I am writing this whilst on the first leg of my return from
speaking at a learning and teaching conference.
I am currently somewhere over the Timor Sea between Australia and
Singapore. It is a good moment to
reflect.
The conference I have been at was the ‘China / Australia
Summit on Teaching and Learning’ (CAUSTL for short). A few years ago the top flight universities
in China (the C9) and in Australia (the Group of 8) agreed to meet every year
to discuss collaboration and innovation issues in undergraduate education. Two meetings have now been held – the first
at the Harbin Institute of Technology, and the second at the University of
Adelaide. The next two are already lined
up – at Xi’an Jiao Tong and at the University of Queensland. I had been invited to the Adelaide meeting as
one of two external plenary speakers.
A first point of reflection is what a good idea this
collaboration between two groups of universities is. I should have thought of creating something like
it while I was the chair of the Russell Group’s PVCs for Learning and Teaching
– but I didn’t.
But a second interesting issue to me is how much the
leadership in Chinese universities (or at least in the leading ones) is
thinking of educational reform. This
adds to the picture I gained from visits to Tongji (in Shanghai) and Nanjing
last year. The story seems to go like
this:
Until recently China needed universities that could produce
the technical specialists to drive the modernisation and economic development
of the country. It also needed strong
application-based research to underpin such development. Top universities put a lot of effort into
research, and continued educating students by strongly didactic methods in
programmes that were massively disciplinary in focus.
In both Tongji and Nanjing last year I heard that they
wanted to shift the emphasis to education.
At Nanjing in particular there was a strong interest in the internationalisation
of student experience. As part of the
background preparation for my contribution in Adelaide I read the strategic
planning statements relating to learning and teaching for each of the C9
universities (and the Australian Group of 8 as well!) and found that theme now to
be general for all 17 institutions. But
the Chinese universities are also now very keen on bringing in student-centred
learning, small group teaching, project-based
(rather than didactic) curricula, and moving towards inter-disciplinary and
more general education. These trends
were very much confirmed throughout the Adelaide meeting by all the Chinese
present who gave papers.
The argument, as articulated by a couple of speakers and
agreed by others, is that China’s development is now at a point where it needs
to produce more generalists to add to the specialists – and that as the country
looks increasingly outward it needs graduates who can operate in international
arenas. One of the most fascinating
interventions was from a Vice-President of a research-intensive university who
told how performance evaluation in his university had been changed from 1:1
research and teaching to a ratio of 5:3 in favour of teaching.
Interestingly, a Chinese colleague indicated that one reason
for driving Chinese universities more towards producing students with general
transferable skills is because such attributes are inadequately developed in a
generation that come from one-child families where they have never learnt
teamwork or the art of compromise with peers.
There are clearly going to be problems in changing
educational emphases in these ways – not least because university teachers
often have a vested interest in the continuation of the system in which they
rose to their current positions. So
change will take time. But some of the Chinese
universities represented at the Adelaide meeting are putting considerable
resources into staff training and development to deliver the new ways. Administrative structures also need
reform. As one Vice-President said, “in
relation to these reforms, we have first class students, but only second class
teachers, and third class administration.”
The changes in Chinese undergraduate education being
actively talked about – and already being implemented in many cases – are
exciting. We in the west have got so
used to stereotyping Chinese education as being about rote learning and an
emphasis on the words of the professor.
We need to revise those views and think about how we can interact with
Chinese universities – and with Chinese students – in ways that are already being
explored in Australia. And, as always,
China is a place to watch for significant new developments.
