international education
Ready for the world
Let’ s take a look at how Australia prepares incoming and outgoing students for life in a new country. By Phil Honeywood
Global mobility has become a key feature of the current generation of students. Within mobility programs a great deal of emphasis is quite rightly placed on the quality of education delivery abroad. Ensuring there is safe housing, and even part-time work and internship opportunities, has taken on increasing importance. However, in all of this, attention needs to be paid to comprehensive pre-departure or arrival briefings for students and their families. We should take note of lessons from the past and recent best practice examples to ensure that there is an adequate level of understanding about the culture, language and environment of our students’ study destinations.
OUTBOUND STUDENTS The advent of large-scale government-sponsored mobility programs, such as the New Colombo Plan, has rightly been greeted as a wonderful opportunity for Australian students to better engage with our neighbouring countries. The soft diplomacy and“ breaking down the barriers” benefits that could accrue from these programs are manifest. However, our education institutions are much aware that there are certain challenges for students when we seek to send them to study and live abroad. What objective information are we going to provide our students with about their study destination country? Are we going to equip students who may never have travelled overseas before with some of the life skills they may need to swim rather than sink? Is it incumbent on our students to exhibit some attempt at speaking or understanding the language of the country in which they will be studying? In other words, to what degree do we need to ensure that Australian students have at least some level of intercultural competency before they embark on such a transformational experience?
Happily, our students usually have some level of cultural awareness when they depart our shores. Pre-departure briefings and information seminars often take place. In many cases, academics from the institution will accompany the students anyway. One might also hope that, given Australia’ s increasingly multicultural social makeup, most young Australians are aware of other cultures and the need to respect cultural differences. However, the overriding concern here is surely how much are we leaving to chance. Questions need to be asked in the early stages of these large-scale mobility programs about whether, as a nation, we are satisfied with the extent of pre-departure information we provide our students. In this context, is there a need for a more holistic comprehensive intercultural competency program? Before answering this question, it is useful to remind ourselves of lessons learnt from the recent past when our nation experienced a huge wave of inbound, fee-paying overseas students.
INBOUND STUDENTS Previously, a number of parties were engaged, or took it upon themselves, to provide information to students intending to study in Australia. These included:
Education agents: Australia has, in the past, placed some reliance on overseas-based education agents to inform prospective students about our culture, way of life and social mores( the dos and don’ ts). On the face of it, this seemed like an appropriate first port of call for students contemplating a study experience in our country. After all, families in many of our key student source countries often had a level of confidence that the education agent in their home city would know a great deal about Australia.
Many long-established agents have visited our country on numerous occasions, have enrolled in agent-training programs at some of our embassies, and have maintained an ongoing dialogue with the students they send to study at our institutions. These people are often great ambassadors for our nation and will sometimes give students a“ warts and all” perspective on what to anticipate in Australia. Unfortunately, we soon discovered that there
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