The persistent challenges posed by COVID-19 and political unrest have urged teacher educators in Hong Kong to develop innovative strategies in curriculum design, pedagogies, and assessment and feedback practices in the online environment. The challenges in online teaching have also encouraged teacher educators to reflect on their practices and conduct practitioner-based research to enhance their scholarship of teaching, to respond to the changing society, changing schools and diverse needs from students. The crises caused by the pandemic of COVID-19 and political unrest have driven almost all school teachers and teacher educators to exercise various modes of online teaching, which undoubtedly presents the importance of technology-supported teaching and learning in schools and in teacher education. In the post-COVID-19 era, technology will continue to be one of the major driving forces of educational changes. However, a few issues concerning the negative impacts of online teaching have been rarely addressed in the existing literature. In this concluding chapter, we look into three issues that are relevant to online teaching in the post-COVID-19 era. They are virtual teaching and technology-enhanced curriculum, social and emotional learning, and digital divide and inequity. The discussion of these issues provides a basis to suggest the ongoing innovations in teacher education and directions that deserve further research in future. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

University closures due to the pandemic have taken learning and teaching from the confines of the physical campus to virtual spaces enabled by digital technologies. In order to ensure the quality of higher education learning and teaching, teaching staff need to be supported with quality professional development (PD) for building their capacity to plan for and implement online learning. It is crucial for universities to design and implement customised PD to address the professional learning needs of the teaching staff. This chapter examines how a faculty-based learning innovation team at a university in Hong Kong has adopted an experiential learning approach to design customised PD programmes for teaching staff to build their capacity to enhance the quality of online learning and teaching. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

Since Ernest Boyer's seminal work on scholarship of the professoriate, the notion of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has undergone changes in the higher education landscape. This chapter, partly based on the literature and partly based on the personal experiences and observations arising from my previous and current roles of a university-scholar teacher, former Dean of Education and Vice President (Academic) and Provost in two local universities in Hong Kong, explores issues related to scholarship and leadership of teaching and learning in different roles, formal or informal, in higher education.This chapter consists of two main parts. The first part of this chapter touches upon different perspectives and approaches to SoTL which is linked with, to some extent, student learning and its inquiry and reflection, disciplinary/multidisciplinary perspectives, self and collegial professional development and pedagogical innovation. The second part discusses issues related to leadership of teaching and learning which might cover forging shared vision, providing and sharing examples and practices, creating policies and structures, engaging colleagues and students in and leading collaboration, leveraging technology and resources, offering support and mentoring for colleagues and students in SoTL initiatives and so on. This chapter ends by offering some possible pointers for future SoTL and leadership development in teaching and learning in higher education. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

Due to the social movements in Hong Kong and the outbreak of COVID-19, many non-local PhD students (NLPhDs) were scattered in different locations outside of Hong Kong. Since then, online teaching has been widely adopted in higher education and it affords students with continuable study and research opportunities but NLPhDs still experienced ever-shifting challenges and difficulties. This study draws on qualitative research methods to reveal the experiences of nine NLPhDs from different locations (e.g., Mainland China, Turkey, Vietnam, The Philippines, South Korea and Kazakhstan). Data were collected through in-depth individual interviews with the participants, their reflective journals and follow-up conversations via social networking applications. The findings show that NLPhDs experienced multifarious obstacles in study (suspended work, difficulties in adapting to online learning mode and stagnation in data collection). They had various emotional problems (stress, frustration, demotivation, sense of guilt and so on). However, they exercised agency (e.g., moving to spatially supportive contexts for study, reaching out to extra online resources, seeking supports from supervisors and tackling emotional problems) to overcome the challenges and difficulties. This study offers implications for doctoral students who are facing universal difficulties in times of crisis and their supervisors regarding how to offer appropriate support to their students. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

In the past few years, the education sector, including teacher education, has encountered unprecedented challenges resulting from the global pandemic of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). In Hong Kong, it was fuelled by protests and campus occupation due to the unstable political situation. Many universities were forced to suspend face-to-face instruction and adopt online teaching. This volume is a response to the global transformation of teaching and learning from the face-to-face mode to the online mode triggered by these challenges, with a focus on teacher education in Hong Kong. This introductory chapter pulls together the narrative of the volume by detailing such challenges and showcasing how the challenges have accelerated the use of e-technology in teaching and learning online. It provides an overview of the chapters included in this volume and discusses how they contribute to the rationale of the volume and the various sections, which include challenges in teaching and learning in times of crisis, curriculum and pedagogical innovations, assessment and feedback practices, and the scholarship of teaching and learning in the teacher education context. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

This study focused on Hong Kong mathematics teachers' experiences and challenges in online distance teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 109 frontline mathematics teachers participated in the survey. Their teaching experiences and challenges during the pandemic were investigated through an online questionnaire and followed up through in-depth interviews. The results show that most teachers believed that their way of teaching mathematics had somewhat changed and that they had tried to offer e-learning as an alternative teaching mode to maintain the quality of teaching during the pandemic. They also tended to focus on external factors rather than internal factors during online teaching. Teachers agreed that a paradigm shift had occurred in the role of teaching during this time of crisis. Although they had developed sufficient levels of technology use, these did not necessarily translate to competence in achieving instructional goals. Ultimately, teachers' personal experiences with online teaching and their beliefs about mathematics teaching are crucial factors affecting the role and effectiveness of online teaching. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.

Literature has long been used as a tool for language teaching and learning. In the New Academic Structure in Hong Kong, it has become an important element in the senior secondary English language curriculum to promote communicative language teaching (CLT) with a process-oriented approach. However, as in many other English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) contexts where high-stakes testing prevails, Hong Kong students are highly exam-oriented and expect teachers to teach to the test. Because there is no direct assessment on literature in the English language curriculum, many teachers find it challenging to balance CLT through literature and exam preparation. To address this issue, this article describes an innovation of teaching ESL through songs by ‘packaging’ it as exam practice to engage exam-oriented students in CLT. A series of activities derived from the song Seasons in the Sun was implemented in the ESL classrooms in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Based on the author’s observations and reflections informed by teachers’ and students’ comments, the students were first motivated, at least instrumentally, by the relevance of the activities to the listening paper in the public exam when they saw the similarities between the classroom tasks and past exam questions. Once the students felt motivated, they were more easily engaged in a variety of CLT activities, which encouraged the use of English for authentic and meaningful communication. This article offers pedagogical implications for ESL/EFL teachers to implement CLT through literature in exam-oriented contexts. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).