Communication-intensive Courses Symposium 2021
Date: June 3rd, 2021 (Thursday)
Time: 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Venue: Zoom
Target Audience: All HKU staff (including those who have CI-badge courses and those who haven’t)
Organisers: CETL, CAES, Common Core
Objectives
At the end of the Symposium, participants will be able to:
- Gain insights into the benefits of the initiative from students’ perspective.
- Learn different ways to embed communication knowledge, skills and attributes teaching in their courses from the experience of HKU and non-HKU teachers.
- Be inspired to evaluate the possibility of badging their own courses or show further support for the initiative.
Programme
| Time | Activity | Speakers |
| 3:00 – 3:05 | Opening |
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| 3:05 – 3:35 | What can we learn from professionals about communication? CiC Student presentation Students involved in the CiC students as partners project will present their video project wherein they interviewed professionals about the communication skills needed in different industries. They will also share their learning experience taking CI-badged courses. |
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| 3:35 – 4:05 | Rethinking communication for global engineers Talking the audience through a narrative starting from the genesis of a practitioners’ network all the way to its direct and indirect impact on language teaching and learning, this presentation will lay out a case study around the redefinition of language and communication for engineering students. It will open on the introduction to GELS (GELS ), a European network of over thirty engineering schools and their shared concerns and efforts to address issues surrounding language learning. This will include some of their findings and outputs. One of the latter, a European Union funded project (BADGE), will then be presented in more details before due consideration is given to the impact of the network at a more institutional level. We hope this presentation will be of interest to language practitioners, curriculum developers as well as course directors from different disciplines. |
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| 4:05 – 4:15 | Break | |
| 4:15 – 4:30 | Equipping students to engage the public about the intersection between COVID-19 and mental health In PSYC2062: Introduction to Psychopathology, we emphasise to students the importance of being able to communicate information about mental health to trained professionals and community members working in the domain of, or affected by, mental ill-health. Each year we include an assessment where students are encouraged to communicate to the public about the intersection between ongoing events and mental health. In 2020, students created podcasts where they discussed with their peers how the ongoing pandemic was affecting mental health in different sections of the community. In this talk, I will present how we prepared students for this assessment and the lessons we learnt in doing so. |
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| 4:30 – 4:45 | Embracing the challenge: Teaching communication skills in the Common Core Communication is a crucial transferrable skill. Hence it is not only important in disciplinary subjects, but also in Common Core Courses. With the support of the CiC Project Team, students learned how to create crowdfunding videos from writing a storyboard to manipulating their voices in the presentation. |
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| 4:45 – 5:30 | Developing intercultural competence in communication-intensive courses Intercultural communication as a concept has been fundamental in the recent years as a response to the process of globalisation of the workplace. The concept of ‘global skills’ such as cultural intelligence, cultural competence or global agility, to name only a few, are central for the discussion about competencies enabling an individual to successfully study or work internationally. This session focuses on intercultural competence no longer seen as a ‘nice to have’ suitable exclusively for expats. It’s an emerging competence that is required in every international environment, including higher education. Additionally, intercultural competence is becoming even more critical in the age of the remote digital workplace where it proves much harder to connect and build rapport with new contacts and therefore to collaborate.
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| 5:30 – 5:50 | Panel Discussion Panel members: Mr. David Tual (Cambridge), Dr. Tom Barry (HKU), Dr. Rachel Lui (HKU), Ms. Kasia Lanucha (Cambridge) |
Facilitators:
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| 5:50 – 6:00 | Closing |
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About the Speakers
Mr. Cezar CAZAN
Cezar is an Assistant Lecturer teaching language and communication courses at the Centre for Applied English Studies.
Ms. Shreeya AGARWAL
Shreeya is a year 3 student majoring in Computer Engineering and She is interested in STEM. She loves to talk to people about anything under the sun – movies, music, technology, life in general and always up for a cup of coffee.
Ms. Neeha Tasleem SYED
Neeha is a year 3 student majoring in industrial engineering and logistics management. She enjoys meeting new people and starting conversations.
Ms. Ann WONG
Ann is a Year 3 BA student majoring in Translation.
Ms. Eunice Yuen Sum CHAN
Eunice is currently a third-year student majoring in Translation and Spanish. She is interested in language and media.
Mr. David TUAL
David is Director of the Centre for Languages and Inter-Communication (CLIC), Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. David has been teaching and managing language programmes in higher education for over 15 years and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). He has developed an interest in 21st century technologies and pedagogies, as well as Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP).
Dr. Tom BARRY
Tom received his PhD in Experimental Psychopathology from the University of Leuven, after which he worked as a Visiting Scholar in the Anxiety and Depression Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles (US) and then as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London (KCL). In 2017, Tom joined the University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor (Research) where he founded the Experimental Psychopathology Lab. In 2020, Tom began his role as the Programme Director of the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences that is situated within the Faculty of Social Sciences but which also spans the Faculties of Arts and Sciences. This programme is interdisciplinary in nature and, in line with this approach, Tom’s research explores the cognitive, behavioural and biological mechanisms involved in the emergence of mental health problems and their treatment (website: hkuepl.com).
Dr. Rachel LUI
Rachel is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Science. She experiences different teaching pedagogies such as flipping the classroom and gamification in her classrooms.
Ms. Kasia LANUCHA
Kasia works as an intercultural facilitator at the University of Cambridge and at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. She is an active member of academic intercultural discussion groups, which enables her to engage with the most recent developments in the field.
For a number of years, Kasia has been supporting individuals and organisations in their intercultural interactions through training and coaching and has been involved in projects at all management levels.
For information, please contact:
Ms. Lavina Luk, CETL
Phone: 3917 5272; Email: ytluk89@hku.hk