Back to Summer: It’s Nice to Learn Together at the ECE Conference 2019!

By Vienne Lin

It was a great opportunity to present our work at the Co-Constructing Excellence Conference last December at HKU. Seven months apart, we are delighted to have another opportunity to share our work with educators, researchers and practitioners around the world in London. Orangised by IAFOR, the seventh European conferences on Education (ECE2019) and Language Learning (ECLL2019) were held on both Birkbeck and UCL’s IoE campuses in Bloomsbury from July 19 to July 21, 2019. I was honoured to have joined more than 300 academics in such a big event.

This time, we explored how decoding the metalanguage of internationalisation could help teachers and practitioners understand their practices and outgrow limitations in such understanding and practices. We drew on an open-ended question “What do you think ‘internationalisation of teaching and learning’ means?” extracted from our pre-online survey to formulate analysis and discussion. Preliminary results showed that half of the respondents had a unidimensional view of internationalisation, meaning that internationalisation referred to, for example, internationalising the teaching contents or student mobility. After presentation, I was happy to receive some positive feedback on our work, saying that the expanded scope of internationalisation did help them develop a more comprehensive perspective on the topic, and that the systematic way to involve different stakeholders in a community would enable teachers to meet and learn from each other.

Among all those great memories, I am happy to have met Ms. Helen Sadig, Teaching Fellow from School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds at the welcome reception where I was pondering the question “To drink or not to drink?” And now, we would like to give a warm welcome to Helen who became a part of our community.

One conference down, another conference to go? Our international conference Internationalisation of Higher Education: Practices, Sustainability and Impact is on 7 – 8 May 2020! Don’t forget to mark your calendar. See you there!