Outstanding CityU educator clinches UGC Teaching Award for pioneering innovative digital learning in history education
Professor Tsui Lik-hang from the Department of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has been awarded Hong Kong’s 2023 University Grants Committee (UGC) Teaching Award (Early Career Faculty Members) for integrating history learning with advanced digital tools.
His approach enhances traditional ways of teaching Chinese history by inspiring students to reimagine history through technology and digital tools.
This is the seventh time that CityU faculty members have been honoured with the sector-wide UGC teaching award since its inception in 2011. The award honours academics who excel in teaching at the UGC-funded universities.
Professor Tsui said he felt much honoured to receive the award. “I chose to become a history teacher because I believe history is important to developing civically-oriented and reflective individuals. By embedding digital elements, we could make the learning of Chinese history more engaging for this generation of digital natives growing up with machines,” he said.
Professor Freddy Boey Yin Chiang, CityU President, congratulated Professor Tsui. “Receiving this prestigious award is a good example of what students will get at CityU, not just traditional institutional learning through lectures and tutorials, but also inspirational, interactive and innovative learning,” he said.
Professor Tsui’s emphasis on engaging with original historical texts and narratives through an integrated learning environment fosters an active understanding of historical issues, allowing students to make meaningful connections to their own contexts. He integrates existing online datasets with handpicked digital tools for mapping historical locations, drawing timelines, annotating historical texts, and looking up digital biographies from Chinese history. He utilises these digital tools to instil a “discovery” element and implement a student-centred approach in his classes.
His teaching in history and culture is centred on embracing digital research skills, interactivity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism. “I stress the integration of digital learning and Socratic teaching methods for the coming age of artificial intelligence, so that students equip themselves to critique clichés and unverified information, and rethink analytical frameworks through data and debates.”
His teaching fosters students' willingness to actively engage in historical learning, encouraging them to enthusiastically analyse, judge and construct meanings from historical texts and participate more fully as “researchers” when tackling academic questions. Professor Tsui’s students have often praised his interactive and inspiring classes.
Beyond CityU, Professor Tsui shares his unique practices with higher and secondary education sectors. Impressively, he led his colleagues to produce a glossary for teaching Chinese history to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong, a project supported by the Education Bureau of the HKSAR Government. He is also a proponent of digital humanities and interdisciplinary research.
Although he only joined CityU four years ago, the University recognised his outstanding teaching performance with the Teaching Excellence Award in 2022/23. During his time with CityU, he has received other awards for his research and knowledge transfer activities.