Really Useful Stuff on Teaching, Learning Etc. Autumn 2009

RUSTLE

For this special edition, RUSTLE has asked some members of faculty what the internationalisation of teaching and learn-ing means to them, what their experience of it has been and where they would like to see it going. What follows is the result of interviews carried out with Jethro Pettit (Institute of Development Studies), Jeremy Lane (English) and Istvan Kiss (Mathematics).

What is internationalisation? Not surprisingly, most people wanted to start by exploring what we mean by ‘internationalisation’ and whilst colleagues are aware of the need to increase recruitment of international students there was a lot of interest in other aspects of internationalisation, for as Jeremy pointed out ‘promoting Sussex as an interna-tional institution, introducing teaching initiatives that are inter-national and raising our international research profile’ are all important too. Istvan was particularly interested in the idea of an international curriculum which he says ‘makes me think of how to teach certain degrees in a way that students will be well equipped to work in different countries or do equally well in different cultural contexts’, while Jethro emphasized the need to think about the ‘social gains and social purpose of university’ so that instead of focusing exclusively on mar-keting Sussex to the world we see this as ‘an opportunity for universities to be global citizens and to play a role in ad-dressing global issues’.

As Jeremy pointed out, there is already a lot of international activity at Sussex, but often it is happening in isolation and not everyone is aware of what is going on. So how are each of our interviewees involved in internationalisation already?

Jeremy Lane is responsible for overseeing the academic arrangements for students studying on 4 year degree pro-grammes whose third year is spent abroad, studying at one of our partner universities, on a work placement or as a teaching assistant in a school, as well as for students opting for a voluntary period of study abroad in Europe and Latin America.

Jethro Pettit gets to meet a lot of international postgradu-ates who come here to study international development, so the curriculum he works with is very focused on those global

concerns that many would argue should be at the heart of an international university.

Istvan Kiss is one of the many international members of faculty at Sussex. He came to Sussex from Romania and teaches in the mathematics department where all but two of the faculty are non-British.

Internationalising the Curriculum. When it came to talk-ing about internationalising the curriculum it was easy to see that there were some differences depending on the subject/discipline being discussed. Istvan felt that ‘for maths it is less of a challenge for the curriculum to be inter-national because maths is international itself’. He explained that in terms of the content of mathematics degree courses, ‘the body of the knowledge that has accumulated over time is very international. Some countries were very good in particular maths fields; India and the Far East con-tributed a lot in terms of discrete maths and combinatorics, whereas the West that was industrialised tended to be much stronger in applications – modelling processes in the natural world and engineering contexts. But the body of knowledge that is taught in maths today is a synthesis’.

Even studying English at Sussex is not as mono-cultural as people might expect with courses focusing on a range of literatures in English including post-colonial writing from the Caribbean, India and Africa, as well as European literature in translation. Although as Jeremy explained, the study of English literature ‘demands a degree of familiarity with the language not necessarily possessed by all international students’ and therefore, despite faculty interests in writing in English from a range of nations, the student body re-mains largely Western, with international students coming mostly from North America and Europe.

So if the content of our courses is international, what about the ways we teach and our students learn? Jethro is par-ticularly interested in the international learning experience and ‘how the learning experience for all students can be enriched by diversity, with something to be gained by eve-

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What does Internationalisation mean to US?

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tional student choosing to do a placement in the UK. A Jamaican student who has done a lot of work with Kingston police on promoting better relationships between gangs and the police, is doing a year of work-based learning in Southwark, working with the council on improving its re-sponsiveness to communities using methodologies from Jamaica. It is important that we recognise that ‘international includes us - we are part of the world and what goes on in

Moulsecoomb, Seaford, Brighton or London is also global studies’. We are in the midst of diversity and there is a lot we can learn from university / community relationships.

An International Future? So where next with internation-alisation? Jeremy thinks that students are increasingly see-ing study abroad as something ‘adding value to their de-gree’ so supporting UK students to spend time learning in another country may well be an area that grows in the fu-ture. At home, Jethro would like universities to think more about the role of education in international development because ‘if we are to internationalise we need to think about offering access and opportunities to people from developing countries who might not otherwise have them – not just those who can afford the fees or access the usual scholarships’. Meanwhile, Istvan suggests that there is ‘research to be done by institutions wanting to design a degree that can claim to be really international – looking at economic pressures and the challenges in health, food, energy and carbon that the world faces. In these areas there is scope to put on high quality degrees that are truly international’.

As someone who has experienced two systems of Higher Education, however, Istvan hopes that Sussex won’t lose its distinctiveness in an at-tempt to appeal to every-one. ‘We must learn from the problems of the global economy… Art, culture and education change across time and cultures and homogene-ity is not good. In maths homogeneity means sim-plifying but losing fea-tures of interesting inter-actions. The more het-erogeneity, the more interesting behaviour overall. Diversity in education makes us richer, so we must try to achieve internationalisation without homogeneity.’

Images: Many thanks to the Study Abroad Office and the students who took these photographs during their time abroad.

rybody if you have people from different backgrounds bring-ing different perspectives into the classroom and sharing experiences that can enrich learning’.

Istvan is very aware of the differences between teach-ing and learning practices here and in other countries because his undergradu-ate degree was ‘very very different’. He remembers having to be very self-reliant as there was little tutoring, no academic ad-vising, no online lecture notes and no solution sheets. As a result ‘you were very much your own man, because there was very little feedback on what you were doing so you

were relying on finding your own mistakes and talking to colleagues’. Whilst Istvan believes that good feedback and advice is necessary for our students, he also thinks that it is important to consider ways to encourage students to be more independent and to take responsibility for their own learning.

That sort of self reliance and discovery of agency is some-thing that Jeremy sees in students returning from studying and working abroad. He explains that ‘students undertaking a language-based year abroad have to engage with a lan-guage that is not their native language, a culture that is not

their native culture and a learning culture that is different to ours, so a cultural awareness has to develop’ and the stu-dents come back to Sussex with a more mature outlook.

Sussex Graduates as Global Citizens. Students are more mobile today than they have ever been, and the ‘gap year’ phenomenon has awakened many young people to global possibilities. Jeremy has seen more students going abroad on a voluntary basis and an extension of Sussex’s links and exchanges over the past few years so that we now send undergraduates beyond Europe to Japan, Singapore, Australia, the United States, Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Jeremy sees study abroad as opening up possibilities for Sussex graduates because ‘they see that they could do some work in a foreign country using a foreign language’ and evidence suggests that Sussex graduates do spread themselves around the globe more than most.

Helping students to become global citizens poses some interesting challenges for teaching at Sussex and Istvan suggests that because we want our graduates to be able to apply their knowledge globally ‘teaching might have to be somewhat strategic – teaching high level content without being too specific as to applications’ but equipping students with the ability to apply their learning in new contexts.

Jethro reminds us, however, that thinking global can also mean thinking local. He offers the example of an interna-

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‘Internationalisation means the embedding of intercultural awareness and learning

within the fabric of all university life.’ (Damian White, Student Support)

‘in internationalisation the centre of gravity shifts so that all cultures are seen as rela-tive … but getting beyond seeing things in

terms of the culture in which you were raised is a challenge’

(Jeremy Page, Sussex Language Institute)

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Globalisation has in part been facilitated by advances in communication technologies, so it seems appropriate to consider ways in which learning technologies might be able to contribute to the internationalisation of learning and teaching at Sussex.

Bill Ashraf (Director of Technology Enhanced Learning) acknowledges that the internationalisation agenda has con-tributed to his engagement with learning technologies be-cause as a member of faculty, ‘one of the drivers for thinking about doing things digitally and differently was how do I help my international students.’ For example, students who do not have English as a first language find it very useful to be able to listen again to parts of a lecture to con-solidate their understanding, so for Bill ‘the ability to digitally capture a lecture and make it available to the students in an easily accessible form that is downloadable and portable ... is a real bonus’. With the introduction of the Echo 360 system in many of our lecturing spaces it is now easier than ever to re-cord lectures and upload them to Study Direct course sites.

There is much more to internationalisa-tion than supporting our existing interna-tional students to succeed at Sussex, and in terms of reaching out to potential students Bill has no-ticed an increasing trend to think about doing things digi-tally. It is now possible to make exemplar lectures, help and guidance, information about courses and about what hap-pens before students get here, available to an international audience and some examples of our course content and what goes on at Sussex could potentially go on iTunes and YouTube.

Learning technologies also have a role to play in helping home students to get the most from learning in an interna-tional and intercultural way. Study Direct forums offer op-portunities for students to discuss course content between themselves outside of the classroom in a format that allows all students to contribute. Overseas students may initially feel happier typing contributions in a forum than speaking up in a lively seminar, and home students can benefit from an opportunity to engage with a wider range of perspec-

tives.

Bill also sees potential for greater en-gagement with partner institutions with the possibility of ‘plugging into courses that are delivered by our partners abroad and vice-versa’ or using Adobe Connect to create virtual classrooms where people all over the world could dip in for individ-ual lectures. With web 2.0 applications this can be interactive, with students ask-ing questions in real time.

For Sussex students studying abroad for a term or a year, technology also offers the ability to stay connected to Sussex and their peers with forums allowing ‘at home’ and ‘study abroad’ students to share experiences and learn from each other.

If Sussex graduates are to be equipped as global citizens then familiarity with a range of communication technologies is important and Bill sees the students themselves as the ‘best advocates for that, as the vast majority are fully equipped and digitally mobile individuals’. There remains, however, a significant challenge to support and guide our students through the complex world of the web, helping them learn how to engage critically with online resources.

Doing it Digitally: the role of e-learning in Internationalisation

Web Links

E-learning at Sussex: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/elearning/

The Open University on iTunes U: http://www.open.ac.uk/itunes/

University College London on iTunes U: http://itunes.ucl.ac.uk/

ITS help using Echo 360 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/helpdesk/faq.php?faqid=1604

Global Studies Launches with Technology The launch of the new School of Global Studies in November 2009 showcased how tech-nology can be used to support the University’s international agenda. The School was keen that the event reflected its worldwide outlook, so live interviews were held with members of the School who were researching and studying overseas. Using the internet application Skype, CNN news anchor and Sussex graduate Becky Anderson put questions to Dr Maya Unnithan who is in India conducting research and Mirjam Büdenbender who is on a year of international study at the University of California, Berkeley. The video and audio from the interviews were projected into the room where the launch was held and were also recorded using screencast software. An advantage of using software such as Skype is that both the interviewer and interviewees were already familiar with the technology in their everyday lives – the technology was, therefore, ‘invisible’.

The benefits that web conferencing tools could bring to learners and researchers at Sus-sex has been recognised by the University’s purchase of Adobe Connect – an application in which you communicate live with students and colleagues using voice and video as well as being able to share PowerPoint presentations and other documents. Adobe Connect should be available as a supported service in January 2010.

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trust your instincts’. The experience also gave them a dif-ferent view on their subject because ‘in a seminar room at Sussex a lot of people would have similar opinions to you, but suddenly in a room with people from all over world – you get a broader perspective’.

Despite having to be much more self-reliant when studying abroad, Alice and Caitlin felt very well supported by the Study Abroad team who they said were ‘amazing …it is a really good scheme and really well organised’. Students might find the financial side of studying abroad daunting, but Alice and Caitlin agreed that with fee waiv-ers and grants it is actually very easy to do – so much simpler than they thought it would be. That is in part due to the work of the Study Abroad team led by Emily Sinclair who oversee links with 38 institutions in North America, 5 in Central and South America, 5 in Asia and 2 in Australia as well as the 130 Erasmus institu-tions in Europe - and new links are being forged all the time. As well as supporting visiting and exchange stu-dents coming here and the 280 people like Alice and Caitlin who go from Sus-

sex to study abroad every year, Emily and her colleagues organise events to prepare our students for studying in another country and support members of faculty to teach abroad.

Sue Millns from Law is one of the Sussex faculty who regularly teaches abroad. Through the Erasmus pro-gramme, Sue and her colleague Yuri Borgmann-Prebil have spent time in Paris teaching a unit on the common law and Europeanisation to students taking a postgraduate diploma course which is taught in English.

In addition to the Erasmus programme Sue also teaches at the Catholic University in Brussels (KUB) and the Uni-versity of Lille. As Sue ex-plains, her academic career has always been international: ‘as a student I went on an Erasmus exchange to Bor-deaux for one year and did a degree in Paris and a PhD on comparative law’ so teaching abroad is a natural progres-sion. Her international teaching gives Sue experience of a vari-ety of academic cultures which

she says ‘opens your eyes to a different way of doing things and makes you think more about what we do here and why we do what we do’, and spending time talking to colleagues in French and Belgian universities is also useful for forging research links. A strong advocate of the benefits of the Erasmus programme Sue would recommend it to anyone and hopes to continue building links with European

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Internationalisation is not just about students and staff com-ing to Sussex from other countries. We also have exchange links with institutions around the world and send people to learn and teach abroad. Caitlin Mcnamara and Alice Quine took the opportunity of a year abroad with the Eras-mus Programme, funded by the European Commission.

Caitlin decided to apply because she is studying international relations, but says that ‘it was only when I was there that I realised how many advantages there were and how much I learnt from the people I met’. A year in Prague replaced the second year of her Sus-sex degree with a wide range of courses in politics, law and social sci-ence and Caitlin was able to study subjects from human rights to photo-journalism. Alice chose Sussex for her anthropology degree because she had always wanted to live in a Scandina-vian country and knew that by coming to Sussex she would be able to study in Denmark for a year. When she got to Copenhagen the wide range of sub-jects on offer meant that she had plenty of choice and was able to do everything she wanted to.

Although the teaching at both universities was in English, giving Alice and Caitlin a big advantage over students from other European countries, they still found the academic cultures they encountered quite different from the UK. In Copenhagen there were no lectures, with all the teaching taking the form of seminars with 10-20 students who ‘all had their own experiences and were all quite enthusiastic about talking about their own countries’. In Prague, stu-dents did nine different courses each semester and teach-ing was very ‘one-way’ with tutors presenting material to students in big lecture theatres with no discussion. Caitlin found this meant she ‘had to be more disciplined be-cause there was never any pressure to say anything, so it would be quite easy to drift. It was up to you - if you wanted to do well you could, but it took lots of self control and hard work’. Alice, too, found she had more free-dom and responsibility than at home: ‘We had to make up our own essay titles, which I really liked… I had passion because I was do-ing something I really wanted to’ and back home that has given her confidence about her dissertation. Both agreed that having experienced studying in other EU coun-tries they now felt quite ‘mollycoddled’ here, as if ‘not enough is expected of us’.

Both students gained in self-confidence and maturity, for as Caitlin said ‘when you are put out of your comfort zone everything is different but you really learn what you do and don’t like and what you want and don’t want. You learn to

Learning and Teaching Abroad

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Learning to be friends

… and learning from international friends.

An international education can transform lives, but just bringing people together from different countries does not automatically result in them learning from and about each other. At Sussex we hope that all our students, whether from the UK or the rest of the world, will benefit from an intercultural learning experience, but that process often needs a little help, so Damian White and Jolyon Western (Student Support and Experience) have set up an Inter-Cultural Friendship Scheme to increase integra-tion and cultural awareness between home and interna-tional students. The scheme matches a home student with an international student for the mutual benefit of both parties and whilst this is pri-marily a social relationship, the mutual understanding and increased awareness of different cultures which comes out of these pairings will spill over into the learn-ing sphere.

The Inter-Cultural Friendship Scheme avoids a common assumption that it is only students coming to Sussex from outside the UK that need help to learn in an international context, when of course home students also need support to get the most from an international education. If we are to prepare UK students to be truly global citizens, then learn-ing to learn from international peers is important for them and getting to know individual international students is a good starting point. For students arriving in a strange coun-try, having a ‘friend’ who has already been matched with

them on the basis of shared interests is a starting point for building new social networks and finding out how things work here.

Students in the scheme attend an initial social/information meeting with all other participants at the beginning of the

Autumn term and make a commitment to meet their matched ‘friend’ at least four times more for at least one hour each time during the term and attend a farewell party at the end of term.

To help the befriending proc-ess there are regular weekly Inter-Cultural Friendship Scheme Cafés for the first five weeks of term where participants meet with their own individual friends and also mix with as many mem-bers of the broader group as possible. It is also proposed that a Facebook group and/or other virtual forum for

members of the scheme will be set up so that multiple links can be made.

So far this year, there are 35 students involved in the scheme and weekly lunchtime get-togethers are under way. It has been proposed that these meetings will work towards becoming ‘cultural lunches’ in which participants from vari-ous countries will determine a menu that reflects some of their national dishes, thereby allowing all participants to get a grounded appreciation of other cultures.

institutions – already a French law professor has visited to teach here and it would be good to get students from Paris coming here too.

So have you thought about teaching abroad? Or suggesting that your students study abroad for a term or a year? The opportunities exist and people who have been involved seem to get a great deal from the experience. If you would like to find out more about the Erasmus Programme or Sussex’s international teaching and learning links check out the links below:

Web Links

Erasmus Programme: http://www.britishcouncil.org/erasmus

Study Abroad Opportunities: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/placement

List of Institutional Links: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/International/europe/A-Zlinks.shtml

Images: Many thanks to the Study Abroad Office and the students who took these photographs during their time abroad.

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Web Links and Contacts

Anyone wishing to join the scheme can contact Damian White on D.B.White@sussex.ac.uk

Details of the scheme: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/students/interculturalfriendship/

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The International and Study Abroad Office provides support and an extensive induction programme for international students when they come to Sussex to try to make the tran-sition into UK student life as easy as possible, but recog-nises that it is not always that easy. As Sara Dyer ex-

plained, whilst we want international students to mix with the rest of campus it is important to also recognise the ‘security and comfort students can get from being with others from their home country’. Sometimes UK student culture is very different from what our interna-tional students are used to, so Sara and her team provide an alternative to that which includes events such as cultural trips to historical sites, guided trips to the supermarket, international and Brit-ish food Evenings and working with USSU to organise more non-alcoholic events. There are now also part-time country support officers who fulfil a sign-posting role for Chinese, Japanese and Asian students who often have not insignificant issues in integrating into the UK higher education culture, but weren’t always accessing the services that could help them.

The Sussex Language Institute (SLI) is an important source of academic support for international students because, as well as offering degrees in modern languages, programmes on teaching the English language and open courses in a wide range of languages, SLI offers courses and modules which international students can take to prepare them for study in English and provides English language and study

skills support to help them learn at Sussex (see links). Jeremy Page (SLI) feels very positive about interna-tionalisation because ‘what international students bring to the party is so hugely important in terms of the range of experiences and different perspectives they contribute’ but stresses that it is important that the right systems are in place to mini-mise any adverse effects. That does not necessarily mean working just with inter-national students because ‘we need to see interna-tional students as primarily

students … they may have needs that home students don’t but they may have very similar needs and home students sometimes have needs we may not have anticipated. Most students in the course of their studies are going to require support in some shape or form so in the future we should be supporting students’ learning holistically’.

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Stimulating and Motivating: the International

Learning Experience at Sussex

Sussex attracts undergraduates, postgraduates and teach-ing staff from around the world, but what is it that makes studying and working at Sussex special? And how do we support international students to learn at Sussex? Our in-ternational students rate the Sussex experience very highly (see link to International Student Ba-rometer) so RUSTLE has been asking people what they get from studying and teaching here, and how we can best support international students as they get to grips with teaching and learning at Sussex.

Prateek Sureka came to SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Re-search) to take an MSc and is very en-thusiastic about the advantages of an international education: ‘a traditional education makes you aware of who you are, but what an international education gives is diversity’. That diversity is one of the things that brought Sherif El-Khamisy back to the Genome Centre after doing his PhD here, then returning to Cairo and working in the United States. For Sherif, class size is the ma-jor difference between the UK and Egypt with four times as many students to a class in Cairo which ‘reduces the quality of the learning environment – especially in labs’ and whilst his Egyptian university education provided him with a good theoretical knowledge, he feels he did not have as much practice as UK students. At Sussex, Sherif sees a nice mix of Euro-pean and non-European students, which brings cultures together providing a stimulating and motivating atmosphere for learning. This is echoed by Prateek who is now tutor-ing a group that includes mostly international students with only a few from the UK, ‘teaching a global course to a global class’ where he sees his role as ‘taking all their inputs and distributing it’. This is a really stimulating interactive process in which Prateek feels that he is learn-ing a lot from his students – quite different from his ex-perience of higher education in India which was very pre-scriptive and authoritative with ‘always a one-way ap-proach in which the teachers are always right’ and any attempts by students to question teachers were ‘shut down and pushed away’. Finding that at Sussex students call lecturers by their first name and are encouraged to question comes as a welcome surprise to many international students, but encountering such a differ-ent educational system at a time when they are also getting to grips with life in a strange country can be a challenge.

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schools will find the academic culture of Higher Education as bizarre as those coming from other parts of the world’ so

inclusive teaching really is the way forward to support all our students to get the most from the stimulating and motivating interna-tional learning environment at Sussex.

Images: Many thanks to the Study Abroad Office and the students who took these photographs during their time abroad.

Too often we make assumptions about international stu-dents, and as the ISB tells us and we have heard from Sherif and Prateek, the experience of learn-ing in the international environment of Sus-sex is extremely positive. Our international students face challenges in adapting to the academic culture in the UK, but as Jeremy points out ‘we make a mistake if we think that home students necessarily have an awareness of western academic culture and most students coming here from UK

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Tips for Internationalising Teaching Thanks to Jethro Pettit, Jeremy Lane, Sue Millns, Jeremy Page and members of the TLDU team for these tips.

From the beginning: In a group where you have disparate individuals, time spent on group bonding at the outset is a good investment. Including activities that help people to get an awareness of where others come from in terms of past learning experience, where they have lived, where they have been and what they have done, forges connections you can draw on throughout the course.

Mind your language: Avoid using idioms, colloquialisms, and culturally-specific terms as these tend to confuse. And watch out for words which have different meanings in different English-speaking countries.

Mixing it up: Vary the session so that there are lots of different ways that peo-ple can engage with the material. This works well with people of different cul-tural and language backgrounds.

Looking at things another way: Try mapping, or using diagrams, symbols and drawings to represent material symbolically, opening up the possibility of non-verbal communication.

Talking to each other: Provide opportunities for students to work one-on-one if only for 5 minutes. This gives everyone the chance to have a conversation and to speak – which can be daunting in a larger group.

Picture this: Use images in presentations to help ideas stick in students’ minds.

Working together: Divide the students into small groups because it is less threatening to have just 2 or 3 other students to engage with. Set exercises or topics to discuss and move between the groups. These small groups will often make very different responses to the same task and come up with very interesting ideas on their own.

Who will start? To help build confidence and support international students to speak in seminars and tutorials, try asking them to start the discussion. It is much easier to start a conversation in a second language than follow on from what some-one else has said.

Pause for Reflection: Include moments of reflective writing. Encourage students to spend 5-10 minutes, near the end of a session, writing down what they have gained from a particular reading, lecture or discussion. When students can do this in their own language it helps to internalise concepts and link learning to their own experience.

Before you go: At the end of a session explain what will be covered in the next session and identify any reading that will help students to prepare for it.

Many more ideas for helping all your students to learn effectively can be found on the Inclusive Teaching Study Direct site at

https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=8611

Web Links

International and Study Abroad Office: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/International/

Videos, photos and blogs: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/international/whysussex/videoandphotos.php

International Student Barometer: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/international/whysussex/bestplacetobe.php

English Language and Study Skills Support: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/languages/1-4-1-7.html

Academic Development on Study Direct: https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1397

‘a traditional education makes you aware of

who you are, but what an international educa-tion gives is diversity’.

RUSTLE

RUSTLE is produced by the Teaching and Learning Development Unit (TLDU)

and is online at www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/RUSTLE

If you wish to comment or contribute please e-mail tldu@sussex.ac.uk

8

RUSTLE Special Edition

Internationalising Teaching and Learning Conference 2010

Web Resources

Teaching and Learning Development Events

The Teaching and Learning Development Unit (TLDU) is taking Internationalisation as its theme for 2009-10 and is working to support colleagues as they think about internationalisation in the context of their own teaching and their students’ learning ex-perience. As well as this special edition of RUSTLE, the annual Teaching and Learning Conference in 2010 will address interna-tionalisation of teaching and learning, materials are being added to the TLDU website, and sessions related to internationalisa-tion are being included in the programme of Teaching and Learning Development (TLD) events.

The web resources include a general introduction and links to background reading for those who would like to know more about the national context for making teaching and learning at Sussex more international. A truly international curriculum will broaden the horizons of all students, preparing them to be global citizens, but this requires thinking about internationalisation at every stage of curriculum planning, so there are online resources to guide and support you through this process including a link to an Internationalising the Curriculum Resource Kit produced by the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD) which includes examples, ideas and case studies. There are also case studies illustrating ways in which global perspectives can be integrated into teaching and learning across a variety of disciplines and suggestions for offering an international outlook for home students and supporting international students to succeed in UK HE.

Already this year there have been TLD sessions on Supporting International Students and UK Education for New International Staff and next term an external speaker is coming to lead a session on Internationalising the Curriculum. Dr Viv Caruana, Reader in Inter-nationalisation at Leeds Metropolitan University is a leading scholar in the field of internationalisation of Higher Education with a special interest is the internationalised curriculum in the context of the global knowledge economy and learning society. In collaboration with Nicola Spurling, she co-authored the seminal review commis-sioned by the HE Academy (2007) The Internationalisation of UK Higher Education: a review of selected material. Viv will attempt to de-mystify internationalising the curriculum by reviewing relevant theoretical and conceptual approaches, providing a framework for considering our own programmes and courses and giving some practical suggestions on how we can use e-learning tools and as-sessment approaches to further develop our own practice in relation to internationalising the curriculum. The 3-hour session will be over lunch on Thursday 21st January 2010 (12.15-3.15pm) and booking is through Sussex Direct.

If you have any suggestions for the web pages, future TLD Events, or would like to discuss ways to adopt a global approach in your teaching please contact TLDU.

Web links and contacts

Internationalisation web resources on the TLDU website: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/international

Teaching and Learning Development Events: www.sussex.ac.uk/tldu/tldevents

Contact TLDU on tldu@sussex.ac.uk