The Common Core (http://commoncore.hku.hk/about-us/) focuses on building relationships between important ideas and disciplines, between students across Faculties, between students and their tutors and professors, and between the campus, the city, and beyond. It creates synaptic leaps between, among many others, art and physics, globalization and fashion, health and cities, and mobile phones and politics.
Faculty Academic Advisers (FAA) and the newly formed Common Core Student Ambassadors are good examples of this relationship-building. The Student Ambassadors, who come from all Faculties and from first-year students through alumni, provide essential advice to us about how to improve the student experience of the Core. And, since the FAAs are in direct touch with the students about how to plan pathways for courses, co-curricular involvements, and patterns of living beyond their studies, they provide a key link to the work of the Core.
The major work of the FAA, in this context, is to share the spirit of the Common Core as it builds student capacities across disciplines and skills for different types of learning. How can the Core best coordinate and connect ideas, sites, and activities? How can it best serve the more specialized learning of the majors (and vice versa)? How can it open up the vastness of the exploratory mind? How can it best prepare students for a very flexible and mobile workplace? The Core has active partnerships with all the Faculties, its teachers and students, other co-curricular units on campus, and sites for learning in the city and around the world. At every turn, the Common Core works to establish points of connections across all of our experiences.
Please let us know how we can help strengthen learning and enhance the student experience of the Core! You can reach us at: commoncore@hku.hk. To find out more about the academic requirements of the Common Core Curriculum, refer to http://commoncore.hku.hk/programme-requirements-2014/
Prof. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren
Director of Common Core Curriculum
