Painting the BIGGER Picture: From Breaking Assumptions to Taking Perspectives in Classrooms and Service-Learning

By Nicole Lai

“What we do here is that we help to paint a bigger picture, provide more information to students to help them make better decisions. That’s how I interpret the job of teaching…”said Prof. Julian Groves, HKUST.

In this rapidly changing world, we have to equip our future graduates with, apart from disciplinary knowledge and skills, global competence. To prepare our students as world citizens, who are also collaborative problem solvers at the same time, nurturing globally competent and socially responsible individuals is undoubtedly one of our core missions. By learning and being able to utilise a blend of skills, values, and behaviours, students can thrive in a more diverse, interconnected world.

Prof. Julian Groves, a HKUST-affiliated member, sees diversity and internationalisation of teaching and learning as something more than merely including western ideologies, international students, mixing students, and sending students out.

Diversity can refer to practically anything, such as age, race, nationality, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, educational background, mental ability, you name it. Knowing the importance of seeing the complexity in diversity, cross-cultural comparisons have always been built into Julian’s Common Core courses to cultivate a mindset of differences and paint a bigger picture for his students to make better decisions. He guides his students to see things from various perspectives, understand from different dimensions, and appreciate the differences.

Unveiling and Understanding Assumptions
Diversity is “learnable”, yet, with no handbook. It is, therefore, crucial to utilise a comparative perspective. As most of us subconsciously call on prior knowledge when it comes to complex problem-solving, or decision making, there could be assumptions that build significant barriers to limit our thinking. In his classes, Julian often illuminates his students by using lots of comparisons of Hong Kong with different countries. For example, how people believed the standard of English in Hong Kong is declining in recent years, but when we look at the bigger picture before jumping to a conclusion, it could be (a) it is really declining, (b) it stays the same, or (c) the standard in other countries is getting a lot better. Another example is how people often associate the education system in Hong Kong with kids committing suicide. However, the suicide rates among the elderly in Hong Kong are much higher. Moreover, the suicide rates among American students are indeed far higher than Hong Kong students when we look from an international perspective. His students always have an Oz moment whenever they encounter Julian’s comparisons, while challenging different sorts of assumptions, to explain some social phenomena.

Not only does he illustrate assumptions from local and international examples, but Julian also challenges his students from a gender perspective. He raised awareness of the “one-size-fits-men” approach to students by referring to Carol Criado Perez’s Invisible Women – a book depicting how women are invisible in a lot of scientific studies. Students would realise certain misconceptions and assumptions, for example, how women actually operate better at a warmer temperature but the temperature in most offices is determined by a formula based on the metabolic resting rate of a 70kg man; the fact that there were not enough spacesuits for women to perform a spacewalk, and more. Drawing on interesting facts provides students with opportunities to see things from diverse perspectives which helps to make better decisions in the ever-changing world. Julian further pointed out these biases might sound distant to us, however, just looking at HKUST’s student feedback questionnaire is already another proof that we always make assumptions. Students assumed different criteria of a good female faculty, whether she is kind and smiling, rather than a well-defined set of skills that we would use on evaluating male faculty. Assumptions can be everywhere.

Creating a Positive Learning Environment for All
It is of paramount importance to see and understand perspectives in teaching and learning. Julian is well aware of how an international student, such as an Israeli student who served 3 years in the army before getting into the university, could think and perceive things in a very different way when compared to other students, especially our local students, coming in straight after high school studies. As each student has a different upbringing and life experience, Julian adopts another strategy in his classes to make good use of the class dynamics among local and international students by asking them to complete particular in-class exercises in their own languages. One typical example for students to contribute and share their cultural backgrounds is the exercise where students were asked to list and explain expressions for sexually (in)active men in their mother languages. This kind of class activity not only reveals the level of sexism in their respective countries but also allows students to reflect critically on the dimensions and perceptions between different discourse systems, cultures, and nations.

Strength Lies in Differences, Not Similarities: Appreciating Differences through Service-Learning and Peer Learning
As Julian recalled what his professor told him, “Well, you don’t have to go and give up your life and live in Africa or India like Mother Teresa. You can help poor countries by helping immigrants from those places.” Service-learning is another valuable way to learn and appreciate differences. He embedded service community projects in the course for his students, both local and international, to help migrants in Hong Kong. By talking to migrants from the Philippines and refugees from other countries, students can understand real situations and get a global perspective without going on a fancy trip to create a huge carbon footprint. With 120 students in his class, Julian made these service-learning projects optional, yet carrying extra credits, as he believes they gain what they give. In one service-learning project, participating students had to go through training sessions with the partner organisation before visiting the shelter of domestic workers, and then designed educational projects. Giving students the space to be imaginative and caring, at the same time giving them a fair amount of responsibilities, the outcomes are usually fascinating. In the previous semester, one of the groups brought all the materials such as wool and needles to the shelter and taught crochet to the domestic workers. It wasn’t any regular art session. Students’ ability to think beyond the project by extending the impact afterward, as the domestic workers can make presents for their kids in their free time, is unexpectedly fantastic. To both local and international students, local service-learning projects have the power to stimulate personal growth and provoke deep-seated changes in students’ perceptions, worldviews, and identity. Having immersed in new cultural contexts through meaningful interactions and experiential learning, the experience has a positive impact on students’ personal development and sense of civic responsibility in the long run.

Game Changer: Are You Ready To Take the Lead?
While utilising a comparative perspective by local and international examples is not a major challenge for most teachers, some of us would find it discouraging when having a large class and limited time. We believe curriculum design (perhaps with technological innovation) and the facilitating of class dynamics are the keys to the internationalisation in higher education and develop students’ global skills, especially intercultural competence and openness. By the same token, we should also be aware and careful of how most of the disciplines at the universities came from the European thinkers instead of Asian, or local scholars. When we talk about diversity and perspectives-taking, are we really teaching and learning in diverse academia?

Unveiling different facts and ideas is truly the idea of internationalisation because it creates a genuine interaction for students of all backgrounds to develop the ability to understand, illustrate, collaborate, and communicate with others without assumptions. The integration of active participation, intercultural communication, and critical reflection promotes numerous transferable skills which they cannot learn from books and lectures. As Alvin Toffler once puts “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Having that openness to the continued process of questioning our assumptions is one of the essential keys to be interculturally and globally competent.

Acknowledgments
The feature story draws on an interview with Prof. Julian Groves who generously shared with us his experiences and insights, and we hope we have done justice to the wisdom of his practice in the internationalisation of teaching and learning.