Saturday 14th November 2015 - Chinese universities in evolution

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.