This USO-project provides a concrete set of teaching practices to enhance tailor-made internationalisation. These range from telecollaboration, Return Days, Diversity Mapping exercises, to research internships and study trips abroad, practicing multilingualism and Structured Mobility exchange.

Background

In the Strategic Plan 2016-2020 ‘internationalisation ‘ and ‘diversity’ rank high on the UU agenda. The university wants to increase the diversity of its academic community and bring global awareness into its teaching programmes. This project hopes to inspire MA staff and MA coordinators by means of concrete examples, and help them bridge the gap between paper and practice.

Description

This USO project aims to provide MA staff and coordinators with a concrete set of teaching practices to increase internationalisation in the master programmes. Enhancing global competences and diversity within the MA is about more than increasing employability. It is also about increasing students’ ‘cultural capital’, and about connecting, bridging and appreciating differences. It can serve less measurable ‘goods’ such as openness, dialogue, inclusion, literacy, empathy, synthesis, and global citizenship. The teaching practices were designed to help students acquire international and intercultural skills to succeed in the highly globalised labour market.

Results

Over the past years pilot projects were carried out to fine-tune a set of teaching tools and activities to bring internationalisation in the MA, including telecollaboration, diversity mapping exercises and return days. The results of this project have been described in detail in different blogs that can be found on the TAUU-website:

Learning activities

• How to harness the power of diversity within an international MA classroom? (Diversity Mapping & Mining exercises)
• How to playfully enhance the reflective capacity of students with marshmallows and spaghetti (Diversity Mapping exercise)
• Linking mobility to the curriculum: the Return Day
• How to create an inclusive environment for new international students at UU (Help guides, and student orientation day)
• How to integrate telecollaboration in a master programme? (Part I)
• How to integrate telecollaboration in a master programme? (Part II)

Curriculum design

• How to guide potential curriculum changes: Comparing curriculums
• How to increase student mobility in a one-year master programme? (Threefold strategy to foster international mobility)
• Internationalising the curriculum;
• How to internationalize your MA comprehensively? Use the check-chain
• How to brainstorm and strategize internationalization at MA team level? (Tools to help think about strategy)
• How do you manage multilingualism (Dutch and English) at the MA level? (Language policy implementation and strategy)
• How to translate Dutch university terms to English (Word list with translations)

Evaluation

• How to obtain valuable feedback from international students (Feedback sessions with pizza)
• How to give international students a voice (Interviews with students)
• How to assess global citizenship (Assessment toolkit to assess global citizenship developed by The University of New South Wales (Australia))

Related projects:

• USO-project Interculturele vaardigheden (ICUU)