From 24 June to 25 June 2016, I attended an annual conference held by Institute of Education, UCL, called CERA-UK Conference 2016, and presented the draft findings of my doctoral research in Session D – Higher Educational issues. And the title of my presentation is “Internationalisation strategies and the international students’ experiences: two approaches of internationalisation of higher education (IHE) in universities of the UK and China”.

I received many useful feedbacks and suggestions from this presentation experience. To be more specific, I received critiques on “sampling” issues and realised the necessity of further declaring the criteria and considerations of choosing participants in my study. Also, I had a further discussion on the IHE framework with audiences during the “Question and comments” part of my presentation.

Also, at the end of each session, there was a panel discussion. And all presenters in that session were sitting in the front, answering more questions and discussing any other related topics in details. In the session D I was presenting, the key topics also covered “intercultural perspectives”, which is another key issue involved in my own project. Although the research context of Prof. Dervin and Harkonen’s study is different from mine, I still learnt a lot from listening to their presentations and the discussing with them in the panel discussion.

Also, as an international conference looking at educational issues and relationships in both China and the UK, there were several keynotes that intensively looking at globalising issues. For example, Simon Marginson from UCL gave a Keynote speech “Towards future world society: Some thoughts about China-UK relations in education and research”. In the keynote, he suggested that in every country, the approach to internationalisation is shaped by historical, cultural and political-economic factors. And he further suggested that more needs to be done in the UK to develop internationalisation on a world-wide scale and practice the China-UK engagement, thus to make the transition from the imperial past to relations of global equals within the unity in diversity of world society. His speech broadened my research horizon, as I am only focusing on “institutional level” of IHE. As a result, for further revising work on my literature review, I would like to consider the IHE issues within a broader background.

In addition, it was really an enjoyable and inspiring conference, and a good chance to get connections with other international scholars, either from the Britain, China or worldwide. For instance, during this conference, I met the Minister-Counsellor Shen Yang, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China TBC, Department for Education, UK, who gave the opening speech. And I got to know more Chinese scholars who are doing educational research in the UK, such as Yongcan Liu, University of Cambridge, who gave a keynote speech named “Dynamic Assessment for the Language Development of Disadvantaged Migrant Children with EAL”.

About the blogger

Written by Coco Lu LIU, 4th years PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics and Education in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University.