Co-teaching for over a decade, Mr. Benz Peter and Mr. Ng Siu King Kingsley have continuously amd significantly contributed towards development of Teaching and Learning at the Academy of Visual Arts. Their collaboration centres around all aspects concerning Experience Design, including the establishment and delivery of only the second Master-level programme in Experience Design in the world, as well as various courses at Bachelor and Master levels. Combining genuine enthusiasm with pedagogical and academic expertise, their team has inspired hundreds of students to explore their personal potentials.

As a team of conscientious and very popular teachers who complement one another, Mr. Benz and Mr. Ng are firmly committed to enriching students’ cognitive, sensual and emotional capacities through meaningful study experience. They see themselves as mentors guiding students through their respective learning journeys. Rather than imparting knowledge, students are encouraged to keep an open mind, to explore and reflect their findings, which they may ultimately express in their creative and academic outputs.

Mr. Benz and Mr. Ng deliver engaging courses nurturing confident practitioners capable of producing exceptional creative works, deeply rooted in their personal experiences and their reflection of the world around them. To this end meaningful dialog is the aim, method, process, as well as the outcome of all learning in their teaching activities.

They also believe, any learning practice for real life must be fundamentally context dependent thus they put great efforts in continuously providing students with new exposures outside of the classroom and the campus. Almost always, their activities are therefore positioned within the community or in an international context.

Students were particularly appreciative towards the team’s efforts in the pandemic. For example, they transformed the lock down experience into creativity opportunities: Mr. Benz and Mr. Ng asked students to form teams, whereby a student under quarantine would instruct the other to explore their neighbourhood from their home’s window. This exercise inspired a student to form the project “Resilience”, an open sharing platform about stories of resilience under COVID-19. The project received CampUs Connect funding and ran on three campuses.

Apart from setting up the MVA (Experience Design), Mr. Benz and Mr. Ng were more recently instrumental to the development of the new MSc in Marketing for the Creative Economy, a joint programme of the Academy and the School of Business, and also contributed significantly towards the establishment of HKBU’s new transdisciplinary BA programme in Arts Tech.

As a team, Mr. Benz and Mr. Ng have made significant contribution in education, through their commitment to developing pedagogy and to supporting our students and alumni, as well as bringing Experience Design to Hong Kong. On this basis, the Selection Committee believe they are worthy awardees of the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Team Teaching.