Faculty Knowledge Exchange Awards 2025

Introduction

The Jockey Club “Peace and Awareness” Mindfulness Culture in Schools Initiative (JC PandA), launched by the Faculty of Social Sciences, has been honoured with the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award 2025. This recognition reflects our ongoing commitment and contributions to promoting mindfulness in education and beyond.

The Faculty Knowledge Exchange (KE) Awards, established by The University of Hong Kong in 2011, acknowledge each faculty’s staff members for their outstanding contributions to knowledge exchange that generate significant social, cultural, or economic impact.

JC PandA is a pioneer mindfulness research-cum-intervention projects in Chinese societies, dedicated to exploring the value of mindfulness in education. We engage school educators, parents, students, government departments, and international organizations through various activities, training, and teaching resources to foster a culture of mindfulness. Our programme delivers evidence-based mindfulness courses and resources to schools through a “train-the-trainer” approach, aiming to establish a sustainable mindfulness culture. Below are some of our major initiatives over the past six years.

 

Promotional Activities

To help students, parents, educators, and the wider public understand more about mindfulness, we have organized a series of activities, including talks and workshops, reaching over 13,000 participants since 2019. Besides, we produced the movie “I Have Arrived (你在嗎)”, which received multiple awards at the Independent Short Awards (Los Angeles, USA). In collaboration with the Education Bureau, we have also organized corresponding movie-sharing workshops. These sessions have drawn more than 4,300 participants, with over 97% of participants finding the events insightful and conducive to reflecting on their parent-child relationships.

 

Moreover, our project has developed series of  mindfulness resources for the public, mindfulness-trained educators and mindfulness teachers. To foster stronger parent-child relationships, we have also designed a “Mindful Popcorn Kit” that supports parents and children to integrate mindfulness into daily family life and nurture better mental well-being. Collaborating with the Education Bureau, this kit has been delivered to all primary schools in Hong Kong (except international schools).

Additionally, we have launched the JC PandA mobile application,  which provides easy access to guided mindfulness practices and related resources, enabling users to practice anytime, anywhere.

 

Training 

To promote mindfulness culture in schools, we offer staff development workshops, professional consultations, and eight-week mindfulness trainings for educators. These initiatives aim to support educators’ mental well-being and to help them embody mindful attitudes such as acceptance, openness, and compassion when responding to students’ and their own needs. In collaboration with the Education Bureau starting from 2024, we have jointly provided the .b Foundations mindfulness courses and organized multiple “train-the-trainers” workshops.

Additionally, we offer Mindful Parenting courses to help parents integrate mindfulness attitude into daily parenting, helping them reduce stress and strengthen parent-child relationships. Based on feedback from over 1,400 participants, 99% of parents found the courses practical and beneficial.

Research Outcome

Our research demonstrated the effectiveness of the programmes for teachers, parents and students.

We have published three peer-reviewed academic articles (Chan et al., 2024; Lam et al., 2024, Tsang et al., 2021), all indicating that the eight-week mindfulness course designed for teaching staff can effectively enhance their mindfulness attitude and mental health.

Another research study we conducted in 2024 examined the effectiveness of the Mindful Parenting Programme. It was found that parents who received the intervention experienced significantly less stress at both post-intervention and two-month follow-up compared to the control group. Their children also displayed fewer behavioural problems. This research underscored the programme’s notable positive impacts on parenting practices, mental health, parent-child relationships, and emotional competence.

In the 2024/25 academic year, we conducted a quasi-randomized controlled trial to evaluate effectiveness of the mindfulness curriculum for students. Preliminary findings indicate that secondary school students who participated in the mindfulness programme showed significant improvements in mindfulness attitudes, gratitude, executive functioning, and teacher-student relationships compared with the control group.

We are grateful for the University’s recognition and will continue our commitment to cultivating mindfulness in the education sector.

Read More

Chan, W. W. L., Wu, K. C., Li, S. X., Tsang, K. K. Y., Shum, K. K., Kwan, H. W., Su, M. R., Lam, S.-f. (2024) Mindfulness-Based Intervention for School teachers: Comparison of Video-Conferencing Group with Face-to-Face Group. Mindfulness, 15, 2291–2306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02430-6

Lam, S.-f., Tsang, K. K. Y., Shum, K. K., Wong, G. H. Y., Wong, S. W., Wu, K. C., Kwan, H. W., Su, M. R. (2024) Emotion Regulation versus Emotion Care as a Mechanism of Mindfulness. Mindfulness, 15, 2888–2905. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02471-x

Tsang, K. K., Shum, K. K., Chan, W. W., Li, S. X., Kwan, H. W., Su, M. R., Wong, B. P., & Lam, S. (2021). Effectiveness and mechanisms of mindfulness training for school teachers in difficult times: A randomized controlled trial. Mindfulness, 12(11), 2820–2831. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-021-01750-1

The University of Hong Kong (2025, August 8). Professor Kathy Kar Man Shum and JC PandA Team Receive Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award 2025. https://web.socsc.hku.hk/school_news/professor-kathy-kar-man-shum-and-jc-panda-team-receive-faculty-knowledge-exchange-award-2025/