Title: Students’ perspective on co-creating curriculum in international classrooms

Author: Jingyi Li

Theme: Partnerships

With the extending internationalisation, the classrooms in UK universities, especially at the PGT level, are becoming more culturally diverse. In theory, it provides valuable opportunities for students and staff to interrogate knowledge and assumptions from fresh perspectives. However, it also presents challenges to both tutors and students in practice as not all experience and knowledge may be valued equally in learning and teaching (e.g. Wang, Moskal and Schwisfuth, 2020).

The author argues that in an international classroom, practices on co-creating curriculum must be guided by pursuing social justice, such as nurturing thinkers with critical consciousness. Such an agenda comes with the need to decolonise the curriculum, particularly challenging the underlying Eurocentric assumptions in knowledge construction.

However, is it possible, given the legacy of colonisation still impacts our knowledge reproduction globally, and the formal education system is disrupted by the neo-liberal discourse globally? Can tutors and students or students from a range of cultural backgrounds work in partnership in learning and co-construct knowledge? Guided by these questions, this session discuss the findings of a research exploring how students from various cultural backgrounds engage with topics relating to social justice and critical thinking and negotiate their positions with tutors and their peers in learning.

There is evidence of an internalised hierarchy of knowledge. In the meantime, the findings suggest that students are sophisticated code switchers and draw on different strategies when (dis) engaging with topics perceived as controversial or sensitive in learning spaces. While embracing the opportunities to co-construct knowledge, students are tuned in with the unbalanced teacher-student power relations and dynamics among students of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.