HKU Law Teachers Recognised by Teaching Excellence Awards 2020

Three HKU Law teachers were recognised in the 2020 HKU Teaching Excellence Awards for individual and group efforts.  Congratulations to the following colleagues:

• Ms Lindsay Ernst won the Outstanding Teaching Team Award (OTA) with  Mr David L Bishop of the Faculty of Business and Economics for EmpowerU: A cross-disciplinary, community-led, impact-based teaching and learning platform.  The initiative aims to connect domestic workers with opportunities to learn from top education partners, including NGOs, companies, and top university professors. Currently, Lindsay is a Co-Director of the LLM  in Human Rights Programme and Lecturer in Human Rights Experiential Learning. Lindsay specialises in developing interdisciplinary experiential learning opportunities focused on advancing social justice and human rights. Her areas of interest are community legal education and empowerment, migration, children’s rights, disability rights, and clinical legal education.

• Dr Anya M Adair, co-appointed in the School of English, Faculty of Arts, and Department of Law, Faculty of Law, won the Early Career Teaching Award (ECTA). Anya is Assistant Professor in Law and Humanities. Anya’s research centres on medieval English law and legal culture, as well as pre-modern English literature. Her focus is the early medieval period (c.550-1200), but her research extends also to Old Norse and Anglo-Latin, medieval language interaction, book history and manuscript studies, poetry and poetics, digital humanities, and the history of the English language. Her present research seeks to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and medieval literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period. Her interest in legal and literary culture takes her work into the history of emotion, historical linguistics, religious writing, poetry, poetics and rhetoric, as well as palaeography, codicology, and the history of law.  Currently, the two courses she is teaching are Introduction to Law and Literary Studies, and The Beginnings of English Law and Literature.

• Professor Douglas W Arner won the Teaching Innovation Team Award (TIA).  Douglas collaborated with  Mr David Bishop of the Faculty of Business and Economics, Mr David S Lee of Faculty of Business and Economics, Ms. Ellen Seto of Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative and Professor Siu-ming Yiu of the Faculty of Engineering to develop HKU edX Professional Certificate Programme in FinTech. This program is designed for those working in finance, technology, regulation or FinTech, those studying related subjects, or those just interested in learning more about one of the most exciting processes underway today. Each course brings together leading experts in FinTech from a range of backgrounds, including professors, market professionals and entrepreneurs. Designed by leading academics from a range of disciplines with input from industry leaders including among others SuperCharger, the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, Microsoft, PwC and the Asia Capital Markets Institute, each course provides the tools necessary to transform one’s own future in FinTech. Remarkably, this programme is now nominated for the 2020 edX Prize.

The Teaching Excellence Awards Scheme (TEAS) aims to recognise, reward and promote excellence in teaching at the University. Under the Scheme, there are four categories of awards, i.e. University Distinguished Teaching Award, Outstanding Teaching Award (OTA), Early Career Teaching Award (ECTA) and Teaching Innovation Award (TIA). Besides individual awards, both OTA and TIA comprise team awards to recognise and encourage collaborative effort and achievement in enhancing teaching and learning.  We are pleased to see Faculty of Law colleagues obtaining awards in three of these categories this year. Click here to view the list of 2020 TEAS Winners.