SLS-8b - TDG Capacity Enhancement Project

To teach service-learning properly, one needs teachers, well-trained teachers.  It is a simply truth which should have been obvious. Attention of the public, without intimate knowledge of how service-learning is actually carried out, tend to be focused on the students.   However, it is often not sufficiently recognised even by administrators in higher education, who, presumably, should know better.  Learning to teach service-learning, by itself, is not exceptionally difficult. The basic concepts are easy enough to grasp through reading, seminars and workshops.  It is the field work that does require a certain amount of practice - there is simply no substitute for direct, personal experience in the training of an effective teacher for service-learning, an experiential pedagogy.  While universities in Hong Kong are becoming more active in adopting service-learning as an academic pedagogy, the need to build up the capacity to teach become more keenly felt.  At PolyU we have developed a number of strategies to build up our own capacity to teach service-learning.  These include workshops, e-Learning modules for teachers as well as students, field experience for new teachers, etc., as discussed in previous sections.  Gradually, we have also started to share out experience with other universities and teamed up with other universities to further enhance the capacity more broadly and systematically. 

In 2017, PolyU led a coalition of 4 universities in successfully securing a Teaching Development Grant (TDG) from the University Grants Committee (UGC) of the Hog Kong Government.  The cross-institutional project aims to build up the capacity of the universities in Hong Kong to teach service-learning.  The 4 universities in the coalition are: PolyU, Baptist University, Lingnan University and Education University.   There were a number of major objectives:

1. Provide modular and flexible professional development opportunities to enhance teachers’ expertise in designing, offering and assessing SL subjects and projects through the development of a mixed-mode teacher training programme that includes an e-Learning course on teaching SL covering topics such as supervising students, assessing students, facilitating students’ reflections, etc.; complemented with on-site observation and reflection sessions.   
2. Develop an SL e-Resource platform comprising 
1. a modular, customizable, platform-neutral eLearning course for students that is designed to complement classroom learning and prepare them to learn the most from the SL experience; and 
2. a bank of tools for teachers to assess student learning from SL and the impact of SL on the community, validated for use in Hong Kong and East Asian contexts, and 
3. a database of exemplars of good practice that focuses on various themes (e.g. curriculum, reflection, project execution) in SL, and documents good practice from all participating institutions for reference from colleagues. 
3. Pilot a number of collaborative SL subjects and projects that leverage complementary skills and disciplines from the participating institutions to facilitate peer learning and collaboration between colleagues in participating institutions. 
4. Facilitate and support teachers in conducting improvement-oriented action research projects. 
5. Build up a cross-institutional “Community of Practice” on SL to promote sharing of experiences among SL practitioners and interested staff from all UGC-funded institutions to support social, collective learning opportunities.