Led by Dr. Percy Kwok (The Department of Education Policy and Leadership, EdUHK), another Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project entitled “Pre-service teacher cross-cultural exchanges through global teaching experiences” among five international universities in Asia, Europe, and Oceania in 2025-26. The organizers are Dr. Jennifer Cutri and Dr. Gerarda Richards (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia), Prof. Yufeng Zhang (Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China), Prof. Tae-Hee Choi (University of Southampton, England, the United Kingdom), and Prof. Ismail Celik and Prof. Signe Siklander (University of Oulu, Finland).
Participants are pre-service and in-service teachers studying the relevant Bachelor of Education, and Professional Certificate/Diploma in Education programmes. Such a new combination of collaborators helps foster students’ awareness, increase their metacognition, and strengthen their pedagogical skills and conditional knowledge concerning ethical dilemmas, teacher professional identity, and professional development in the tensions between local development of teacher professionalism policy and globalization of educational reforms in teacher professionalism. The online synchronous workshops and asynchronous follow-up Padlet discussions will run at regular times to ensure high participation rates. Experienced school panel chairpersons and principals will also share more valuable experiences and help students address theory-practice gaps from local and international perspectives. Tentative discussion topics cover effective classroom management, tackling great learner diversity, tailoring school-based curricula, enhancing local and international teacher collaborations, developing cross-curricular, inter-curricular, and trans-curricular materials and activities, aligning school assessment with national/international curricula, helping students develop studying resilience, developing student agency in project works, and study tours.
In the two-way knowledge transfer of teaching knowledge and pedagogical skills between preservice and in-service teachers in Hong Kong and other international universities, the COIL project will collect evaluative mixed-methods research data for academic presentations and publications.
