Aims and Objectives
Aims
The development and implementation of “Students as Partners” (SaP) through a University-wide supporting Community of Practice (CoP) for education
The development and implementation of “Students as Partners” (SaP) through a University-wide supporting Community of Practice (CoP) for education
Objectives
- Share experiences of existing SaP projects through seminars
- Compile a mapping document of existing SaPs across the university
- Validate frameworks on “Process”, “Levels” and “Scope” for SaP implementation
- Help engage/ support colleagues develop their own initiative on SaPs
- Publish on SaP initiatives across the university
- Evaluate outcomes of SaPs
SaP Definitions
Our Definition of SaP
Students as Partners (SaP) is an educational or experiential strategy designed to engage students, academics, professional services staff, and others both inside and outside of the University who will gain from the process of learning and working together.
How This is Done
The SaP is built on shared responsibility between students, faculty, and partners through collaboration, reciprocity, and measurable outcomes.
Students are offered or may initiate a participative agenda to contribute to education/ service /research conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or evaluation of education/ service/research activities inside or outside of the classroom.
Benefits of SaP
The SaP approach aims to transform institutional cultures and students’ learning or experiences by facilitating engagement and inducing a shift from passivity to agency.
This involves developing a meta-cognitive awareness among those involved about all aspects of learning, teaching, research, and service. This collaborative partnership will have multilevel benefits across a spectrum of activities for those engaged with the process and ultimately have meaningful and impactful outcomes in the broadest sense within and beyond the University.
SaP Framework
The SaP CoP has developed informative frameworks that serve as a guideline for designing, implementing, and recognizing Students as Partners initiatives. This framework encompasses the Scope, Process, and Levels of engagement, providing a structured approach for staff and students to effectively initiate and participate in SaP activities.
Scope Framework
The scope framework defines the range of activities that students can participate in which can be supported or initiated by staff or initiated by students.
Teaching
- Peer teaching/mentoring inside the university or beyond
- Knowledge exchange for individuals (or in service)
- Curriculum design and content creation for courses
Research
Research in the discipline or of teaching and learning
Service
- University service
- Office-bearers of university or faculty committees – halls, societies, sports, clubs, mentors /wellness
- Community service
- Voluntary work/ outreach outside of the university – NGOs, organizations, schools, etc.
Process Framework
The Process Framework outlines the steps involved in designing and implementing student-as-partner (SaP) initiatives. This framework aims to effectively share the SaP concept with a wider audience, allowing them to understand its generalizability and learn from each other’s experiences. By presenting with the process framework, we aim to inspire educators to incorporate student engagement into their teaching practices.
Levels Framework
The levels framework defines the scope of students as partners. At the moment only the partners and leadership levels can be recognized by credits.
Engagement of students as contributors, partners, and leaders
There are different levels of engagement in SaP with regard to students’ participation in activities.
Contributors
- All students are contributors and are responsible, empathetic, and engaged contributors with their peers, teachers, hall, club, course, curriculum, faculty, university, and society
- This relates to all aspects of engagement inside or outside of the classroom, with regard to individual activities, coursework completion, teamwork engagement, peer support/feedback, knowledge sharing/exchange, course feedback, hall life engagement, sports, and club activities, mentoring, tutoring, internships, electives, etc.
- This is to promote and inculcate collegiality, respect, character, altruism, civic-mindedness, and social responsibility during their time at HKU and beyond
Partners
Students as Partners co-create, co-implement teaching, research or service activities outside of programme credits with a relative engagement level around 40:60 or 60:40 teacher: student.
Leadership
Leadership@HKU is the sustained learning, participation, reflection, and development of a student’s personal attributes and skills across a range of leadership activities and experiences that is defined and reported by personal reflection, achievements, self-evaluation, and demonstrable outcomes.
Credit Recognition
The Students as Partners credit recognition is facilitated by the HKU Horizons Office which supports out-of-classroom learning experiences. For more information please see:
Recognition of Out-of-classroom Learning Experiences – Credit Award Scheme
Below is an infographic that demonstrates the ways that credits can be awarded to Students as Partners in activities that are outside of the Credit-bearing parts of the curriculum.
Mentors
Dr. Elizabeth Barrett
Professor Michael Botelho
Dr. Lisa Cheung
Dr. Mei Li Khong
Dr. Match WL Ko
Dr. Peter Fat Man Lau
Ms. Leung Kin Yi, Promail
Dr. Mandy R. Liu
Dr. Jack Tsao
Dr. Gloria Wong
Ms. Teenie Wong & Ms. Helen Xiao
Dr. Elizabeth BARRETT
Senior Lecturer
Assistant Dean (Learning and Teaching),
Faculty Academic Advising and First Year Experience Coordinator
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
Preferred consultation times: Wednesdays
Biography
Elizabeth teaches students who are training to become speech therapists or early childhood educators. In terms of Students as Partners, Elizabeth has worked collaboratively with undergraduate students to co-develop a suite of e-learning resources for cross-program use, with the support of funding. At the course-level, she has worked to re-design assessments to create opportunities for students to take the lead on learning-and-teaching in the classroom. Elizabeth enjoys collaborating with students and colleagues to develop engaging and interdisciplinary learning experiences for students. Elizabeth is eager to brainstorm SaP opportunities or reflect on on-going SaP projects.
Professor Michael BOTELHO
Clinical Professor in Restorative Dental Sciences,
3A 19 Prince Philip Dental Hospital, 34 Hospital Road
Faculty of Dentistry, HKU
Preferred consultation times: any time when not teaching with good coffee
Biography
Michael is from the Faculty of Dentistry and has been at HKU for 27 years. He has been actively engaged in educational reform, pedagogy innovation, and research. He is the Lead of the Community of Practice for the Students as Partners initiative.
He has been involved in several Students as Partners projects in connection with near-peer skills learning (clinical photography, digital scanning, and communication) with students who created course manuals and videos. He also mentored students who performed a robust survey of student wellness in the faculty of Dentistry. These have been published in the European Journal of Dental Education.
Dr. Lisa CHEUNG
Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Applied English Studies,
Room 6.25, Run Run Shaw Tower,
Centennial Campus, HKU
Preferred consultation times: chat over coffee on Monday afternoons
Biography
Lisa has joined the Centre for Applied English Studies for over two decades. She is the recipient of the HKU Teaching Excellence Award (Individual) (2022) and the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, Faculty of Arts (2018-19).
She has been actively involved in the teaching of a range of postgraduate and undergraduate English enhancement courses on academic and professional communication and has extensive experience in developing corpus-based learning resources and their integration with classroom teaching.
Lisa led the Centre’s initiative on Students as Partners (2020-2022), which utilized HKU students’ expertise and experience as a student to contribute equally to ‘teaching and learning process’ and ‘enhancement of teaching and learning policy or practices’. A total of five projects were organized: three course-related projects and two project- or service-related ones. An impact framework was developed to measure the impact of CAES student partnership on student learning. Six core values of student partnership identified in the literature, including Autonomy, Commitment, Inclusivity, Partnership (or Collaboration), Empowerment, and Reciprocity, were incorporated into the framework to evaluate the benefits of student partnership on student learning.
Dr. Mei Li KHONG
Lecturer / Digital Education Consultant
4/F, William Mong MW Block, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam
LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU
Preferred consultation times: any time when not teaching, with good food/snacks
Biography
Dr. Mei Li Khong (FHEA) is the Lecturer / Digital Education Consultant at the School of Clinical Medicine and School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Her involvement at HKU has broadened to medical education more generally, ranging from transdisciplinary projects to incorporating blended learning into the medical curriculum through modified flipped classrooms, redesigned online learning environments, and optimised educational technology.
Dr. Khong is involved in multiple teaching development projects. In these projects, she is especially passionate about exploring the possibilities of student-educator partnership in teaching and learning, where students and faculty collaborate to co-design curriculum and pedagogy. She advocates using the transformative potential of student-educator partnership in shifting learning perspectives and bringing about student-centred improvements to a curriculum. She is currently spearheading the student-educator partnership initiative in curriculum development and pedagogical innovations, across the LKS Faculty of Medicine.
Her team’s overarching initiative on formalising student-educator partnerships in curriculum/pedagogy was awarded Global Bronze Winner in QS Reimagine Education Awards 2023. She is also the recipient of the Early Career Teaching Award 2022.
Dr. Match WL KO
Lecturer and MSc(Eng) in Mechanical Engineering Programme Director,Department of Mechanical Engineering, HKU
Room 5-22, 5/F, Haking Wong Building,
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
Preferred consultation times: every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon with good coffee
Biography
Match is from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has been actively engaged in experiential learning and leading several student-initiated teams.
He has been working on a Students as Partners project – HKU Racing in the Faculty of Engineering since 2018. HKU Racing is a student motorsports team representing the University of Hong Kong in the Formula Student UK (FSUK) competition. The team’s main goal is to promote motorsports to young people. The team have achieved an impressive feat by designing and constructing a formula-style, single-seater, open-wheel electric race car. This project provides an ideal platform for the young engineers to showcase their exceptional engineering skills and promote motorsports in the society. In addition to building the race car, the team has also hosted numerous STEM education workshops related to motorsports to further our mission of promoting STEM education.
Dr. Peter Fat Man LAU
Lecturer Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre, HKU CPD 1.74, 1/F, Jockey Club Tower,Centennial Campus, Pokfulam
Preferred consultation times: any time when not teaching
Biography
Peter is a Lecturer at the Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre. He has a decade of teaching experience. As an advocate for Students as Partners (SaP), Peter works with colleagues and students in T&L projects on various topics, such as service-learning, team-based learning, academic integrity, creative drama, reflective portfolio, etc.
Since 2017, Peter has organised the Redesigning Student Learning Experience in Higher Education programme, an inter-institutional award scheme, to promote student partnerships in local institutions. At HKU, Peter also launched various SaP initiatives (including seminar series, Co-creation Café, and consultation sessions) for staff/students to share SaP engagement and meet global partitioners/researchers. In 2022, as the project PI at HKU, Peter launched a UGC-funded inter-institutional collaboration project, Co-Creating the Future of Education, with colleagues from HKUST and HKBU, aiming to establish a community of practice to share effective practices supporting student partnership within and across institutions.
Peter recently submitted a manuscript (accepted) to JSLHE for a cross-institutional project, as a co-first author, reporting reinforced autonomous motivation by engaging traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) students as partners in Orthopedics curriculums. A new APRS service-learning model is also proposed. [click here for information]
Dr. LEUNG Kin Yi, Promail
Director, School-University Partnerships, Faculty of EducationSpecialism Co-ordinator, Master of Education Teaching of Science in an International Context Senior Lecturer, Academic Unit of Teacher Education and Learning Leadership Room 315, Runme Shaw Building, Faculty of Education, HKU
Preferred consultation times: any time when not teaching with good coffee
Biography
Promail Leung, a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, has two decades of hands-on teaching and leadership experience. She joined HKU in 2017 and has been actively involved in various initiatives, such as the government-funded Students as Partners project, to support the science/STEAM teaching community. Promail shared her practice, “Students as Partners Beyond the Classroom: Practice to Promote Employability and Community Engagement,” at the Students as Partners: Community of Practice Seminar.
In 2021, Promail launched a fund-supported Experiential Learning course and collaborated with students to develop innovative solutions for the creative problem-solving competition “Odyssey of the Mind (OM™)” at the virtual USA World Final. One of the teams won 4th place in Problem 2 (Virtual Odyssey), and another team won 3rd place in Problem 3 (OMER and the Beanstalk) in the competition. She also conducts seminars and workshops with students for local teaching communities, further promoting her commitment to education and community engagement.
Dr. Mandy R. LIU
Lecturer, School of Biomedical Sciences,L4-52, Laboratory Block, 21 Sassoon Road,
Faculty of Medicine, HKU
Preferred consultation times: any time when not teaching
Biography
Mandy is a dedicated educator in anatomy and histology education at HKUMed, contributing to all healthcare-related undergraduate programs. She is the coordinator of near-peer anatomy teacher (N-PAT) program and Enrichment Year Programme (Functional anatomy and anatomy education).
With years of experience in the N-PAT program, she aims to train future medical educators while enhancing their knowledge of anatomy. Upon joining N-PAT program, students will receive both dissection and pedagogical training, acting as co-instructors in various anatomy teaching and learning activities. The program has been extended across MBBS and BBMS programs, allowing for greater collaboration and engagement. Hundreds of students benefit from this program annually, with active participation from N-PATs in anatomy teaching and the development of course materials.
Dr. Jack TSAO
Associate Director / Senior Lecturer,Common Core Office,
Room 136, 1/F, Main Building, HKU
Preferred consultation times: flexible
Biography
Dr. Jack Tsao is the Associate Director and Senior Lecturer at the Common Core. As a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Advance, he is passionate about working with other teachers to explore innovative Student-as-Partners projects involving gaming, storytelling, and digital and artificial intelligence technologies.
His previous SaP initiatives have encompassed student well-being, serious gaming, and creative writing with GenAI. He is spearheading the inaugural HKU GenAI Hackathon for Social Good, which concentrates on student-devised solutions to societal challenges.
Dr. Gloria WONG
Associate Professor,Department of Social Work and Social Administration,
524 The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Preferred consultation times: flexible
Biography
Gloria is from the Faculty of Social Sciences. She has studied at the Faculty of Arts and Medicine dating back to 1996. She is the vice-chair of Wellness@HKU, a student-staff partnership in university mental wellbeing.
In her teaching, research, and service in mental health, she has been collaborating with students. These include student consultations for revising course content and materials for an undergraduate course, co-designing with undergraduate students a 2021 HKU student mental health survey, involvement of HKU students as key members in organizing committee of the International Youth Mental Health Conference of LevelMind@JC in 2022, and co-creation of a Student Chapter in the U21 University Mental Health Group. She is overseeing a new development (Project W2) to empower students to develop and implement whole-person development and wellness in HKU.
Ms. Teenie WONG
MBBS Year 6 student
LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU
Preferred consultation times: flexible
Ms. Helen XIAO
MBBS Year 5 student
LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU
Preferred consultation times: flexible
Biography
Teenie Wong and Helen Xiao are Year 6 and Year 5 MBBS students who are lead organisers of the Near Peer Teaching (NPT) Program. Embarking on its third year, NPT represents the first systematic and large-scale peer teaching program in medical education in Hong Kong.
The NPT Program is a student-led initiative with faculty support. It has served over 300 pre-clinical students since its start in 2019 and is expanding to include clinical teaching. Senior students conduct Zoom tutorials for junior students in the pre-clinical phase, while case Discussion Workshops and bedside teachings are included in the clinical phase. The goal of NPT is to complement formal teaching methods, integrate knowledge, and bridge the gap between pre-clinical and clinical experience.
Project Leader
Professor Michael Botelho
Project Coordinator
Ms. Trinity Jiao
Faculty of Dentistry, HKU
tchiao@hku.hk
Project Leader
Project Coordinator
Dr. Elizabeth Barrett
Senior Lecturer
Assistant Dean (Learning and Teaching),
Faculty Academic Advising and First Year Experience Coordinator
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
Assistant Dean (Learning and Teaching),
Faculty Academic Advising and First Year Experience Coordinator
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
Professor Michael Botelho
Clinical Professor in Restorative Dental Sciences
3A 19 Prince Philip Dental Hospital, 34 Hospital Road, Faculty of Dentistry, HKU
3A 19 Prince Philip Dental Hospital, 34 Hospital Road, Faculty of Dentistry, HKU
Dr. Lisa Cheung
Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Applied English Studies,
Room 6.25, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Dr. Mei Li Khong
Lecturer / Digital Education Consultant
4/F, William Mong MW Block, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU
4/F, William Mong MW Block, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU