Virtual exchange programs represent a relatively novel approach designed to foster a more global perspective and promote discipline-specific learning; however, this approach has not been widely adopted in sociology. This article reports findings on student experiences and learning in a virtual exchange program involving two large introductory sociology classes in Hong Kong and Atlanta. A postsurvey invited students to reflect qualitatively on their experiences, and six major themes emerged from the data: (1) global application of sociological knowledge, (2) social and cultural relativism, (3) breaking the shell and gaining intellectual and social flexibility, (4) social networking opportunities, (5) challenges and adjustments, and (6) keeping contact beyond school. Based on our experience and the students' feedback, we conclude that virtual exchange is an effective pedagogical approach for internationalizing sociology curricula, enhancing intercultural competency, and deepening students' understanding of core sociological concepts. Copyright ©2024 SAGE Publications.

Designing effective strategies for developing higher education students’ competencies, such as creativity and entrepreneurship, is crucial for their survival and self-realization in the technology-rich 21st century. This study is important as it addresses a significant research gap by designing and implementing self-determination theory (SDT)-guided case-based instruction (CBI) to enhance digital learners’ creativity and entrepreneurship. A class of 34 master’s students in a taught programme focused on digital learning and technology at a public university in Hong Kong participated in the study. First, the students took a pre-test to assess their creativity and entrepreneurship. They then experienced a 13-week course designed using SDT-guided CBI. After the intervention, they completed a post-test on their creativity and entrepreneurship. Additionally, the researchers conducted interviews with 10 participants. These processes allowed the researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of the SDT-guided CBI learning activities and to gather participants’ suggestions for improving the design. The results of a repeated measures analysis of variance indicated the feasibility of SDT-guided CBI. Significant improvements in creativity were observed from the pre-test to the post-test, from the pre-test to the mid-test, and from the mid-test to the post-test. Meanwhile, students’ entrepreneurship significantly increased from the pre-test to the post-test, although the increases from the pre-test to the mid-test and from the mid-test to the post-test were slight and did not reach a significant level. From the qualitative data, students provided suggestions such as selecting effective case studies, using entrepreneurs’ stories, supporting entrepreneurial experiences, promoting technology-enhanced learning, and advocating for collaborative learning to improve the design. The findings imply that SDT-guided CBI has the potential to continually enhance students’ creativity and entrepreneurship

Prior research in Applied Linguistics has explored how teachers mobilise diverse resources in order to make connections between the students' out-of-school knowledge and experiences and the abstract content knowledge. Nevertheless, how teachers can transcend the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge by incorporating relevant content knowledge from other academic subjects to facilitate students' learning of new content knowledge is a topic that is under-researched in the field. Adopting translanguaging as an analytical perspective, this study examines how the creation of a translanguaging space can afford opportunities for an English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) teacher to connect content-related knowledge for supporting students' learning of new historical knowledge in EMI Western History classrooms. The data is based on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong EMI secondary Western History classroom. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is used to analyse the classroom interaction data. The classroom interaction data is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. This paper argues that a translanguaging classroom space can be ­created for activating students' prior learnt subject knowledge for ­supporting students' learning of new academic knowledge. Such a translanguaging space provides opportunities for classroom participants to not only engage in fluid language practices, but also encourages the teacher and students to bring in multiple epistemologies that help students understand new academic knowledge in a new classroom interactional context. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

The Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, launched during the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022, encourages governments, companies and investors to publish data on their nature‐related risks, dependencies and impacts. These disclosures are intended to drive businesses to recognise, manage and mitigate their reliance on ecosystem goods and services. However, there is a ‘biodiversity blind spot’ that is evident for most organisations and business schools. Business education rarely addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss, such as the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. As the dominant positioning of Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) presents biodiversity in anthropocentric instrumental terms inadequate for addressing ecosystem decline, we posit that a more progressive and transformative ecocentric education through ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy is needed. Both approaches include the development of critical thinking about degrowth, the circular economy and conventional stakeholder theory to include non‐human stakeholders. Using comparative case studies from Northumbria University, the University of Hong Kong and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we illustrate how business education can be transformed to address biodiversity loss, providing theoretical guidance and practical recommendations to academic practitioners and future business leaders. Copyright ©2024 Wiley.

Aim/Purpose: This article aims at the critical present: to serve a constructive purpose in the current COVID-19 crisis by presenting practice driven pedagogical strategies for online learning and teaching. It acknowledges the multitude of challenges faced by educators through the delivery of online instructional strategies for schools.Background: The development of information technology enables online learning and blended learning to be increasingly popular in extending students’ learning opportunities. Technology-enabled learning approaches make students’ learning more flexible and personalized. In Hong Kong, one of the first few cities where the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak was first reported, school classes have been suspended since the end of Lunar New Year on February 3, 2020.Methodology: This research used a qualitative method of multiple case analysis to explore how three educators from primary, secondary, and tertiary institutes employed various strategies to offer learning and teaching as usual. Naturalistic inquiry was used to observe, describe, and interpret the “lived experiences” of the three educators and the perceptions of stakeholders.Contribution: Since early February 2020, school classes have been suspended amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong, one of the first cities where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported. This timely article overviews effective practices with the use of online learning technologies to support academia from around the world to achieve teaching and learning in an online environment.Findings: Results indicate that meaningful cognitive activities rely on teachers’ leading role to build a blended approach that combines the advantages of asynchronous and synchronous methods in order to facilitate social interaction among students. Furthermore, our research has revealed that educators are likely to perceive three non-teaching challenges on a rapid blended transition of the learning – digital divide, data privacy, and professional

Purpose: This study aims to offer authors’ humble yet unique experiences about developing an undergraduate sociology programme in an increasingly divided city.Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the authors reflect upon the development of a new sociology programme in Hong Kong in which a wide spectrum of expectations from different stakeholders, together with their own sense of mission towards sociology education, have set a very challenging stage.Findings: Developing an undergraduate sociology programme has never been easy, and there is no self-complacence as far as developing a programme that is of both academic and social values.Originality/value: This paper offers a first-hand account of how sociology educators have developed a new sociology programme in a unique social context. Copyright © 2023 Emerald Publishing Limited.

Entrepreneurial STEM, an interdisciplinary approach blending STEM and entrepreneurship education, has become a new trend for cross-subject collaboration that aims to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in students, enabling them to apply their STEM knowledge across various contexts. In this study, we investigate the challenges and corresponding strategies of head science teachers who initiated an entrepreneurial STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) curriculum in their schools. Grounded in social exchange theory, we explore how head science teachers with entrepreneurial attributes navigated asymmetrical power distribution presented by principals and other subject heads. This collective case study focuses on three schools in Hong Kong that successfully implemented a renowned entrepreneurial STEM curriculum. The findings reveal a common trajectory among head science teachers: initial enthusiastic promotion of the curriculum while meeting resistance; a downscaling and team reform struggles; and a handover and scale-up. This study illuminates the intricate process of balancing power dynamics and stakeholder perceptions through reciprocal negotiation, which were in turn shaped by societal norms. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Developing intercultural competence plays an essential part in language learning. This resonates with Halliday’s (1978) apt observation that culture provides meaning to language-in-use. Intercultural competence is a complex concept, including dimensions such as attitudes, knowledge, skills, and awareness (Byram, 2009). Cultivating students’ intercultural competence has become one of the objectives of language teaching, and a range of courses has been designed and conducted for preparing students to take an active part in the global world. As more college students are willing to work in multinational corporations or study abroad, language teachers play an important role in providing students with more opportunities to enhance their intercultural knowledge and skills.Based on Byram’s (1997) intercultural competence model and guided by the intercultural language teaching approach proposed by Liddicoat (2003; 2013), the researcher developed a course that seeks to cultivate students’ intercultural competence in four dimensions, attitudes, knowledge, skills, and awareness. One class of second-year English major students took part in the 12-week course with another class as the control group. During the course, students experienced a process which involved noticing, comparing, and reflecting through various intercultural activities. This study employed a range of methods including questionnaire, interview, and reflective journals, and it was found that students’ intercultural competence was improved, and the course showed significantly positive influence on the cultivation of students’ attitudes, facilitation of cultural knowledge acquisition, and the development of intercultural skills and awareness. Further analysis led to identification and detailed discussion of a range of aspects of the four dimensions of intercultural competence such as willingness to explore otherness and enriched knowledge of value systems and various intercultural skills.The study has shown an example

The identification of the effects of university-based entrepreneurship education has attracted increasing interest in both academic and practical communities. On the basis of integrating passion- and competency-based perspectives, this study attempted to offer a sound understanding of how university-based entrepreneurship education influences the entrepreneurial intention of university students. Based on a dataset of 1050 university students from 50 universities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in China, a hierarchical linear modeling analysis was performed, and the results support our hypotheses. Our research provides the first empirical evidence illustrating how, in the organizational context, university-based entrepreneurship education facilitates the shaping of future entrepreneurs from dual perspectives. The implications of our findings were discussed. For these parts, we sought to incorporate reviewers' suggestions, which have been highlighted in revision version. • The impact of EE on the EC not only concerning with creating businesses but also enhancing recognition of business opportunities. • In light of this TPB theory, intentions toward implementing behaviors could predict planned behaviors (e.g., entrepreneurial behavior). • This study focused on students majored in the business management, and science and technology, which have relatively high startup potential. • Along this reasoning, EI seems to play dominant part in the set of variables that are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of EE programs. • Although the benefits of EE have been established, studies on the implications of EE remain divided. Copyright © 2023 Elsevier.

Individuals with higher financial capability not only have more savings, fewer debts and better lives after retirement but also exhibit higher life satisfaction, fewer depressive symptoms and more prosocial behaviours towards others. Unsurprisingly, financial capability has been regarded as one of the most important ‘life skills’ by parents, educators, spouses, employers and the community. Therefore, integrating financial capability into formal school curricula and students’ learning journeys is important. Existing practices have emphasised the relevance of saving and spending to financial education but distinguishing between investment and speculation and sharing and donating has been gaining attention from educators. Most existing programmes, international or local, have been limited because they have focused relatively less on (a) the behavioural aspect of financial capability (e.g., how to save and how to control impulse buying), (b) the pedagogical approach to engage younger children and support their learning and (c) whether they were able to improve the financial knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and self-control and gratitude of the recipients. To date, no financial education programmes have been designed for and evaluated with primary school students in Asia, much less Hong Kong. The goal of this dissertation was to develop a programme that was comprehensive in content, suitable for younger children and effective in improving children’s financial capability in terms of their knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviours. The programme was called ‘The 4S Programme’ because it targeted effective saving, wise spending, distinguishing between speculation and investment and sharing. The programme consisted of 10 sessions of 60 minutes, equipped with a wide range of interactive pedagogical activities, including discussion, games, role-play, case studies and experiential learning activities. The programme was also equipped with simple, take-home worksheets that involved