Teaching Culturally Diverse Classrooms and International Students for the Education Industry
(2005 – ongoing)

Challenge
Lecturers, instructors and teachers who teach culturally diverse and international students in multicultural classrooms might struggle with the culturally diverse learning styles, teaching methods and communication preferences. Some of the challenges experienced are, for example, a student’s participation, communication styles, language and accents, and self-ownership for learning. Lack of understanding about culturally different learning styles, student expectations, teaching styles and methods lead to disengaged students and struggling teachers.

Interventions:

1. Participants fill in Training Needs Analysis to identify challenges, experiences and expectations of participants.
2. Face-to-Face training workshops
   – challenges and experiences
   – cultural know-how to be able to map cultural behaviour and styles
   – communication styles and preferences to bridge cultural differences
   – explore different teaching and learning styles across cultures
   – developing teaching and classroom practices to close cultural gaps
3. Country specific knowledge to assist international students and teachers.
4. Participants complete Training Feedback Analysis and reports are shared with organisation and contact persons.

Results:
Since mid-2005 we have ‘Teaching Culturally Diverse Classrooms and Students’  training programs in place to assist teachers and lecturers from different institutes, colleges, and universities who teach and lecture to students from culturally diverse background and international students. The wealth of information shared between ourselves and teachers allowed us to verify different teaching and learning styles across cultures, develop lists of teaching practices around identified ‘best practice’ key areas, and explore teaching methods and techniques better suitable for teaching culturally diverse classrooms. The results are shared with participants from different workshops.

We work with lecturers and teachers from a range of Universities, TAFE Colleges and Institutes in Australia to assist them in become more attuned top the requirements of culturally diverse and International students in the educational system (please also explore our Industry Briefing for Education.

Over the years we have also developed and facilitated training workshops and presentations for other staff and students within education industry:
– six-hour multicultural customer service for the customer service staff who deal on a regular basis with international students.
– three-hour presentations for International students to prepare them for living and studying in Australia
– half-day ‘Intercultural Mentoring’ workshops for students mentors to actually assist international students in a ‘buddy–system’ approach.