I spent part of this week at College of the North Atlantic – Qatar in Doha.  Having had the pleasure of visiting in 2008, it was fascinating to see the evolution of the organization, particularly now that the institution is starting to pass from Canadian to Qatari control.

One of the things we talked about quite a bit in the various sessions I attended and/or ran was the issue of delivering a Canadian curriculum to students whose secondary education was not comparable to the Canadian system.  Partly, this is an issue of language skills, but it’s also about the study habits which were acquired over years of schooling.

This isn’t just an issue in Gulf countries: there are an awful lot of places where primary and secondary school are concerned with rote learning.  This sits badly with a North American approach to education, which has a considerable element of either discovery learning or Socratic dialogue, or both.  Simply put, students from many of these countries are negotiating a very large gap in understanding when taking North American courses for the first time.  It’s not so much that the material is beyond them; it’s not.  Very often their approaches have taken them beyond Canadian levels of competency in some academic areas, but they are not necessarily equipped to deploy their knowledge in the way that North American-style courses require them to deploy it.

(This is not something limited to teaching in branch courses overseas.  I have heard tell of arrangements in Canadian universities where Chinese “tutors” offer their services to Chinese students to effectively re-teach certain high-enrollment first- and second-year courses in a more Chinese way; which is to say, they take the same material, look at previous years’ exam questions and try to come up with ways to drill students on course materials in ways that enable success for final exams.  And charge each student low four figures for the privilege.)

Obviously, this is something that overseas campuses must think about a lot, because getting these students ready to pass a Canadian curriculum is their bread and butter.  And to some extent, this is what their bridging programs are meant to do.  But habits of thought and study aren’t easily adjusted: it’s not something that can be done in a bridging program at all.  In fact, in most programs it’s something that takes years.

And it’s not in the standard curriculum at all.

If an institution opens its own campus abroad, presumably it has some discretion over curriculum and can modify it to deal with these kinds of challenges.  But if you have been hired on a contract basis to deliver services – which is what a number of Canadian colleges have done in the Middle East – then you have very little latitude to change curricula at all, because the “Canadian curriculum” is right there in the contract.  You can’t deviate because that curriculum is itself a guarantee of quality.  And so, what happens is a big work-around: instructors spend a lot of time trying to blend a second curriculum which develops certain types of habits of mind and concentration without which the “true” curriculum simply won’t work.  They do this with an impressive lack of fuss, and the result seems to satisfy everyone.  But boy, it seems to require a lot of extra work from staff.

My purpose in raising this is not to praise the folks at CNA-Q or at similar institutions throughout the world (much though they may deserve it).  Instead, the question which kept occurring to me as they told me these stories was: why aren’t we hearing more stories like this in Canada?

There’s no way this isn’t an issue here.  We have a number of institutions – Centennial and Cape Breton most obviously – where the number of international students is so high, and so many of these students come from countries with more rote-learning-oriented secondary schools, that there’s no way their teachers aren’t running into the same issues.  Same goes for schools of business and engineering at dozens of other schools where international enrolments are also at or near 50%.

(Lambton and Canadore colleges are not running into this issue despite having 50% plus international students because they have contracted out most their teaching of international students.  Of course, just because the institution rids itself of the burden doesn’t mean the students don’t have a problem.)

At an overseas campus, the job of helping students to make the necessary learning style adjustments are basically part of the air staff and faculty breathe.  It’s job one, and the impression I get is that people automatically help one another out to figure out how to adjust their teaching to make it all work.  But here in Canada, where there is the added complication that the classrooms also contain many domestic students who come to the classroom with a completely different set of mental habits than many international students, who is helping faculty adjust to these very different situations.

Anyone?  I mean, I know that institutional centres of teaching and learning (CTLs) can be very helpful in these situations, but I’m not sure all the institutions that have gone big on international students in fact have the kind of strong CTLs needed for everyone to cope.

I wonder, then, if we aren’t worried about the wrong kind of backlash when it comes to international students.  I’ve seen people talk about scenarios where the backlash comes from communities upset that international students are taking spots from domestic students.  I’ve also seen talk that the backlash will come from international students themselves.  But what if the main backlash comes from professors, from staff who have no idea how to teach to classes with these kinds of different approaches to learning, and feel they have inadequate support from institutions to do it well.

In fact, now that I say that to myself out loud right now, I kind of wonder why it hasn’t happened already.