Developing Learning Environments

This book addresses critical challenges for university renewal, and sketches critical issues in Hong Kong’s higher education that have global implications. Contributors to the book were originally gathered for a conference funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong, and took as their starting point the work of the Carnegie Foundation on The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

With the worldwide move towards public accountability, academics live in a climate of assessment and must constantly adapt to new pressures. This book presents a focus on leadership in learning, on the basis of which academics can reconcile pressures and paradoxes, transcend the system, and move on to a public domain where teaching and research can be integrated in scholarly discourse and practice. The shared professional insights, as articulated by the contributors to this book, will be most helpful to academics who are navigating through these turbulent waters.

Emerging from the major thrusts of the selected papers are three thematic divisions: Critical and Creative Thinking, Motivation in Learning, and Collaboration in Teaching and Learning. The targeted readers include academics, administrators and policy-makers in higher education. The primary focus is on academics as teachers to whom the contributors can communicate authentically as frontline practitioners in an optimistic tone without being naive. Together, the chapters transcend local concerns, and contribute to a developing international discourse on the impact of scholarship of teaching on learning. Rather than advocating certain approaches from successful experiences, the book generates ideas for research into teaching, making transparent the dynamics of learning.

Ora Kwo is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Tim Moore is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and was until mid-2003 Director of the Centre for the Advancement of University Teaching. John Jones was until recently Director of Educational Development at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.