Introduction

Service-learning is gaining recognition in higher education institutions as an effective pedagogy for holistic student learning, and many universities have integrated service-learning into their academic curriculum in some form. While service-learning has gained much attention in many Western countries, its development in different Chinese societies is still at its infancy. In Hong Kong, most of the higher education institutions implement some form of academic service-learning. However, service-learning as a pedagogy is not something that is familiar to most higher education teachers and teachers generally hold the myth that service-learning is simply another form of community service, and they lack the skills and knowledge as to how to properly implement service-learning. As such, there is an urgent need to build capacity of university teachers for service-learning. With this background, we have implemented a large-scale teaching development research project with an objective to promote the service-learning capacity of university teachers in Hong Kong. In this book, we outline what has been achieved in this project as well as some issues related to SL. In this chapter, we outline the background of this project and the proposed initiatives to promote capacity in service-learning teachers in the university context in Hong Kong.