CHPR 3002 - Health Education and Health Behaviours
The objectives of this module are teaching students the concept of health in relation to health education and health promotion in community. Different behavioral theories, models and approaches will be explored. This module will also look into how health promotion practice links to different models of health behaviours . Through understanding of factors related to health behaviour, modifications for healthy lifestyle can be planned within the social and cultural context. Students will learn how to put theory into practice.
CHPR 4012 - Mental Health as a Public Health Issue
The course aims to enhance students’ knowledge on mental health and its determinants in public health and psychological perspectives. Major components of the course include 1) the epidemiology of mental health problems; 2) relationships among sociocultural factors, interpersonal resources, individual characteristics, and mental health; 3) mental health issues after adverse life events; 4) concepts and theories related to mental health promotion in the community; and 5) community health services and interventions to improve mental health.
EDUC 2120 - Principles and Implementation of Curriculum and Instructional Design
The course aims at introducing the theories and skills of curriculum and instructional design. The theories include: 1) models of curriculum and instructional design; 2) factors that should be considered in curriculum and instructional design; 3) establishing curriculum aims and instructional objectives; 4) curriculum organization; 5) curriculum implementation; 6) teaching strategies; 7) learning activities; 8) catering for individual differences; 9) assessing the learning of students; and 10) school-based curriculum design and implementation. It is hoped that learners will be able to apply what they have acquired throughout the course to handle curriculum matters and teaching tasks properly in schools.
EDUC 2210 - Education and Society in Hong Kong
This course is designed to help students reflect on the social and education system which they have lived with for about twenty years. By applying sociological and political concepts and theories, the course will analyze the development experience of postwar Hong Kong. The course will also introduce research findings on Hong Kong society and education which have been accumulated for the last four decades. It is intended to help students to have a broader and more penetrating understanding of Hong Kong society and its educational system. (Not for students who have taken UGEC 2895.)
EDUC 2220 - Educational Thought
This course aims to discuss the prominent thoughts directing educational practice and their philosophical origins or foundations. Topics include the meaning and aims of education, content and practice of teaching and learning, will be introduced and examined in relation to various fields of philosophical investigation concerning knowledge and value, humanity and society, etc. Traditional and modern, Chinese and Western perspectives on education will be scrutinized. (Not for students who have taken UGED 2682.)
EDUC 2240 - Understanding Schooling and Education Policy in Hong Kong
This course introduces learners to a structural analysis of schooling: its nature and how it has been shaped and, at the same time, how it contributes to macro social divisions and contradictions along class, gender and racial/ethnic lines. It also sensitizes learners to various aspects of school life at a micro level, in order to see how these are constrained by macro economic, political and social forces on the one hand, and how these forces go into the making of students’ identities and relationships on the other. This course attempts to portray all these macro and micro dynamics in the local context, and at the same time, depicts how these are played out in selected education policies and the process of policy-making itself
EDUC 2312 - Child and Adolescent Development
This course provides an introduction to major theoretical orientations in understanding human development. The contexts and the motivational foundation of child and adolescent development will be highlighted. The core of the course lies in different aspects of development (e.g., cognitive, moral, aesthetic, social, emotional; and self) in childhood and adolescence, which will be examined from both theoretical and applied perspectives. Issues of current concern (e.g., talent development, special educational needs, and various kinds of psychological disturbances) will also be discussed.
EDUC 3140 - Curricular Strategies for Tackling Individual Differences
Catering for individual differences is one of the challenges facing classroom teachers. This course aims to help student teachers develop basic understanding of the nature of the problem and means of tackling individual differences through curricular and instructional measures. Strategies such as curriculum adaptation, cooperative learning, mastery learning and assessment for learning will be covered. Student teachers will also acquire practical instructional strategies such as cubing. To make the course directly relevant to practical teaching environment, subject-specific examples and case studies will be widely used.
EDUC 3150 - Global Dialogues on Education for Sustainable Development in the Curriculum
The course attempts to promote understanding of the self and transform the ways students view themselves and navigate the world regarding Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) issues. During the course, students can have opportunities to connect, communicate, and interact with “global peers” around the world through “global dialogues”. Global dialogues can help bring together scholars and students from different parts of the world, share their experiences and views upon ESD issues, build a growing network of people with interests in ESD, and make available an accessible body of comparative information and knowledge about current and emerging issues in ESD.
EDUC3200 - Developing Intercultural Competence: Experiential Learning
This course aims to equip students with essential understanding of intercultural concepts and theories for providing effective educational services for people from diverse cultural backgrounds in Hong Kong. Students will be: (a) engaging with placement activities in a range of local social and educational contexts, (b) examining the rationale and policies and modes of social service provisions for ethnic minorities and new arrivals students in Hong Kong in the light of the theories and concepts, (c) analyzing and reflecting problems and shortfalls with the current educational settings, and (d) suggesting possible solutions to the identified problems. An experiential learning approach coupled with a wide range of interactive activities such as group presentation, site-based observations and services will be employed to sharpen the students’ intercultural awareness and sensitivity and to develop their personal perspective on themselves, others and their relations with cultural differences and diversity.
EDUC 3201 Ethics and Professional Standards for Teachers
This course provides an overview of professional standards for teachers in Hong Kong, encompassing issues related to law, professional ethics, values and behavior. Case studies are used to illustrate key aspects of T-standard+ and professional code, which include rights and responsibilities of teachers vis-a-vis other major stakeholders like students, employers, colleagues, parents/guardians, and to explicate what values and principles teachers can use to make ethical decisions and take ethical actions. Key legal issues related to professional development are also addressed and examined.
EDUC 3260 - Teacher Development and Leadership
Teachers are expected to play multiple roles in the education reform process. Shifting expectations require teachers to have a firm understanding of how schools operate and how reforms affect their roles both in and outside of the classroom. To effectively reshape their work in line with growing expectations, teachers must understand the current reality of school administration, their own personal weaknesses, commit to career-long professional development and consider strategies for maximizing their effectiveness. This course is designed to help teachers understand and shape their roles in a reform environment. In others words it aims to help teachers become leaders of their own professionalism. It does this in two ways. First, it aims to nurture teachers’ awareness of their own professional growth and how they can maximize the latest opportunities available in this area. Second, it helps teachers understand life in schools undergoing reform and the effect this can have on their professional life. Topics covered in the course are: understanding teachers’ role and the complexity of the school organization, developing personal mastery and personal vision in education, systems thinking and problem solving in the organization and in the classroom, learning shared vision and team learning skills, leading and managing change in school, etc.
EDUC 3270 - Engendering Education
Drawing on sociological and socio-psychological perspectives, this course tries to sensitize students to the gender implications underlying educational structures and processes. This course examines how various aspects of education, including its hierarchical structure, the curriculum and school processes, are shaped by the changing needs of capitalism and patriarchy. At the same time, this course will attempt to identify the various contradictions, paradoxes and space for resistance embedded in education. This course sees education as the site for the construction of and contests involving gender and sexualities. It also deconstructs dominant epistemologies, and introduces students to research concerning -differentiated modes of learning. The ultimate goal is to enable students to question existing power relationships in patriarchy, as well as concepts and views that are deeply embedded in such relationships, so as to be able to build up a broader intellectual space for themselves. (Not for students who have taken GDRS 2004 or UGEC 2672.)
EDUC 3280 - An introduction to Moral and Citizenship Education
This course aims to help student-teachers to reflect on their own values and on the ways they teach values, especially those values related to moral education and citizenship education in school. Philosophical, historical, social, psychological and pedagogical foundations on moral education and citizenship education will be explored. Among other important considerations, students are asked whether teachers should or can teach their own values in the classroom, and whether this is indeed inevitable. Taking education as a means aiming at nurturing human qualities for the sake of personal and social well-being, the course examines a range of values such as truth, beauty, goodness and justice as embodied in ‘whole-person education’. Key concepts like human rights, rule of law, democracy, nation-state, and globalization will be compared. How these concepts can be taught and learnt in daily classroom will be discussed. During the course students will discuss the nature of morality and explore various perspectives of moral education, values education and citizenship education. Students will also be asked to reflect upon how they understand their own personal and professional development in relation to values, moral and civic education and how to enact their various roles in the school.
EDUC 3290 - Meaning Concerns, Death and Life Education
This course aims to help student-teachers to reflect on their attitudes towards death in search for meaning of life and other meaning concerns in life education. It will draw on philosophical, historical, cultural, psychological, pedagogical and religious sources when relevant. Among other important deliberations, students are helped to reflect on their quest of meaning of life, in which kinds of deaths and their causes (e.g. mental health problems) are explored. Students learn how to cope with suicidal tendency of oneself and others, or sudden deaths of family members or friends. They will also learn how to prepare themselves as teachers in helping their future school pupils to cope with related issues on meaning concerns in death and life education.
EDUC 3311 - Psychology Applied to Learning and Teaching
This course provides a general overview on major psychological theories of learning and their implications for teaching. Emphasizing on the application of theories in teaching practice, the following topics are introduced:1) Behavioral, cognitive, social-cognitive, and socio-cultural theories of learning; 2) Basic cognitive processes: attention and memory; 3) Higher-order cognition, embodied cognition, and metacognition; 4) Cognition and instruction; 5) Classroom management; 6) Motivation and individual differences; 7) Design and implementation of classroom assessments.
EDUC 4110 - Dynamic Curriculum Development for Innovative Learning Experiences
This course aims to equip students with knowledge and skills required in design and implementation of student activities. The ultimate goal is to enhance both the processes and outcomes of student activities in the school curriculum and meet educational expectations on student learning through activities. Another aim is to heighten students’ awareness of safety and insurance issues in risk assessment through class activities.
EDUC 4130 - Information and Technology in Education
This course aims at equipping participants with knowledge and skills in making use of information technology (IT) to facilitate the process of teaching and learning in school contest. The course content includes: (1) development of multimedia and online resources for educational use; (2) integration of multimedia and e-learning elements into classroom teaching; (3) design and implementation of IT-supported collaborative inquiry learning, and (4) information literacy.
EDUC 4131 e-Learning in Schools
The rapid development of information technology (IT) brings new e-Learning opportunities to students. This course aims to develop participants’ ability to apply IT in education and design e-Learning activities in school contexts. Apart from gaining pedagogical knowledge and technological skills for leveraging IT to facilitate face-to-face teaching and self-directed learning, participants will work in groups to innovate inside- and/or outside-the-classroom activities with e-Learning strategies for addressing various educational needs or challenges in schools. The e-Learning strategies to be covered in the course include multimedia-enhanced learning, mobile learning, flipped classroom, computer-supported collaborative learning, as well as web-based inquiry learning.
EDUC 4320 - Classroom Management and School Discipline
The course is designed to familiarize students with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of classroom management and school discipline. It also aims at assisting teachers to promote an optimum learning environment and to encourage the development of self-discipline among students. Topics include: organizational perspective of discipline, group dynamics, management skills in context, student-teacher relationship, school rules and organization policies, coordination between discipline and guidance, home-school partnership and whole school discipline.
EDUC 4330 - School Guidance and Counselling
The course aims to explore different kinds of guidance service in schools and their functions, and to promote guidance activities in schools in Hong Kong. The course content includes: (1) history and aims of guidance; (2) what is guidance and counselling?; (3) major dimensions in school guidance; (4) the importance of teacher counsellor as a person; (5) basic counselling theories, attitudes and techniques; (6) individual and group counselling; (7) coordination of guidance and discipline; (8) whole school approach to guidance; (9) home-school partnership; and (10) referral counselling and consultation services.
EDUC 4340 - Supporting Students with Special Educational Needs
This course employs a cross-disciplinary perspective to introduce important issues in supporting students with special educational needs (SEN) in integrated school settings. First, we examine contemporary policy changes and controversies in special education and integration. We then discuss basic principles of identification and education of exceptional children and adolescents. Curriculum and instructional issues will be deliberated. In particular, the types of SEN covered are Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), Intellectual Disability (ID), Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), Physical Disability (PD), Visual Impairment (VI), Hearing Impairment (HI), Language Impairment (LI), and Giftedness and Talents (GT). Development characteristics and needs of these students at different learning stages will be addressed, with a focus on preparing prospective teachers’ readiness to teach these students in the regular classroom.
PHPC 1001 - Foundations in Public Health
This course will introduce undergraduate students to the discipline of public health and its basic academic framework, concept and methodology. The objective of the course is to provide a broad intellectual perspective of public health and presents both local and global public health challenges that are facing our society in the 21st century. The various academic disciplines within the domains of public health that include environmental health sciences, management sciences and health policy, social and behavioral sciences and biological sciences will be introduced and discussed. The impact of these public health problems in relation to our society and our everyday lives will be emphasized. An analytic public health problem solving framework will be used to enable students to appreciate and learn the problem solving methodology in evaluating and appraising various public health problems.
PHPC 2007 - Nutrition and Health
This course provides the foundation background of nutritional science and its application to the primary prevention of diet-related illness. It will look into the importance of nutrition throughout the lifespan and in different population sub-groups. The wide variety of nutritional issues in both developed and developing countries will be discussed. There will be a specific focus on the challenges of obesity and chronic non-communicable disease.
PHPC 2009 - Environment and Work
This public health oriented course addresses how the environmental and occupational (work-related) factors affect human health and what we can do to prevent or minimize the negative impacts. Whereas environmental science tends to address how human beings affect the environment, this course focuses on how the environment affects human health. Topics include an introduction to the toxicology and environmental epidemiology methods in assessing the impact of environmental exposures on human health; how the physical, chemical or biological agents in the air, water, soil and food affect human health; the evaluation and control of common hazards in the work place; and the impacts of global environmental changes on health.
PHPC 2016 - Theories and Concepts of Health Behaviours
The course lays the foundation for socio-medical behavioural sciences in public health. Contents of the course include the definitions of health and health as a socially constructed concept, some important theories that have been widely used in health promotion, interdisciplinary health concepts, as well as key concepts about health promotion.
