February 10, 2011, by Teaching at Nottingham

An international curriculum

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Chris Barnatt: “I’m always keen to try and find examples which come from as many different places as possible.I teach a lot about technology and organisation so you’ve got to be aware, for example, technology development is very different in different parts of the world. Students will come from Japan having a very different experience of what they expect to work to students from Africa or the UK or the States. So you’re very careful your examples are as international as you possibly can be and that inevitably means when you put courses together you actually make sure you look at international resources more.”

Katharina Lorenz: “So scholarship is written in very different languages and written by, well, it’s very Western European, one needs to say, but it’s also still, within this Western European area, it’s very international, so people use French, Italian, English, German, all sorts of different languages.

“One of the things I have done automatically by being me and being from a different context, is to raise some awareness of that there is scholarship done outside the English language which is interesting. And that actually it might be valuable to be able to access it.”

Will Bowden: “Britain’s view of Rome as a great civilizing empire was forged in the period where Britain viewed itself as a great civilizing empire. So you can use Rome to encourage people to question ideas of empire, ideas of Colonialism.

“If they come from, for example, North American, they will very often have quite similar perceptions of ancient Rome to British students. European students will have, rather, sometimes quite different views on the ancient world. And then international students, for example, from China or Asia will have, I think, rather different impressions of it.”

Peter Cartwright: “There’s a premise on the idea that there will be a dialogue between the member of staff and the students and obviously between different students as well so having a range of different experiences, a range of backgrounds, a range of views, a range of nationalities becomes extremely important to that”

Andreas Fulda: “I provide both Chinese materials and English language materials and that actually I think is quite useful to show that we are not biased, we are actually offering two perspectives at the same time.

“I do think that this is actually a very typical British trademark that people in Britain learn how to develop a good argument, how to debate, to disagree with people without being disagreeable. These are very good values, things that we should definitely uphold.”

Authors:
Christopher Barnatt (Nottingham University Business School),
William Bowden (School of Humanities),
Peter Cartwright (School of Law),
Andreas Fulda (School of Contemporary Chinese Studies),
Katharina Lorenz (School of Humanities).

One of a series of interviews with staff that contributed to the development of the Teaching at Nottingham handbook.

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