Towards a More Internationalised Learning Environment

By Michael Yu

With the growing importance of internationalisation in higher education, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has been committed to undertaking a wide range of internationalisation projects within the university and beyond. In order to support a student-centered teaching agenda, HKUST conducted focus groups and an online survey to capture the authentic voice of students.

In May 2017, five focus groups comprising thirteen local, five mainland and thirteen international HKUST students were conducted as a pilot study to examine undergraduate students’ intercultural needs and challenges within the education curriculum. Interview questions included:

1. whether a participant agrees that he/she has rich intercultural experiences and interactions with peers and teaching staff within and outside classroom
2. whether the above-mentioned experiences meet his/her expectations prior to studying at HKUST
3. whether he/she is included or excluded (or feeling uncomfortable) in a learning activity in a course
4. his/her recommendations on improving cultural-inclusiveness in the curriculum and
5. other important issues regarding intercultural interactions within the curriculum

The focus groups revealed that the local, mainland and international participants had significant differences in their intercultural experiences in terms of the three aspects below.

1. General expectations of intercultural experiences at HKUST
Local students were largely satisfied with the level of internationalisation at HKUST, while international students expressed disappointment to classroom learning facilitation which tended to favour local students.

2. New student orientation
International students found it difficult to integrate into the local student body as orientation camps for locals and non-locals were held separately.

3. Classroom learning experiences
a) Language use in class
International and mainland students were particularly concerned about the dominance of Cantonese and locally contextualised jokes in some classes. And many students, including the locals, were aware of how the English accents of instructors or tutors might affect the communication effectiveness and their understanding of the teaching content. There were also voices from the locals that their international counterparts from non-English speaking countries only expressed ideas in their own native languages.

b) Nature of topics, case studies and examples
Instructors’ efforts to draw on global topics, cases and examples, instead of leveraging culturally or linguistically specific ones, were proved successful in facilitating intercultural learning for all groups of students.

c) Feelings of inclusion/exclusion
It is a good practice to require each group to have students from diverse cultural backgrounds or ethnicities. Local students who were accommodating and volunteered to translate the teaching content for international and mainland students, as well as instructors or tutors who were willing to create a more inclusive learning environment and to offer extra assistance, were much appreciated. All these would render the newcomers a heartwarming experience.

The three key aspects identified in the five focus groups sketched out the design for a more comprehensive online survey. The online survey consisting of fifty-two questions were distributed to all undergraduate students from 15 to 29 November 2017. 532 responses were collected. Such data well open doors to better formulating strategies when dealing with development and challenges in internationalisation at HKUST.