Internationalising European Studies at HKBU: Going the Extra Mile

By Tiffany Ko

“My students have chosen to study something very challenging, I just want to do more for them,” Dr. Emilie Tran said.

HKBU’s European Studies (French Stream) is, by large, a programme internationalised by nature. The four-year study enables undergraduates in Hong Kong to learn more about contemporary European societies. The students are entitled to a compulsory two-semester learning experience in France in their third year. They spend their everyday life studying French language, politics, history, society, culture and EU affairs. They also have online tutoring with French teachers from France. As the Course Coordinator, Dr. Emilie Tran shared with us what she has been doing to further internationalise the conceivably well-established curriculum and, ultimately, why these extra efforts matter.

Mobilising External Resources
In the course “European Economic and Business Life” for Year 4 European Studies (ES thereafter) students, Dr. Tran has changed its major component from grounding an imaginative French company in Hong Kong to networking students with some real French businesses in the city. Students had the opportunity to visit a dozen of companies in one semester. The directors/CEOs of these French companies were also invited to conduct face-to-face sharing sessions in the classroom setting. By inviting those practitioners to the campus and getting students well-prepared for the 60-minute talks, she is glad to see more job opportunities being offered to her outstanding students, more scholarship agreements signed, and the University receiving more positive attention from the French business community in and outside Hong Kong.

Diversifying the Classroom
The aforementioned course had long been exclusive to the ES majors. Since January 2018, Dr. Tran has made it available to all French speaking undergraduates on campus. In AY 2017/18 Semester 2, the class composition changed from 15 ES students to 35 students from diverse backgrounds. Exchange students from France, Switzerland, and Morocco as well as full-time students from Hong Kong and Mainland China were all integrated in lectures, visits, and group assignments. Seeing that the international students even outnumbered the local ES majors in the mixed classroom, the latter remarked joyfully that they felt like studying in France!

Archiving Internationalisation Events
Besides businessmen, French artists, academics, and government officials were also invited as guest speakers for a range of courses and activities, including a career fair for French companies. Thanks to the webpage that archives the department’s Internationalisation-at-home-related events, students and faculty, have access to a handy record of the international experts they met, while members of the local community, including prospective students and their parents, could keep track of how the programme nurtures globally aware graduates.

Dr. Tran joined a programme inherently internationalised. Yet, she has taken the challenging road to internationalisation at home in order to secure better career prospects for her students, extend the study-abroad experience to her classroom, and consolidate relevance of the programme to the society it serves.

Acknowledgements
The feature story draws on an interview with Dr. Emilie Tran who generously shared with us her experiences and insights, and we hope we have done justice to the wisdom of her practice in the internationalisation of teaching and learning.