Chapter 1: A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching Practice at RMIT University

Chapter 1

A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching Practice at RMIT University

Julian CH Lee, Maki Yoshida, Jindan Ni, Kaye Quek, Anamaria Ducasse

All authors from the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

Perita manus, mens exculta – a skilled hand, a cultivated mind. Today, RMIT University’s motto captures the approach of RMIT University to teaching and research as well as it did at its establishment as the ‘Working Men’s College of Melbourne’ in 1887. The approach has been grounded in practice and engagement with communities and industry, guided by theory and research, and brought together by praxis – the unity of theory and practice.

Although knowledge acquisition is often achieved best through application, there is more at stake. In an age where information is being generated at incredible rates, where the quantity of data is exploding, where the knowledge and axioms that were once held as true become superseded in ever shorter periods of time, we have at hand a need for not only well-informed members of society but for those who know how to remain well-informed. This means people who can navigate the new and complex problems that their communities face, and who not only are able – but feel able and confident – to work thoughtfully, collaboratively and sensitively with others to address problems and create advancements. In short, while having knowledge is important, increasingly important is the ability to navigate the glut of information, to understand its origins, to consider it with both a rigorous eye, and with an eye to its applicability. This ability to apply knowledge in turn is a skillset, fostered through practice and an awareness of context and the reality that the experience of ideas and information can differ significantly.

Too readily the problems facing us are framed as ones to be addressed through technical or medical ‘solutions’, thus the contemporary emphasis on STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. However, countless examples demonstrate that many such solutions flounder, or even create new problems because of inadequate attention to, and thoughtful engagement with social context. This may result from many kinds of oversight, including overlooking historically embedded dynamics (e.g. Boulton et al., 2015); under-appreciating differences in cultural worldviews and values (e.g. Patel, 2013); failing to engage with a wide enough array of stakeholders (Green, 2016, p. 242 & passim; Bowman et al., 2015, p. 11); and being unreflective about one’s own social position and how this plays into historical and cultural dynamics (e.g. Nadarajah et al., 2021, p. 4).

As the challenges that face local and global communities, and humanity in general, are becoming increasingly complex, how people become equipped to address these challenges in globalised world requires ever more consideration and reflection. Complex challenges require collaboration, often across national borders, and engagement with others who speak different languages and have different culturally informed worldviews. Not only is the need for collaborative success on many issues ever more important, but even the nature of success requires interrogation, for what success means to different societies and stakeholders can vary greatly.

Universities play an important role in providing the skills, knowledge and qualifications that set people – often young people – on the paths to addressing challenges and to fulfilling personal aspirations. Although it is tempting to think that what the university does is ‘teaching’, it may well be better to think about universities creating, designing and curating learning experiences – the experiences that cultivate various forms of ability and personal growth. Weekly lectures and tutorials that take place in a subject over a semester are probably what most readily spring to mind when we think about university learning, but there are a great many other ways in which universities create learning experiences for students. These include study tours, micro-credentials, co-curricular activities with industry and community, engagement with place and Indigenous knowledge and enabling overseas exchange. However, the thoughtful designing of the conditions in which learning occurs go further than meeting formal ‘learning outcomes’ and choosing the content of particular subjects and topics. Learning is affected by the design of the built environment, the layout and furnishing of teaching spaces, and as is explored in this volume, it is to be found in the seemingly incidental moments of interaction before, after and during classes, where essential interpersonal connections develop and flourish.

How those of us who work in universities achieve our diverse objectives with students is something that requires constant reflection and evolution. While a given subject might have had the same ‘course learning outcomes’ for twenty years, the ways by which those outcomes are achieved constantly change. Students change, teachers change, the world changes, and the medium of instruction changes. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic made the latter change starkly apparent when, as explored by Julian Lee and several co-authors in Chapter 13 of this volume, teaching abruptly moved online over 2020 and 2021, but the trend towards a more online experience of university was occurring in any case (Young, 2023). Thus, remaining engaged in the scholarship of learning and teaching, and sharing learning and teaching insights and experiences, are fundamental to our objectives as practitioners at university.

The discussions in this volume draw on the research and reflections of colleagues at RMIT University. The volume emanates from discussions and research taking place particularly amongst members of the Language, Culture and International Education (LCIE) research theme group of the Social and Global Studies Centre. This centre, which is itself located in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS), houses an array of diverse academic discipline groups including Global and Languages Studies, whose members overlap significantly with those in LCIE. Both the LCIE theme group and Global and Language Studies share common concerns relating to the learning, teaching and research of global skills (such as those articulated by Bourn 2018; Bell et al. 2020). These skills encompass a range of competencies necessary for thoughtfully engaging with global issues, global problems and the array of complexities that come with the diverse histories, cultures, languages and worldviews of people around the world. While these competencies are a focus of RMIT’s ‘pioneering’ Bachelor of International Studies degree (Steger & Wahlrab, 2017, p. 48; Bell et al., 2020), subjects in which many of these skills are built are taught to students throughout the university.

These considerations of the importance of global and cultural competencies are not, however, just to be found in LCIE and Global and Language Studies. Indeed, they are university-wide concerns that have come to be distilled in one of RMIT’s new core graduate outcomes: to develop ‘ethical global citizens’. This graduate attribute has been articulated as the ability to “Communicate and collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, with commitment to diversity, inclusion and respect, while actively contributing to a more sustainable world with an application of knowledge relating to Indigenous and globally inclusive perspectives. Actively participate in actions towards reconciliation and self-determination of First Nations.”

So, while this volume emanates from LCIE and GLS, we have sought to bring into this volume contributions from colleagues and interlocuters on these issues from elsewhere in RMIT. Thus, we hear in Chapter 4 from Nick Brown and Tanja Rosenqvist on their work on humanitarian engineering; in Chapter 6 from Frank Ponte and Jennifer Hurley from the RMIT University Library on their work in initiating RMIT’s open educational resource capabilities; Chapter 5 from Anna Branford et al. from RMIT’s Centre for Educational Innovation and Development on their work on careers and employability; and Gabriella Karakas and Samantha Webster who write in Chapter 7 about their crucial roles as PhD student representatives in building and maintaining a community amongst higher degree by research candidates during 2020.

The practice of learning and teaching at RMIT builds on a longstanding tradition of research and scholarship in educational practice (e.g. Tynan et al., 2019). Within this tradition, there is particular engagement with issues important in the cultivation of ethical global citizenship amongst members of the Language, Culture, and International Education research group in the Social and Global Studies Centre, as well as amongst members of the Global and Language Studies discipline area of GUSS (e.g. Harris Agisilaou & Harris, 2023; Harris Agisilaou 2022; Harris & Harris, 2019). Although the notion of global citizenship may be debated, and what constitutes an ethical global citizen likewise contested, these discussions have a relationship with the issues raised by movements towards ‘decolonising the university’. While what it means to decolonise a university is also a matter of discussion and difference of opinion (Bhambra et al., 2020; Khoo et a;, 2020), Yaso Nadarajah has made noteworthy contributions to discussions of decolonising pedagogical practices in higher education (see Nadarajah et al., 2022a; Nadarajah & Grydehøj, 2016; Nadarajah, 2022b; Grydehøj et al., 2021). In a special edition of the Island Studies Journal that Nadarajah co-edited on the topic of ‘Islands and Decolonization’ (volume 11, number 2), Nadarajah et al. consider systemic issues in relation to the epistemologies with which we, as researchers and academics and teachers, engage. In this article, Nadarajah, Elena Burgos Martinez, Ping Su, and Adam Grydehøj assert that:

While knowledge can be liberating and emancipatory, it can also be oppressive and intimidating. The impacts of knowledge are always coloured by who is saying what, when, and for what reason. Interrogation of or engagement in epistemic processes such as ‘decolonisation’ can appear merely cosmetic when not accompanied by more fundamental transformations in attitudes and being. ‘Decolonising’ cannot be separated from epistemic humility and the need to decentre, to stand apart from one’s own intellectual authority (Nadarajah et al., 2022a, p. 4).

Learning and teaching practices that engage in this decentring and which participate in epistemic humility are diverse. One of those dwelt upon both in this volume in Chapter 8 and elsewhere by Nadarajah is the study tour. With colleagues from Centurion University in India and from RMIT University, including Glenda Mejia of LCIE and Global and Language Studies, Nadarajah et al. describe a study tour with students from RMIT and Centurion engaged with elders and members of the Saora tribal community to build a traditional mud house. This article describes how their students “embark upon travel, jump into the mud, work with diverse groups of people, embrace unlearning and relearning, and open themselves up to the painstaking but decolonial process of what Tlostanova and Mignolo call “learning to unlearn in order to relearn” (cited in Nadarajah et al., 2022b, p. 9). Their observations of the students’ physical engagement with the building of the mud house and their social engagement with each other and their lecturers, affirm for Nadarajah et al. that study tours “can become valuable assets in this decolonial journey” (Nadarajah et al., 2022b, p. 16).

Likewise reflecting on field trips as a decolonizing learning experience is Peter Phipps who has regularly taken students on a multi-day excursion to the Lake Bolac Eel Festival in Victoria – an experience also facilitated by Nadarajah. There, students are directed to “learn from the eels” and are “immersed in deep experiential learning about community sustainability, reconciliation and Indigenous epistemologies on Country” (Phipps, 2016, p. 23). Commenting on the impact of the experience and of the wider process of disciplinary decentring, Phipps observes that these processes “challenge the established methods and truth claims” and “has also led to a re-evaluation of the largely oral and performative knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples, from ‘ancient myth and legend’ to living epistemologies which might make a critical contribution to contemporary human development” (Phipps, 2016, pp. 22-23).

The ways in which people engage with different knowledge systems vary in manner and depth. How such engagements may be advanced in a university context are the concerns of several chapters in this volume, such as that by Jing Qi, Wei Liu and Cheng Ma who reflect on the affordances of Instagram in Chapter 10; AnaMaria Ducasse who reflects on over two decades of language teaching experience in Chapter 9; and Chantal Crozet, Kerry Mullan, Jing Qi and Masoud Kianpour in Chapter 2, who conducted research in relation to course with high and diverse enrolments of first year students, Intercultural Communication.

As these chapters point out, there has been significant thought given to how teachers in higher education can best enable students to gain insight into specific cultures, but also cross-cultural communication and the study of languages. As Jane Orton and Andrew Scrimgeour have argued, “the value and affordances of modern language study” should not simply be for ‘training’; it should be “understood first and foremost to be potentially educational” resulting in “desirable cognitive and affective growth in the learner” (Orton & Scrimgeour 2019, 2). They go on to write that language learning should raise “students’ awareness of the nature of language”, including among many other things, “how it carries the power divisions that exist between groups”, and “how it is open to being re-formed and made to serve new purposes” (ibid.).

The implications of language are best explored through the contributions of diverse scholarly disciplines. The academics who teach language and culture courses are often from diverse research backgrounds and thus bring a diverse array of disciplinary insights to their educational practice. Taking LCIE at RMIT, for example, members of LCIE are conducting research in fields including applied linguistics, language education, history, literature, global studies as well as translating and interpreting (e.g. Lai, 2018; Mulayim & Lai, 2015; Lai & Mulayim, 2013). As Maki Yoshida and Jindan Ni have considered in Chapter 12 in this volume, university language teachers are often enthusiastic to implement their expertise in their different scholarly areas in language classrooms, with the goal of increasing language students’ capacity to think independently and innovatively.

The study of other cultures and languages can foster beneficial habits of mind, including critical thinking. In the transcultural and transnational contexts, this can help with diminishing racism and dissolving cultural stereotypes propagated by media – both traditional and social media – which are interwoven with everyone’s daily life. As John Downing and Charles Husband write in their discussion of the impact of media on people’s understanding of race, “The attributions made to others through racial stereotyping have their effect because they are credible, not because they are true” (Downing & Husband, 2005, p. 6). In this context, a well-informed and nuanced language teacher is important to enable to engage with that language’s societies and cultures in a way that simultaneously acknowledges difference and challenges stereotypes. This cross-cultural critical thinking skill can be developed in classrooms to improve academic performance, and, more importantly, to promote a life-long skill for the benefit of the whole society. Language courses in universities delivered by academics from a wide range of disciplines in social studies and humanities are excellent sites for the cultivation of intercultural respect and critical thinking, which are keys to inclusiveness.

The political aspect of language and culture education is not anything new, though it is highly relevant in our complex, globalised world. Accordingly, educators in the field are required to acknowledge that their pedagogical choices are deeply associated with their political positionality (Kubanyova & Crookes, 2016) in relation to issues including, but not limited to, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and disability. Being keenly aware of this political positionality, Glenda Mejia (Diaz et al., 2022) and Maki Yoshida (2023) of LCIE and Global and Language Studies challenge the gendered linguistic norms in Spanish and Japanese language classrooms respectively, and endeavour to promote more inclusive learning environments for teachers and students of diverse gender and sexuality. In line with the mission of the Social and Global Studies Centre (SGSC), the members of LCIE and Global and Language Studies are keen on delivering “transformative research for social justice”, as it is phrased in the 2018 mission statement of SGSC.

These cross-cultural skills which contribute to the development of ethical global citizens can be developed through the learning and teaching of specific languages, but also through the study of intercultural communication more generally, which can build “intercultural competence”. Intercultural competence has garnered burgeoning attention as one of the key graduate attributes in higher education worldwide and resulted in the design and implementation of courses in intercultural communication (Diaz & Moore, 2018). Intercultural competence has been referred to “as representing a wide-ranging set of cognitive, affective and behavioural skills useful in dealing with the increasing diversity (cultural, religious, socio-economic, etc.) of the world in which we live, and the pressing global challenges confronting us as a result” (Diaz and Moore, 2018, p. 84). As the coordinator of the course Intercultural Communication (ICC) at RMIT between 2015 and 2022, Chantal Crozet focuses on both language and culture and incorporates a critical perspective into the course. As described in Chapter 2, her teaching aims to nurture students’ critical awareness of the role language plays in perpetuating essentialized and static views of a particular culture.

ICC also cultivates the competence to challenge generalizations reproduced in everyday interactions. This approach is deeply associated with foreign language education as well, where students are provided with an abundance of opportunities to encounter new language and cultural norms and negotiate language and identities vis-a-vis their existing worldviews. Whereas such an approach in ICC and foreign language education contributes to nurturing students’ sensitivity and empathy towards ‘the other’, and competence to act as ethical global citizens, it requires, as we learn in in Chapter 2 from Crozet et al., a deeply ‘political and ethical level of engagement’ of teaching staff and students.

While it might seem obvious that culture and language are thoroughly intertwined, many people – teachers and students alike – objectify language and remove it from its socio-cultural context when they envisage how it is learned. Claire Kramsch’s point on cultural context for meaning-making is three decades old but remains pertinent:

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them (Kramsch, 1993, p.1).

As noted before, the practical and engaged characteristics of learning and teaching in RMIT mean that we in Global and Language Studies recognise and respond to this; our teaching of language seeks to develop the skill to decode language and culture in their combined state, not as discrete entities.

Today, there are more people worldwide who are bilingual than monolingual (Wigglesworth & Oshannasy, 2021). In Australia, there are 400 languages in use. Therefore many RMIT University students learn a new language and culture after having had a range of previous contacts with other languages and cultures; few would claim a strictly monolingual or monocultural heritage as they learn an additional language. Although we note the various career advantages of learning additional languages, we encourage our students to learn them from a position of genuine intercultural exchange and not as a neo-liberal ‘feather in one’s cap’ extra skill for the job market (Hellmich, 2017). In other words, we offer language learning to open up to cultures, not only to open up markets.

Being bi- or multilingual and multicultural ourselves as academics, the global challenges we reflect on as practitioners in LCIE and Global and Language Studies encompass, but are not limited to, how to connect learners with our research and aspirations for social justice. This can happen through our thoughtful interactions with learners, the teaching materials selected from different perspectives, and assessments that look outward globally and connect to real world processes.

The intersection of political, cultural and global elements of learning and teaching at RMIT is evident, where an evolved conception of praxis – the bringing together of theory and practice – is drawn on to achieve our diverse objectives with students. The emphasis on praxis at RMIT takes form, most obviously, in the focus on applied learning and the conscious articulation of the real-world relevance of what we teach. Yet, for many, ‘praxis’ is central to what we do, not only in the sense of promoting graduate readiness or employability, but as a principle underpinning the learning cultures we seek to create with and for our students. That is to say, amongst our colleagues, praxis can come to mean both the bringing together of theory and practice and, more particularly, the application of the theories we teach in the pedagogical approaches we use.

As a university committed to social justice in a variety of forms, there are any number of cases which point to this heightened conception of praxis which centres on ‘practising what we teach’ (Copp and Kleinman, 2008, p. 101). As described earlier, in the teaching of Yaso Nadarajah (Nadarajah et al., 2022b) and Peter Phipps (2016), praxis meets pedagogy via the use of study tours to not only teach students subject matter on decolonisation but to decolonise the learning experiences themselves. Another case in point is Glenda Mejia’s course, Global Mobility, which encourages students to develop a critical reflexivity in exploring questions of migration, place, and belonging. In the course, Mejia works to create a learning environment which explicitly moves away from the hierarchical structure of educators instructing students on what they need to know, to a culture of knowledge-sharing in which learners and teachers are positioned as equals in their capacity to engage in knowledge exchange. Lectures are renamed ‘sessions’ to emphasise the potential for dialogue and Mejia frequently begins her written communications with students by stating that she ‘greets’ them with ‘respect’, ‘peace’ or kindness’, underlining their value as participants in the course as she asks them to explore the inherent value of the perspectives and experiences of others in the context of global migration.

On the issue of gender equality, Kaye Quek’s course titled Global Feminisms is an example of similar pedagogical attempts to realise praxis in the classroom. Quek draws on the insights of Copp and Kleinman (2008), and of Tompkins (1990), who observe in their respective works that students learn at least as much about how to counter sexism from the interpersonal exchanges and learning environments created by their teachers, as they do from the materials we provide and present in class. Reflecting on Tompkins’ (1990, p. 660) ethos that ‘What we do in the classroom is our politics’, Quek seeks to promote a feminist sense of community amongst the cohort through activities such as ‘Feminist Book Club,’ which aims to instil a sense of belonging in the class and to derive a shared commitment to explore the issues at hand in good faith. At the same time, the learning culture that is promoted seeks to consciously problematise traditionally masculinist modes of interaction (e.g. aggression, competitiveness, the absence of listening) as key to ensuring respectful exchanges even in the context of spirited debate. In a world that can feel remarkably unsafe for those at the margins of patriarchal power structures, the course seeks to facilitate and prioritise the sense of ‘safety’ of its participants through an approach that puts (feminist) theory into pedagogical practice.

Conclusion

The issues addressed above are recurring themes in the chapters in this volume. All chapters reflect on the experience of learning and teaching, whether it is through study tours, a postgraduate-led online community, the infusion of career development learning into the teaching practices at RMIT University, or the role of our library in spearheading open educational resource use as learning materials – everyone ranging from students to academics to curriculum design specialists and senior management contribute to the cultivation of a holistic and transformational learning environment.

And while RMIT University’s emphasis on career readiness leads us to focus on praxis, learning does not only just prepare students for the world of work. An ethical global citizen is a holistic person that both emerges from a complex world and is also able to engage with that world in an informed and practical way. This engagement takes many forms, including engaging with local and global issues, with professional practices and workplaces, and with a whole array of diversities including those of culture and language. The learning experiences where these engagements occur are intended to build various important competencies – what we might refer to metaphorically as ‘a skilled hand’. The praxis which is core to RMIT University’s approach to learning and teaching, however, also fosters ‘a cultivated mind’, which is critical to developing the ‘ethical global citizen’ of the present and the future.

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