by Bryan Webber, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Management, VIU

I like to think that I’ve been reasonably engaged with the international presence here at VIU.

I regularly teach classes with a significant international composition (for example, one of my classes this semester has approximately 33% international students –and that’s relatively low for our courses – representing 14 countries) and I did a week long in-house course on internationalizing the classroom years ago. I do as much as I can to acknowledge, respect, and reflect the international reality in my teaching.

I know, however, that I’m doing all of this still coming from a perspective where I privilege my own culture and domestic understanding, basically because I don’t have the personal international experiences to do much otherwise. I have felt constrained by this and sense that I’ve been playing it safe when it comes to international engagement. So when the opportunity came up to finally get that international experience for myself this spring, I jumped at it.

In April, just after the semester ends, I will travel to Shanghai, China to teach one of our Faculty of Management first year business courses (in English) at a partner institution, Shanghai Lixin University. I will be there for four weeks instructing approximately 40 students in our Organizational Behaviour course with a condensed schedule of four 3-hour classes a week. The students are part of a group going through the standard course progression of the Bachelor of Business Administration program; last year these students received first semester courses from two of my colleagues, and there is a new group of first-semester students scheduled to start up the program in May. This is all a result of a growing relationship between the institutions that is providing the chance for a more intimate cross-cultural understanding between students and faculty.

Since Christmas, I have been actively preparing for the travel and the teaching, taking care of the typical logistics required for both. I’ve done the passport renewal, flight bookings, bought the appropriate Rough Guide book, and I’m making all the right lists. I’m taking weekly Mandarin lessons locally, which is a wonderful experience, as the delving into language is as much cultural learning as it is about communication. And despite how different from English Mandarin is, it is such a sensible language, I really “get” it.

The more involved preparation is dealing with the realities of what it means to be delivering one of our courses immersed in another place, culture, and language, and within a very condensed time frame.

For example, consider the impacts of the text associated with our course: we use a well-regarded book, in a Canadian edition, which has been our standard for years. In Shanghai, what they can access is an older US edition that is structured quite differently. So, I have to review and revise the class plan and associated materials (slides, etc.) for each class to ensure I am referring to content that is both available and correctly located for the students.

Another concern is that my lectures and seminars here are spiced with pop culture references, personal stories, and a variety of activities that are centred on a Western frame of reference. I suspect that’s not going to be as effective with my students in Shanghai who don’t share my contexts. A further complication is the level of English language experience most students will have. Here at VIU, I may have reasonably consistent expectations of the language abilities for all of our students here, international or domestic, considering the resources and the environment they live in. In Shanghai, their English language learning may have been limited to what they hear from their ESL teachers in the classroom. That’s it. All of the exposure to our culture and language and I take for granted here is simply not going to be the reality for them.

Or take the impact of a condensed schedule, where I can’t rely on the elapsed time nature of a 14 week semester. Here, if I give a take-home exercise on a Wednesday, and expect it back on the following Monday, I can expect that somewhere in the five days, the student will be able to find the time to carry out the work. In my Shanghai class, one week now becomes one day and there is only so much time I can expect students to find in 24 hours.

What ends up being really exciting about this, is that I know I’m going to be surprised by something: there will be some assumptions that will get blown-up, some things that I simply didn’t prepare for, some learnings that will likely humble me. All of this just provides me with the opportunity to look at what I do with fresher eyes, to challenge the things I’m attached to, and develop even more capacity and resources that I can apply to my teaching, anywhere.

Bryan Webber  (bu lai en wei bo)