Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

International Education and Innovative Approaches to University Teaching

1995; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2208-5394

Sid Morris, Wayne Hudson,

Second Language Learning and Teaching

clear, however, is that Australian universities are acquiring considerable experience of international education, both in the sense of educating international students offshore, and in the sense of educating such students here. The University of Wollongong already has 12% international students from 45 countries. Clearly there are tensions between the need to design programs which meet the requirements of one target country with a single dominant culture (e.g. courses for Korean managers) and are not portable, and the need for programs which can be offered to multiple culture cohorts. Hence Australian universities may need to develop a two track approach to changing our universities into international universities. One track would emphasise international education for international students from specific countries. The other track would emphasise planetary portable education. In practice, the two tracks are likely to influence each other’s articulations. This means, we suggest, that any set of strategies for internationalising our universities will need to be flexible and polycentric. In this paper we suggest that experience of international education has practical implications even in the short term for what we teach, how we teach, whom we teach, and when we teach. In the longer term, we suggest that Australian universities may need to move towards a pedagogy which is: (1) intercultural pervasional; (2) grid multireferential; and (3) planetary portable, as opposed to monocultural, single grid referential, and localist. Since we take a strong view of the importance of international education, it may be useful to begin with a non-controversial example. Many Australian universities now recognise the need to establish special support courses in English language for their international students. Such courses, once in place however, suggest wider applications. Indeed they often become models for similar courses for Australian students. Such a simple example prepares the reader for the less obvious suggestion that as we discover what international students need, we often find that these needs are those of many Australian students. Moreover, such discoveries may be relevant to the staff development needs of Australian university teaching staff. Specifically, they may highlight areas in which retraining and reskilling is called for. We now turn to some more complex possible implications for innovative teaching practices. It is not suggested that Australians should change their teaching practices merely to please foreigners. We do argue, however, that taking account of the conflicting needs and expectations of international students exposes and problematises the monocultural assumptions of our allegedly multicultural society and the monocultural prejudices of our teaching practices in particular.