Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 8 | Page 68

68 | JADE
HIGHLIGHT #4 | 69
DR. RACHEL BERKSON & DR. ADAM MOOLNA
Dr. Adam Moolna
Teaching Fellow in Environment and Sustainability
School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, Keele University
Reflections of a new Teaching Fellow in the School of Geography,
Geology and the Environment
With the strapline “Teaching International Students”, this seemed
a particularly important day for me to take part in. Not only am I
a new Teaching Fellow here at Keele but a substantial part of my
role is working with international students—in particular, students
from Nanjing Xiaozhuang University in China with which we have
a partnership. Students in the scheme take the first three years of
their degree in China and then come to Keele for their fourth and
final year.
The symposium began with a keynote presentation “Teaching
International Students” by Professor Sally Brown of Leeds
Metropolitan University. The follow on session, before group
discussions in a World Café format, was a call by Dr Megan Lawton
of the University of Wolverhampton for an “Inclusive curriculum:
creative approaches to making online spaces and resources work for
all students” [my emphasis].
Because the wider context is our responsibility for maximising the
success of all individual students, considering individual students
through the lens of group identity reveals structural issues in
pedagogy that only become apparent in group comparisons. The
focus issue for the symposium was how to close the attainment gap
of international students—as a group; they do less well in degree
outcomes. Considering international students as a group highlights
aspects of our pedagogy for improvement not only to close that
attainment gap but also benefit individual learners across the whole
student body.
Sally Brown called for a change in perception, a plea to recognise
that international students are not a problem but an underused
rich resource to enhance the learning of domestic students and our
own pedagogy. The attainment gap is not because of individual
international students but because of structural factors that we
can and should be addressing in our approaches to teaching and
learning.
“Internationalisation is not about taking money from around the
world to prop up our higher education system… it’s very different, it’s
about changing our lives and the lives of others for the better”
REFLECTIONS OF THE ANNUAL LEARNING AND TEACHING SYMPOSIUM 2017
Drawing on her international experience, working around the globe
in usually 7 or 8 different countries each year, Sally pulled out issues
identified with international students and how they are applicable to
the whole student body. Students in different countries come from
different contexts of expectation, for example. In some countries,
the expectation is that learning is passive and not at all like the
construction of knowledge and understanding expectation in the
UK and at Keele. Would it offend your professor to talk to them
afterwards and ask questions because that implies they failed to
teach you properly in the lecture? Is it unacceptable to disagree with
your tutor? What are the barriers to learning for a student with that
frame of reference when dropped into a seminar where discussion
is key? That’s relevant to the diversity of UK students too—and
for individual students, not just considering groups like Black &
Minority Ethnic (BME) and Widening Participation. Is explaining our
expectations, for example of a seminar, something we talk about
doing for international students and should we not be doing that for
UK students too?
Sally asked “do you make it possible for students to draw on their
own subject, cultural and country backgrounds and experience?”
Isn’t that what we should be doing to enable higher taxonomic levels
of understanding, developing relational and then extended abstract
learning, for all students?
Megan Lawton built upon this by asking us to think about a current
module we teach and imagine we were asked to head to a university
overseas and teach it there. What would you need to change and
how? Megan used an example from her own experience of taking
a module to Sri Lanka—discussing what went wrong and why
inclusivity by design rather than reacting to individual needs would
both avoid this issue teaching abroad and enable access to learning
for international students here in the UK.
How accessible would my own environmental science modules
be taught in Sri Lanka if I use a UK reference framework for, say,
biodiversity conservation and environmental assessment? I could
instead make the learning content draw, as Sally Brown says, on the
students’ own country experience. So why not use that approach
here at Keele by default when I am designing a module taken by
international students and a wide diversity of UK students?
Megan stressed that you need to be comfortable as a teacher that
you do not know things in order to draw on students’ own subject,
cultural and country backgrounds and experience. An inclusive
curriculum should be transparent so that students see why it is
designed as it is—and why independent learning and drawing on