Dr Wong Lung Hsiang Shares His Decade-Long Experience of Public Engagement in an International Panel

Dr Wong Lung Hsiang, Senior Research Scientist at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, was invited to join a panel discussion titled “Public Engagement through Public Prose” on 19 May 2021. The session, chaired by International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) President Assoc Prof Victor Lee, Stanford University, USA, was part of the Public Engagement Series organised by ISLS. The hour-long session explored how learning scientists could craft and disseminate prose (e.g. news articles, op-eds, and columns) on the topics relevant to their expertise to engage the public.

Dr Wong’s fellow panellists, Assoc Prof Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University, USA, and Prof Mark Guzdial, University of Michigan, USA, discussed their op-eds and blog articles on education-related issues respectively, while Dr Wong shared his experience of public engagement in multiple modalities and targeting different audiences. These include his involvement in co-authoring the Innovating Pedagogy Report 2016 to engage international practitioners, policymakers and scholars, his op-ed article on teaching in the “new normal” and other opinion letters published on Lianhe Zaobao, a video on how to “Transform Your Home into a Learning Playground” under the “OER Education at Home Series”, and several interviews on television and radio stations over the last decade.

He also shared how the Public, International and Alumni Relations department in NIE and Office of Education Research have been supporting him and his NIE colleagues in such public engagement efforts. The take-away message he foregrounded at the session was, “Read your target audience’s minds, their needs and their concerns, understand the characteristics and draw the best out of the modality of the prose that you choose to engage them, and find the right ‘frequency’ to have a dialogue with them.”