The benefits of students from different countries gathering together for their studies is well-recognised in business education. But other disciplines in the global postgraduate marketplace are catching on.
Earlier this year, 28 people from around the world, including six from Hong Kong, gathered at Hong Kong Baptist University as part of a postgraduate course that is providing a fresh angle on the 'internationalisation' of learning.
For participants who undertake the Dulwich Centre International Training Programme, leading to a graduate diploma in narrative therapy, not only have a chance to study with a multinational group of professionals from a range of healthcare fields, they must also be prepared to learn in different cultural settings.
The Australian-based Dulwich Centre is a leading training provider for narrative therapy, a popular, client-centred therapeutic practice which is informed by poststructuralist thinking and draws on personal narratives or stories to define problems and propose solutions. Like a number of other distance learning courses, its skills-based, 12-month graduate diploma programme comprises a mixture of self-study and intensive taught blocks. Where it differs is in its sensitivity to the context of learning.
Two of the programme's three, two-week training blocks are scheduled at the centre's home base in Adelaide. The middle session takes place in a changing international location. For the diploma's second intake - its current one - Hong Kong was chosen. For the third intake, starting early next year, it is Mexico.
'It is very important for us to make sure there is an opportunity to consider cultural interpretations of what we are teaching,' said Michael White, co-director of the Dulwich Centre and one of the pioneers of narrative therapy. 'When blocks are held in different cultural contexts, it helps to de-centre what is taken for granted as western conceptions about practices and brings to the fore other cultural notions that are highly relevant and can be taken up in what people do.
'By being in Hong Kong, it made it possible to foreground Hong Kong Chinese culture and opened up the opportunity to fully engage participants in explorations of how ideas might be made culturally appropriate,' he said.