Retrospective and Continued Need for the School Building

As early as in 2013 when our NGO was set up, PLA started to apply for building a school. After nine years of hard work, PLA at last managed to secure in 2022 a piece of Government land in Ting Kok Village, Tai Po for building a kindergarten. (Earlier in 2018, PLA had in fact been allocated another piece of Government land in Wai Tau Village, Tai Po, but that land had been given up in view of villagers’ objection).

The founder of PLA, Dr. Jane Nam is an educational psychologist. Her primary objective of founding PLA in 2013 was to establish innovative school complex (comprising a kindergarten, a primary school and a secondary school) for providing quality education to students with learning difficulties, so as to fortify their ‘potentials’ and ‘strengths’, and with this to ameliorate their learning difficulties and elevate their overall learning ability. For more than a decade, Dr. Nam has been assessing the intelligence and learning ability of children and adolescents in Hong Kong. She found that while some children and adolescents may have learning difficulties ( for example: those being labelled as Autism tend to be short of the ability of socialising, interacting and communicating with others, those suffering from Hyperactivity Disorder, tend to lack power of concentration, and those with dyslexia are prone to incoordination of hands and eyes), they are in fact inclined to be high in their intelligence level, some even being gifted in arts and academic pursuit (possessing the ingenuity and ability characteristic of the so-called ‘Savant Syndrome’).

Dr. Nam also discovered that where thinking perspective of children and adolescents lean towards ‘Visual-Spatial Intelligence’, many of them will often be erroneously assessed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). They will be seen to have Dyslexia and a problem with coordination between eyes and hands or between hands and feet, thus affecting their learning progress. Dr. Nam’s research findings showed that those children and adolescents need to use the Three-Dimensional, Interactive Teaching and Learning Model, in order that they can settle down and focus on learning.

Furthermore, where children and adolescents lean towards ‘Micro Thinking’, their thinking abilities tend to be meticulous. Overall, in the course of their learning, they are relatively slow in their response and expression, to the extent that they may be erroneously assessed as suffering from ‘Mild Mental Retardation’.

In addition, Dr. Nam noticed that many children and adolescents are inclined towards ‘Multisensory Learning’; that is to say, in the course of learning, they will simultaneously use more than one of their senses, e.g. they may use their sense of sight and kinesthetic sense as well when they are using their sense of hearing. As a matter of fact, many children and adolescents can at the same time use the following eight perspectives of Cognitive and Thinking Abilities and Sensory Ability:

(1) Image / Picture / Shape
(2) Colour / Hue
(3) Sound
(4) Smell / Odour
(5) Taste
(6) Movement Direction
(7) Organisational Ability
(8) Development Direction

Dr. Nam opines that when teaching these children and adolescents who can concurrently display three or more the above ‘Cognitive and Thinking Abilities’ and ‘Sensory Ability’, it is necessary to apply Activity Teaching methods, coupled with interactive teaching and learning aids with high technology, artificial intelligence and audio-visual multimedia, such as to utilizing a ‘setting/ environment’ with ‘multi-space’, ‘multi-layer’, ‘multi-angle’, ‘multi-channel’ and even ‘three-dimensional’, in order to make contents of learning/ teaching more easier for the children and adolescents to use their ‘Cognitive and Thinking Abilities’ and ‘Sensory Ability’, thereby alleviating their learning difficulties.

Right now, PLA is continuing its efforts to raise funds for building an innovative and hi-tech kindergarten. It will adopt a teaching mode that is to teach students according to their abilities and be furnished with high technology and artificial intelligence interactive and activity-teaching equipment, for mitigating children’s learning difficulties. This will, at the same time, help discover and nurture their ‘potentials’ and ‘strengths’, followed by enhancing overall their sense of meaning in their learning and their learning ability, enabling them to experience the joy of learning. A sound footing for their learning will thus be established, preparing them for their quest for excellence.

Prospect for 2025

1. To start the construction of the kindergarten

2. To keep on raising funds to the tune of HK$170 million, for constructing the kindergarten, and buying and producing textbooks, teaching materials and teaching equipment with diverse technology and artificial intelligence.