Unfolding the Magic of Classroom Diversity

By Michael Yu

Leveraging classroom diversity has been a difficult topic under the broad concept of internationalisation of teaching and learning. Large class, students’ diverse backgrounds and lack of motivation are common concerns shared among teachers. In light of this, we invited three speakers from different disciplines to share with us how they unfolded the magic of leveraging diversity in our second Join-the-Conversation event at HKUST on 23 April 2018. It brought about 30 participants across different institutions together.

The event first began with Dr. Tracy Zou’s introduction of the background, aims, approaches and focal areas of CoP – ITL, followed by Dr. Beatrice Chu’s dissemination of the survey findings of the Undergraduate Cultural Issues and Challenges at HKUST 2017.

Our first speaker, Prof. May-yi Shaw, shared with us her three approaches of leveraging diversity in the humanities courses. Not only did Prof. Shaw include interdisciplinary, intercultural and intergenerational learning materials drawn from both local and international contexts, but she also asked her students to form groups with others from different cultural backgrounds, gender, disciplines and year. She has been committed to relating what students learnt to their personal lives. She also remarked that teachers might consider applying her practice to a larger classroom, required courses, other disciplines and subjects as well as a campus with a fixed intercultural ratio.

Our second speaker, Dr. Jess King, explicated how she adopted peer-supported experiential learning to leverage student diversity in her Common Core ocean science courses. Through designing activities that enhanced students’ emotional engagement, students were able to develop ownership of the problem they need to tackle and make real-world impacts. Above all, students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds were given multiple opportunities in their learning processes to contribute their own professional and disciplinary knowledge, experiment and discover possible solutions freely and fearlessly.

Our third speaker, Dr. Roselyn Du, talked us through how she facilitated international learning opportunities in her journalism courses at HKBU. Recognising the need to bridge the gap between local and international students, Dr. Du not only invited the international students in her class to articulate their opinions, but also encouraged all students to work in international study groups. To develop a sense of global citizenship in students, Dr. Du invited her PhD students who had been to overseas exchange programmes to deliver guest lectures and discussed local and international readings and case studies with students to develop their intercultural perspectives.

After reading the above sharing, we hope that you may have some inspiration from the three speakers and develop your strategies tailored-made for your own courses or programmes.