Introduction

Words from

Principal Investigator

Providing their students with opportunities to gain more exposure to their profession has become a common goal among many universities these days. In face of the keen employment competition and challenges of globalization as well as internationalization, university students of this generation have to be not only academically sound, but also professionally competent. Research shows that the ability to engage in reflective practices is of crucial importance in professional education (Schön, 1983). This practice in the healthcare context is termed clinical reflection. Since critical reflection in clinical practice is essential for clinical effectiveness and continuing professional development, clinical reflection has often been used by educators (e.g. dental educators) to encourage students to evaluate their daily practice during workplace attachment with the aim of becoming a reflective practitioner with higher-level critical thinking skills (Hanson & Alexander, 2010). Seeing that reflection is a skill that needs to be practised in order to be developed (McClure, 2016), more universities and educational institutions are now incorporating clinical reflection into their programmes to establish this skill to prepare students for their professional career.

In the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES) and the Chinese Language Enhancement Programme Unit (CLEP) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the language enhancement courses for healthcare undergraduates have a component of reflective writing to teach students the reflective theoretical frameworks and reflective language expectations in clinical practice. The findings of this project can increase our awareness of the reflective learning needs of healthcare undergraduates, thus setting a more focused direction for future curriculum design and material development, both within the School/Centre and within the Faculties of Dentistry and Medicine more generally.

While experiential learning seems to be commonly scheduled in the senior years of undergraduate curricular at HKU, provision of experiential learning opportunities for first-year undergraduates is still lacking at HKU. This project is therefore a pioneering initiative to engage first-year students from healthcare disciplines in experiential learning to develop a thoughtful and personal commitment to their professionalism as soon as they start their academic studies. This breakthrough project also represents an innovative collaboration between the CAES and CLEP to develop HKU students’ bilingual language proficiencies, thus enabling them to achieve the most powerful bilingual learning.