transformative impact of international experience on personal and professional learning'
ESCalate Regional Workshop on ‘The transformative impact of international experience on personal and professional learning’ on Wednesday 23rd March 2011, hosted by Liverpool Hope University. Full details and at http://escalate.ac.uk/7733
“Developing intercultural courses in a UK university context: some curricular, strategic and research considerations”
Richard Fay and Susan Brown
In this presentation, we will present and reflect upon our experiences of designing, developing, implementing and finetuning/revising a range of intercultural courses in recent years as well as describing our upcoming development plans. This portfolio of intercultural course development involves: both undergraduate and postgraduate provision; face-to-face, elearning and blended learning modalities; and experiential sites in Manchester, overseas and online. The courses cater for both a specialised student body of experienced language teachers and a wide range of undergraduates (drawn from different faculties). These developments have taken place in a context in which the ‘intercultural was, for many years, noticeably absent from the institutional discourse. However, over recent years, the university’s vision for the undergraduate experience has increasingly seen cultural awareness, global citizenship, digital literacy and sustainability education foregrounded. Thus, our experiences regarding these courses can be characterised initially as ‘development largely in a institutional vacuum’ and now as ‘development in the vicinity of an intercultural agenda and emergent intercultural practice’. Although we will refer at some points to our ongoing research activity into the intercultural learning of our students, our presentation is primarily a reflection on our course development experiences.
Nice!