Ms Loretta Leung Mee-kuen, Head of the Wofoo Whole Person Development Centre, Student Affairs Office at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), is a team member of the inter-institutional Joint University Mental-Wellness Project (JUMP) which has received the prestigious University Grants Committee (UGC) Teaching Award 2021. Led by City University of Hong Kong, the winning team comprises members from The University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University.
 
JUMP is a three-year intervarsity project which aims to promote university students’ well-being, enhance their resilience to face adversity and challenges, and nurture them to be socially responsible citizens through positive education, including positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. 

The team has developed and implemented a positive transformational learning pedagogy, which shifts from a deficit model to a strength-based model. The goal is to promote students’ understanding, and use, of language which can maintain or improve wellbeing. The process-oriented approach enables learners to define, validate and reformulate the meaning of their experiences. The transformational pedagogical framework delivers positive education content by enabling students to learn positive education theories and concepts, and ultimately embed a positive education atmosphere in the university and the community by way of student-led projects.
 
The project has benefitted over 1,100 staff members and professionals, and around 4,000 university students through a variety of activities. The participating university students also carried out community projects of their own design to help a further 1,500 members of the wider community. 

Introduced in 2011, the annual UGC Teaching Award aims to recognise past and present teaching performance and achievements, as well as staff members’ leadership in and scholarly contributions to teaching and learning in and across universities. For the sharing of the team award recipients, please visit the UGC website.