Curriculum as a path to making diversity a driver of quality

The first expert debate between Brazil and Australia, promoted by Ciebraus, discussed concrete examples of innovation in the design of internationalized curriculum. The event began with Craig Whitsed from Curtin University discussing the challenges that led his institution to develop new methodologies for defining the curriculum at home.

The university aims to become a global institution, thereby attracting a large contingent of international students, particularly from Asia. Australia’s student body also has diverse origins, including a significant population of Indigenous peoples, as well as second and third-generation immigrants. With a total of 50,000 students, Curtin had to work to accommodate international and domestic diversity on its campuses, as well as to discover how to use this to produce an innovative curriculum.

“Innovative is not associated with technology, as is commonly thought. But it encompasses new ways of responding to significant diversity challenges, with an open spirit that fosters organized experimentation in the curriculum,” explained Craig. The first step for this, according to him, is to engage teachers, who are always very busy, in activities that are meaningful in addressing their day-to-day issues. Thus, the interconnections between local, national, and global contexts are key to reflecting on classroom practices. From this and using the model developed by Betty Leask from La Trobe University, it is possible to bring teams in disciplines together to review and incorporate new dimensions into classroom work. The key would be to establish cyclical processes of review, planning, action, and evaluation focused on empathy with the entire community inside and outside the campus.

Next, Gabriela Wallau, a professor at PUCRS’s Law School, brought the Brazilian experience of dealing with another type of diversity — racial, social, and economic, which are increasingly present in the country’s universities. She emphasized that mobility programs are very limited in their possibilities of impact on diversity in the classroom, while the internationalization of the curriculum can bring benefits to all students and the community as a whole. “Technology may not necessarily be the central point of this discussion, but it helps in its subsequent execution,” she noted. According to her, the human factor becomes increasingly strategic as the world evolves at an accelerated pace. “We prepare students without knowing which planet they will operate in various aspects. But regarding diversity, we know it will be increasing and increasingly complex, and we can use it to our advantage in this formation,” she concluded.

The PUCRS 360° project, highlighted by Gabriela, has been moving in this direction. It operates in seven different schools at the university, with more flexible formative itineraries that interact more widely with the diversity of the academic community, leading students to a more meaningful coexistence with others as part of this process.

 

 

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