Tools for Teaching in an Educationally Mobile World

Jude Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317657422
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Tools for Teaching in an Educationally Mobile World examines the challenges that undergraduate and postgraduate teachers often encounter when working with students from different national and cultural backgrounds. It focuses on the consequences for interactive teaching and for course design in a world where students, ideas and courses are mobile, using examples and experiences from a wide range of disciplines and national contexts. It not only considers Anglophone countries, including the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, but also the use of English as a language of instruction in countries where neither teachers nor students are native English speakers.

This book offers ideas for adjusting and adapting teaching approaches for culturally and linguistically diverse student groups. Students may cross national boundaries to seek accreditation, or the courses may be 'transnational', being designed in one country and delivered in another using local as well as 'fly-in' faculty. It draws upon growing good practice recommendations using tried and tested methods alongside the extensive and varied experience of the author.

The book is structured around a selection of the most common issues and statements of belief held by educators, with key topics including:

• the impact of educational mobility on teaching and learning;
• teachers as mediators between academic cultural differences;
• learning and teaching in English;
• inclusive teaching and learning;
• encouraging student participation;
• assessing diverse students.

With a wealth of practical tips and tools that help deal with these issues, this book will be of value to any educator working with students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. It will also interest those involved in the design of curriculum and pedagogy.

SECTION III Intercultural teaching, learning and assessment issues

DOI: 10.4324/9781315765433-10

Chapter 8 Designing programmes and courses with an international perspective

DOI: 10.4324/9781315765433-11

Defining terms

Terminology used in relation to programmes, courses and classes differs widely between and within national higher education systems. In this document, I use terms as follows:

• A programme denotes a collection of learning units leading to a named award.
• A course refers to an assessed unit of learning.
• Academic credit is the ‘currency’ for learning effort: the more credit, the more effort. Programmes use different credit systems, which makes conversions between credit systems difficult and causes problems with issues of equivalence.
• Assessment refers to making a judgment as to the quality of a student’s performance. Quality is usually designated by a grade or a percentage mark.
• Graduate attributes define the capabilities of exiting students. Graduating students who hold these attributes can be expected to show specified knowledge, skills and attributes. The programme should check their capabilities before graduation.

This chapter

This chapter suggests strategies and techniques for designing programmes and courses that are relevant to the diverse students they recruit; inclusive (meaning the programme supports the learning needs of these diverse students); and appropriate for producing graduates ready for the globalised and culturally diverse world in which they will live and work. To design an inclusive programme, teachers need to think and work collaboratively with other members of a programme design team. Most teams start by deciding the purpose or outcome to be gained by incorporating an international and/or intercultural perspective – why are they doing so? The next step is to identify opportunities, activities and sites for making changes, looking to both the formal and the informal curriculum. Then programmes usually review course-level learning outcomes and, finally, they rethink elements in the programme related to diversity. To that end, the chapter finishes with six good practice principles for programme redesign.

If you decide to include an international and intercultural dimension in your programme – however and wherever you decide to do it – then the process will require adequate resources and tangible support from colleagues and the institution. Without external support and input, most programme design teams find the task is almost impossibly difficult or complex (Childress 2010).

Tools highlighted in this chapter

• Identifying sites in the formal curriculum for introducing an international or intercultural perspective
• Agreeing shared programme-level goals for internationalisation
• Creating graduate attributes linked to internationalisation
• Using graduate attributes for iterative programme planning
• Adjusting programmes for diversity

Internationalisation of the curriculum

Teachers usually find the ‘why’ questions the most engaging, as in ‘What is the reason to internationalise?’, ‘Why now?’, ‘Why this programme?’. However, over the years, I have learned to steer them first to defining terms, starting with what the term ‘internationalisation’ means. There are many definitions in the literature, but I use the one proposed by Leask (2009) who defines internationalisation of the curriculum as ‘… the incorporation of an international and intercultural dimension into the content of the curriculum as well as the teaching and learning arrangements and support services of a program of study’ (Leask 2009: 209). You might need to read that definition several times to get your head around what it means. I have certainly found understanding the meaning is easier in a workshop setting or with colleagues (rather than asking people to just read it). I discuss the implications of the definition below.

Opportunities for designing an international curriculum

One reason for discussing the definition of an international and intercultural curriculum is to understand what it means. A more important reason for clarifying the meaning interactively with colleagues is because internationalising a curriculum cannot be an individual endeavour. ‘Incorporating an international dimension’ cannot be the responsibility of an individual course or teacher since neither provides enough scope for action. Programmes, on the other hand, are usually large enough, long enough and complex enough to provide many possible sites for incorporating international and intercultural learning. As a consequence, it is to programmes that people look when they are thinking about making changes.

Designing as a team rather than an individual means being able to draw upon the resources and diversity within the team itself. The programme team is likely to bring their different disciplinary strengths, past experiences, cultural backgrounds and skills to the design table. The programme leader probably has sufficient authority and knowledge of each member to encourage them to act together, yet he or she can also bring out the team members’ differing views. Many teams have found that, by planning, discussing and arguing about the programme, those who hold what were previously perceived as ‘minority’ views became more audible. People can move from being peripheral to being more central and respected members of the department (Leask and Bridger 2013).

Working as a design team is also the best way to deal with some of the common problems that block programme redesigns which set out to incorporate an international or intercultural perspective.

Common problems in designing an international programme

It will always be complex and difficult to design programmes that incorporate an international and intercultural perspective, but some problems make it harder still. These include:

Lack of a local ‘programme design’ culture – Many programmes are not designed so much as collected from discrete learning units with the onus on students studying on such programmes to make connections between courses. By contrast, other programmes are tightly designed, starting from deciding on programme and course learning outcomes, then attending to issues of progression in the complexity of skills and knowledge and to coherence in how individual units and courses fit together. Designed programmes have programme outcomes; they make sure their graduates have achieved stated graduate attributes and have ways to track where and how the programme develops the attributes that they claim to support.

Lack of a ‘course design’ culture – Some courses are designed around learning outcomes, using an integrated course design approach (Biggs 1996). Integrated design starts by creating learning outcomes then, in turn, deciding the best way to assess them – that is, putting in checks that the learning outcomes have been met. Finally, integrated design means teachers choose teaching methods that are most likely to lead to success in assessment. All three elements – method, outcome and assessment – are designed iteratively. The alternative to integrated design processes is to assume that a tried and tested approach to assessment or to teaching is automatically the right way to proceed and cannot or should not be changed.

Lack of a ‘session-design’ culture – In some places, sessions are designed to best meet learning outcomes. In others, there are traditional and unquestioned ways to use students’ and teachers’ time.

Alongside these general problems about the context within which programme redesign might happen, there is one problem particular to internationalisation of the curriculum_ many people hear the term and misunderstand what ‘internationalisation’ and/or ‘curriculum’ mean (Grant 2012; Sanderson 2004).

Understanding and misunderstanding of ‘curriculum'

Teachers and programme designers often assume the word ‘curriculum’ refers to what they teach – they think it means ‘the syllabus’. In fact, curriculum refers to everything that shapes the student’s learning experience. Grant (2012) suggests thinking about the curriculum as ‘the total context within which learning is placed’ (p. 69). A narrow and inaccurate view of curriculum often makes teachers resist any suggestion to become more international or to address intercultural issues on grounds of irrelevance. Some say their subject is already ‘international’ (‘East European studies is already international’), or that they are not taking a comparative approach (‘I teach philosophy, not comparative philosophy’) or that their knowledge base is universal. There are many taxonomies of disciplinary differences (Becher and Trowler 2001), with the spectrum ranging from those subjects and disciplines which are characterised as ‘hard science’ (mathematics, physics etc.) to ‘hard applied’ subjects (medicine, civil engineering, pharmacy etc.) to ‘soft applied’ subjects (psychology, law, business and economics etc.) through to ‘soft’ disciplines (art, design, history, media studies etc.). Some disciplines sit between these positions on the continuum, such as education, which the taxonomy places between ‘soft applied’ and ‘soft’, and IT, which the authors say sits between ‘hard’ and ‘hard applied’.

The point about this taxonomy is not to resolve whether or not it is a correct classification, but present it to potential designers as a prompt to reorient the thinking of those who hear the word ‘curriculum’ as content. It seems obvious to some teachers that empirical knowledge is relatively culture-free or, as one chemist remarked, ‘Oxygen works the same all over the world’. I try not to hear this type of objection as an invitation to engage in discussion about their assumption about knowledge-making (and the large literature on how this, too, is shaped by cultural assumptions and beliefs), but rather as an opportunity for me to put forward the idea that teaching is always a social activity. The curriculum refers to everything that shapes the students’ learning experience, not just to the content. Those on the ‘hard/pure’ end of the spectrum may need to think about international and intercultural perspectives with more of a focus on teaching processes and support services. There are examples of how programme redesign teams in ‘hard/pure’ disciplines reshaped their programmes later in this chapter.

Creating the motivation to start and to persist

Most attempts to internationalise the curriculum start with what Leask (2005) calls the ‘Big Picture’. Redesign processes tend to be much more successful if they are driven by identifying and maximising programme-level opportunities and benefits, and they are less successful when they are trying to meet demands from outside the department or trying to resolve problems caused by past decisions. In other words, a question such as ‘Do we want graduates to be able to collaborate with researchers in different countries?’ tends to be a more motivating question compared to one such as ‘How can we reduce the level of plagiarism amongst international students?’.

Both questions address a ‘why’ question (‘Why should we internationalise?’), but one (the first one) looks forward and prioritises values and outcomes. This is referred to as ‘strong internationalisation’ (Sanderson 2004), and strong internationalisation is less likely to be interrupted by temporary events and by shifting external factors. Turner and Robson (2008) go further and build on the concept of ‘strong’ to suggest that redesigns should aim for transformation. Their suggestion is that an internationalised curriculum should transform students, concepts and university communities.

Taking a forward-looking, transformative approach can motivate the redesign team, because it forces them to focus on what is important for them. The question becomes ‘What do we want in this department?’, not ‘What does the University want?’. While teachers might agree with general aspirations, such as ‘We need to be a global university’, ‘We need to raise our international status’, ‘We need to attract the best students’, Clifford (2009) was able to show that they are more likely to take action if they start with what matters in a particular discipline. A search for answers to ‘Why internationalise?’ takes time and often requires external advice and support to resolve.

Finding answers to ‘Why should we internationalise?'

Here are some snapshot examples of programme teams who have introduced an international dimension to the content, teaching arrangements and learning support systems in their own, local context. In these examples, I have paraphrased and summarised the words of teams with whom colleagues and I have worked in several national settings and over about a decade of effort.

Statistics – a Bachelor level programme

Why internationalise?	We need to turn out graduates who can solve global problems, who can address global questions.
How we did it:	We changed from using local databases to using United Nations-generated data and we adjusted the content of three courses to emphasise their internation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editor's foreword
• Section I Teaching across cultures
• Section II Developing students' skills for intercultural and communicative competence
• Section III Intercultural teaching, learning and assessment issues
• References
• Index