Watch this video to hear from Monash and Warwick University staff and students talking about the importance of internationalisation in our global classrooms and what it means to them.
Both Monash and Warwick have committed on an institutional level through their education strategies to embed internationalisation within the curriculum. There is a strong moral imperative to internationalise the curriculum. Our student communities are becoming increasingly diverse as universities globalise. To give every student the opportunity to participate fully, it is crucial that class material draws from both international and domestic sources. This means hearing the students’ different cultural and geopolitical perspectives on the discipline, and their prior educational experiences being acknowledged and valued in the classroom; to remove participation barriers for these students and to optimise the learning potential for the entire class. It is also of the utmost importance that students understand the influence of different cultural lenses on the way other students communicate, learn, and solve problems, particularly global ones.
Amongst the staff that were interviewed for this project, another important reason for internationalisation was the necessity to prepare job-ready graduates for a globalised society. Students cannot simply be trained in domestic contexts and then sent out to a workforce that operates globally. At the same time, many students never gain the opportunity to participate in classic study abroad experiences. Therefore, their global training must be integrated throughout their curriculum and their classroom experience.
This hub was first created through a Monash-Warwick Alliance funded project, which was run by an international and multidisciplinary team of both students and staff. Following a literature review and through staff interviews, the student team discovered why and how staff members brought international elements into their classroom, and how they managed to overcome the inherent challenges in this pursuit. The students also conducted interviews with other students to get their perspectives on both the positive experiences they’d had with internationalisation and the challenges they’d faced in classrooms that had not been internationalised.
From these interviews, the students and staff identified four key themes into which the internationalisation methodologies fell. The themes were populated with staff and student experiences, with additional information and resources linking to the literature and other projects, initiatives and practice at Monash and Warwick. Further video interviews were recorded with a sample of staff and students and are included here as a helpful set of resources to inspire as well as to offer practical examples of internationalisation in the classroom.
The hub was created to provide a helpful set of resources to inspire as well as to offer practical how-to’s and is not intended to be exhaustive. It is hoped that the hub will continue to develop over time, and more good practice will be added as people visit and wish to share their own work.
Students: Kristopher Kewish, Bonnie Pilgrim, Gabrielle Terliatan
Staff: Nadine Normand-Marconnet (Chief investigator, contact person), Gabriel Garcia Ochoa, Nell Kimberley, Sarah McDonald, Kirsten McLean, Felix Nobis
Students: Ariana Kular, Marianna Slutskaya, Zeeshan Amjad
Staff: Caroline Gibson, Claire O’Leary, Sophie Reissner-Roubicek
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