There has been a lot of interest in international education recently, and perhaps consequently, somewhat in internationalising of the curriculum. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, internationalising the curriculum is no longer an option, in order to appropriately prepare students for the future of work, it is imperative that the learning experiences that we design for our students includes significant opportunities to engage in globalised ideas, challenges and solutions.
For any teaching and learning initiatives to be effective, students need to engage in learning activities that help them transform their thinking, and ultimately their actions. This is the reason I like to focus on learning experiences, as everything comes down to what students’ experience, through learning activities including assessments. (In fact some of the most effective learning experiences are those that are embedded within assessments, but that is a topic for another time/blog!) So how do we internationalise the learning experience, and ensure that these experiences are transformative? Most educators embed international case studies, examples from different countries, etc. in their classes, which is great, however, in my own experience these approaches probably does not have the type of transformative results that we should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong, these initiatives are absolutely welcome, but we should really be looking to do more. To be truly transformative these ideas should challenge students’ traditional thinking and doing things. Many teachers use group work in their classes, and if they have international students, create groups that mix international and domestic students in their groups, why? Well if you talk to many teachers they would not hesitate to suggest that the international students need help with their English so the domestic students help them out, perhaps this is true. How about rewarding the process of the group work rather than the actual output.( Rewarding effort, not the output!) That way a really great learning opportunity for the whole class could be to understand how different groups worked, regardless of the makeup of the group, and in some cases actually have groups that are not formed along nationality lines, but their strengths (https://www.16personalities.com/) . Some groups can have all international students. The process of getting students into groups can become a learning activity on its own. Get students to demonstrate and defend the process they used so that others can understand different ways of working. Remember that different people, from different cultures engage in group work very differently! If you are looking for some ideas about some of these transformative ideas, have a look at one of the papers that Byron Lui and I wrote (https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128314/) .
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December 2019
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Philippe Put