Wednesday 27 June 2012

Track L: A view of internationalisation

Link to abstract
Presenter: Dr David Killick, Leeds Metropolitan University


‘I don’t care what these international students have to say’ interestingly, (and perhaps, given the flavour of the conference, thankfully) this quote was not directly from Dr Killick himself. Instead, and of importance to Dr Killick’s talk, it was a quote proffered by one of his students. The student offered this view upon completion of a piece of group work in which they had worked within consciously created multi cultural groups. Interestingly the student was studying language and was about to embark upon a year studying abroad. In offering this quote, Dr Killick far from trying to ‘out’ a racist student instead cleverly used this quote to cause his audience to recognise that the incorporation of an international identity into a student’s life is a complex and difficult task.

Dr Killick proceeded to offer an introductory framework by asking ‘Internationalisation, by whom, to whom and why’? He stated that the we are pre-conditioned by the discourse of internationalisation into thinking about mostly geographical and business related issues and endeavours namely; overseas campuses, exchanges, partnerships and mobility. He also challenged the audience by reminding us that still, internationalisation may have negative connotations to domestic students and if we are to move on in this area we need to understand these views and why they occur.

Dr Killick next shared the work which Leeds Met have been carrying out in order to counter act the potentially negative student view of internationalisation as well as to produce global graduates. Leeds Met have incorporated internationalisation when defining their graduate attributes. The ‘global outlook’ attribute incorporates 2 areas; Inclusivity and Global relevance. Leeds Met has stated that the development of graduate attributes is not separate from discipline knowledge and so is to be embedded within the curriculum. In conjunction with the idea of constructive alignment Leeds Met looked at rewriting learning outcomes to encourage the development of graduate attributes.  

This exercise started with Dr Killick’s team authoring generic ‘global outlook’ learning outcomes from which teaching teams then created discipline specific learning outcomes (examples of each were offered and are available within the slides).

Dave Westwood, CLTE


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