial from basic child welfare. In Africa, over 50% of children and refugees have no legal identities and are of unknown age. Dental age assessment is a validated method to determine one’s age and enable unregistered individuals to obtain their legal identities and secure their human rights. Citizens in Togo also have limited access to dental care, as there were only 15 registered dentists in Togo in 2008. The project provides dental students with the opportunities to serve children and orphans through providing oral health campaigns, and to promote birth registration among vulnerable groups in the third-world countries.

Students from the Faculty of Medicine should know about the meaning of life-and-death. 30 senior Medical and Nursing students will have four workshops on “life-and-death”:
1. What is death?
2. Meaning of life: fulfillment, and cherishing of quality life experiences
3. Death and Grief
4. How to Prepare?
After the workshop, students will have a field-trip to Taiwan to visit the palliative care facilities, healing gardens, and farewell services, etc. Taiwan is one of the leaders in promoting life-and-death education. In the trip, students will discuss with the leaders of different parties to understand more about this topic.

The project will provide 17 students from Faculty of Social Sciences and Comparative Literature students opportunities to conduct onsite case study on social business in Kenya, Singapore or mainland China. Under the supervision and guidance of the NGO supervisors, the students who choose to go to Kenya will be able to interview the small business clients and document the impact of the business loan in growing the local business with a social purpose. In Singapore or mainland China, the students will focus on the social business innovator development. All the students will gather in Hong Kong to share their case study of your areas in the final reflective meeting.

This proposal seeks to provide 24 months (2 rounds) of ‘umbrella’ funding to students, teachers, and learning partners involved in innovative experiential learning initiatives linked to the Common Core. The grant will allow for continuous application for experiential learning projects/activities and undergraduate students (as individuals or in groups) to pursue transdisciplinary experiential projects/activities, with an estimated project impact on the learning of at least 4,000 undergraduate students. A mechanism will help streamline and widen the adoption and participation of experiential learning across the curriculum and cross-programmatically via our existing connections established across all 10 Faculties. The proposed initiative will expand the scope of the Common Core’s future readiness programmes, enable (co)curricular local, regional and international impact, strengthening the impact of Common Core initiatives on student learning at HKU.

This pilot project takes twelve (12) HKU undergraduate students from across different faculties on a research study trip to Mae Sot in Thailand (on the Thai-Myanmar border) during the reading week of the Spring Semester 2023. The study explores the experiences of Myanmar refugee youths struggling to find educational opportunities in two learning centres, as well as their educational pathways and future aspirations. HKU students will conduct a literature review of the educational context in the region, interviews with experts, NGOs, and the affected Myanmar youth, and co-produce podcasting episodes with the Myanmar refugee students. The objective is to use the podcasts to make a positive impact in furthering quality education by highlighting digital platforms of communication, best practices for improving teaching and learning, areas for improvement, and challenges persisting in the educational and broader context.

Rainforests are biologically rich terrestrial ecosystems, but under increasing human pressures such as logging, burning and conversion to agriculture. We will travel to Danum Valley Conservation Area, tropical rainforest in Sabah Malaysia. Students will carry out research projects, collecting data on the ecology and human threats to tropical rainforests. In addition to course lectures, students will receive guest lectures from local researchers and gain an understanding of the threats to biodiversity in tropical rainforests landscapes.