Teaching International Students (TIS) and the Distributed Facilitator Framework (DFF): Capturing Educators’ Career Development Learning (CDL).
Led by: Associate Professor Arianne Rourke & Associate Professor Kim Snepvangers
Introduction: In 2018 Scientia Education Fellows Associate Professor Arianne Rourke (SEF 2017) and Associate Professor Kim Snepvangers (SEF 2018), initiated an ‘Inspired Learning and Teaching’ project in the Faculty of Art and Design on ‘Teaching International Students’ (TIS). This initiative included planning and facilitating Faculty-wide Forums for academic staff. At the first TIS Forum in February 2018 at the Australian Museum, Professor Georgina Barton from the University of Southern Queensland presented the keynote, the event was attended by 35 Sessional staff, 7 Educational Developers, 34 Faculty academics, academics from UNSW Faculties FASS, Science & Law and 16 International students participated as Student Ambassadors. There were seven films produced that captured the Forum 1 event, which are being edited into 5 minute short films to be used as digital resources on the TIS Moodle site. Visual and survey data from the Forum was collected and analysed and was used to inform the planning of other 2018 TIS events. TIS Forum 1 was followed by two academic Career Development Learning (CDL) workshops, where academics shared their case-base teacher knowledge and reflected on their practice of TIS, this was also visually recorded and surveys were conducted.
At Forum 2 in September 2018, there were 17 (5 minute) presentations and workshop activities on TIS presented by academics and students from Faculties across UNSW including five SEA Fellows (Arianne Rourke, Kim Snepvangers, Jacky Cranney, Louise Lutze-Mann & Dijana Alic - Arianne mentored Dijana - ADE, FBE - in the 2018 SEA Mentoring Project). As a result of our work on TIS, we received an invitation from the Dean to present outcomes of our leadership of TIS Career Development Learning (CDL) at the Faculty Planning day. Our presentation was visually captured by the artist Vivien Sung and used in other TIS CDL initiatives. In 2018 the TIS initiative was co-presented at a UNSW Learning and Teaching Connection workshop and was presented by Arianne at a SEA meeting.
During the year we mentored two Bachelor of Media Arts 4th year students in their Professional Experience Projects (PEP), where we collaborated as ‘Student as Partners’ producing animations for the TIS project. Kim, Arianne and artist Vivien Sung and PEP students Iain McDonald and Jason Jiang, designed and presented a poster at the ‘2018 Learning and Teaching Forum, Partners in Learning: Connecting Communities’. Arianne was on the Forum’s Planning Committee and chaired a Session on ‘Being Inclusive’. All the TIS activities were visually captured in a Distributed Facilitator Framework (DFF) that we designed, which utilises an Action Practitioner Research methodology over a one-year cycle that includes follow-up reflective practice activities. It provides a scaffold ecological system for building practice-based architecture to inform educators’ Career Development Learning (CDL).
Theoretical Background: The theories that underpin the DFF model, includes the Iceberg Model of surface and deep culture (Kruger, 2013) and the Ecologies of Practice concepts of Kemmis and Heikkinen (2011) and Snepvangers & Rourke (2017). The DFF was created to visually capture an interconnected series of processes and events utilising the Kemmis and Heikkinen, (2011) characteristics of ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ to develop a creative ‘Ecology of Practice’. An ‘Ecologies of Practice’ lens has been used to envisage a TIS Community of Practice (CoP) as an integral component of global outreach as expressed in the UNSW 2025 Strategy. The DFF is also underpinned by the policies of the Australian Government International Education Strategy 2025 and Leask and Carroll (2013), ‘Good Practice Principles: Teaching across Cultures’.
Aims: The aim of the Teaching International Students (TIS) Distributed Facilitator Framework (DFF) is to enhance teacher knowledge about how to teach International students and increase engagement with their learning. Rather than providing general advice or formulas about teaching for FT/PT and sessional staff, the aim is to impact educational quality at UNSW by focusing on place-based educator driven mentoring, and collaborative events that activate ecosystems and Students as Partners projects. Impact can be gauged through high-level positive educator-led evidence and feedback about new insights and practical strategies that they will now be using as a result of participation in TIS activities in 2018 and 2019.
The DFF models and portrays:
- Educator-led ‘ecologies of practice’ that promote new transformative practice-based architectures to address gaps in quality outcomes through ‘Inspired learning through Inspired teaching’.
- Deeper understanding of TIS through active strategies, resources, events and project based outcomes that value teacher case-based knowledge.
- Practical application of context-driven content knowledge and pedagogy focused on the primacy of relationships as an enhanced quality measures, in the current techno-driven environment of higher education.
This has been achieved by:
1) Designing a non-hierarchical, generative, interconnected and inclusive Career Development Learning (CDL) model for encapsulating Action Practitioner Research (APR) and Reflective Practice of educators.
2) Facilitating staged and scaffold professional development activities that support and encourage educators in their teaching practice and that provides a framework for documenting teacher case-based knowledge.
3) Develop and produce creative visual learning artefacts as online teaching resources to assist educators in Teaching International Students (TIS) with the focus of improving the International student experience at UNSW.
Progress / Outcomes / Next steps: The TIS DFF was presented at The Image 2018 Conference in Hong Kong and the 2018 Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at Sydney University. A paper about the TIS initiative was published and presented at the ACEN 2018 conference, which Kim and Arianne co-authored with their PhD student Meg Lomm. Papers on the TIS project have been accepted for the InSea Conference in 2019 in Canada and the Asian Conference on Education and International Development (AEID 2019) in Japan. We are currently working as a Community of Practice (CoP) designing and building a Moodle TIS DFF that will have all the learning artefacts collected so far. The TIS CDL CoP will be further built upon in 2019 by inviting editors and authors from the book series that Arianne Co-Curated on: ‘Transformative Pedagogy in the Visual Domain’, which published eight books in 2018 that included 18 Editors; 163 Authors from 25 Disciplines; 21 Countries and 98 Educational Institutions. In 2019 the Moodle TIS DFF will be built with the aim of showcasing UNSW and other invited academics worldwide, peer-reviewed innovative teaching resources that utilise visual learning artefacts. The main outcome will be to provide a variety of multi-disciplinary online creative resources to assist educators towards improving International student learning and to improve the overall learning experience of students at UNSW and beyond.
