5.3 The Globalisation-Directed IC School
As introduced on its website, the School of IC at UNNC aims to provide students with a good command of new skills, new tools and a new level of understanding about how things work interrelated to what is required in the process of globalisation, and specifically with the latest knowledge and thinking, and a range of critical perspectives that will enable them to operate in any international environments.Upon graduation, the students are expected to become independent, critical, thoughtful and skilled individuals who are ready to excel and prosper in employment possibilities worldwide.To that end, the school offers three programmes at undergraduate, master and doctoral levels, which cover a wide range of core subjects including the study of modern European and Asian languages, the communications theory, cultures, the media and the social sciences, as well as other subjects related to the use of modern information technologies and globalisation.At the same time, IC students are able to choose optional modules offered on the International Business and International Studies degrees.The school claims on its official website that it ultimately aims to equip its students with an international perspective, by saying:‘We provide our students with the latest knowledge and thinking and with a range of critical perspectives that will allow them to function effectively in virtually any international environment.’ (http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/internationalcommunications/index.aspx accessed on 20 June, 2016)
In order to provide further understanding of the school’s particular disciplinary culture, I collected the four video-recorded seminar curriculum materials from the school’s official website.I analysed the curricula in accordance with the processes of ‘finding, selecting, appraising (making sense of), and synthesizing data’ (Bowen, 2009, p.28), these four module curricula then were synthesised with reference to the aspects of education aims; learning outcomes and assessment were examined in this document analysis.For easy access, I summarised the results in Table 5.1.
Table 5.1 Summary of learning aims in the four seminars
In addition, I collected teaching goals from the teachers who conducted the four seminars. Table 5.2 presents the teachers’ original statements of teaching goals.It shows that the Year 1 tutor was expecting the students not only to develop critical understanding and analysis of the module-related concepts and theories, but also engage in more interaction in the classroom.Year 2 and Year 3 tutors similarly expected and encouraged their students to engage in critical discussion, analysis, application of concrete examples and theories, while the final year tutor stressed the ability of critical judgement and application of module-related theories.
Table 5.2 Teachers’ statements of teaching goals of four seminars
