Teaching Excellence Awards Virtual Workshop (1): Constructing an Evidence-based Portfolio

Anita Wong is a speech-language therapist (SLT) by training and experience. She teaches in the area of Cantonese grammar, child language development and disorders, child language assessment and intervention, and interprofessional practice in educational settings in the BSc (Speech and Hearing Sciences) program.

As a SLT educator, Anita has a good understanding of the professional competencies required for entry-level practice in Hong Kong. With that understanding, she creates a social milieu of learning that motivates students to pursue knowledge with her as partners. To meet this longstanding need for an evidence base for intervention with Chinese children with language disorders, Anita follows a three-phase teaching cycle. In the first phase, she engages her postgraduate and undergraduate students in clinical research on child language intervention. In the second phase, she illustrates her evidence-based intervention decision-making process to students in the classroom. In the last phase, she collaborates with clinical educators to help students translate research evidence to actual clinical practice and develop new research questions. Anita hopes that this cycle will strengthen the research-teaching-clinical practice nexus in child language disorders, hence making a stronger impact on the children who receive speech language therapy.

Anya researches medieval English literature, as well as pre-modern English law and legal culture, and teaches across the disciplines of English language and literature, legal history and law. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. At Melbourne, Yale and HKU, she has taught courses in interdisciplinary law and literature, legal history, medieval and early modern English literature, creative writing, the history of the English language, palaeography and codicology, and digital humanities. Anya’s teaching is inspired by what drives her research: a desire for knowledge and the recognition of its complexity, a persistence in the search for succinct and coherent clarifications, and a delight in the discovery of unifying patterns or solutions. She is committed to the value of enthusiastic energy as the way to classroom leadership, to performance and creation as the way to learning, and to making her classroom an active one.