From 20 to 24 July 2025, St John’s College, Cambridge, hosted the annual education highlight—the Cambridge China Education Forum 2025. Under the theme “Dialoguing with the Future: Educational Transformation through Culture, Innovation and Interdisciplinary Research,” the conference used four key words—“dialogue,” “culture,” “innovation” and “interdisciplinary inquiry”—to explore how global educational change can meet local practice.
The forum brought together a wide range of scholars, education experts and promising early-career researchers from China and the United Kingdom. Over five days, they engaged in multi-layered, cross-disciplinary conversations clustered around four broad themes: educational technology, arts education, language education and literature, and educational philosophy. The program featured two high-level round-tables, four keynote panels, seven early-career salons, one parallel session and two poster rounds, preceded by several warm-up events—an ample display of the diverse perspectives and cutting-edge trends shaping education research today. Assistant Professor Yang Zi was invited to present her work at the forum.
On 23 July, Assistant Professor Yang Zi took the floor in the parallel-session room and presented her study, “Factors Influencing Teaching Innovation at a University: An Extension of the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) Model in the Digital Age.” Grounded in JD-R theory, the paper unpacks the delicate balance between digital resources and digital demands that university teachers juggle when they try to innovate in the classroom. Her findings offer university leaders a practical lens for matching resources to requirements while steering digital transformation. When the talk ended, questions and comments came quickly from every corner of the hall, and the conversation spilled over into coffee breaks and later sessions. Those informal exchanges opened several lines of joint inquiry and laid the groundwork for future collaborations with scholars from both countries.
Text & Photo: Yang Zi
