We’re in trouble is this is accurate ... “After five weeks of helping Chinese classmates I fired off a furious email”
By Meshel Laurie August 27, 2019 https://www.smh.com.au/national/after-five-weeks-of-helping-chinese-classmates-i-fired-off-a-furious-email-20190827-p52l8f.html I spent yesterday watching a 20-year-old man teach five weeks' worth of post-graduate level film-making to five Chinese students in three hours. He had no choice if he wanted to pass this semester. It's a neat trick: group assessment (with groups allocated by instructors) in courses overloaded with full-fee-paying, non-English speaking students means the English speakers bear the burden of catching the others up, translating the course content for them and helping them pass. I’m enrolled in the course myself by the way. I wasn’t lurking around campus in a trench coat spying on students. I’m five weeks into a Masters in Media and I’ve spent time in every class assisting non-English speaking students to comprehend the lesson and complete the set task. On my first day, I sat with the Chinese kids because the racial divide in the classroom was so obvious it was embarrassing. Within half an hour we had to break into small groups to discuss something, because that’s the done thing in classes I’ve discovered. I spent the allotted discussion time explaining the content we were supposed to discuss, by any means I could think of, and I’ve done so ever since. Perhaps this is why the room was so divided on my first day. Maybe younger students, with more recent experience in the Australian university system knew to avoid becoming unpaid tutors for their classmates. The workload is overwhelming enough without having to piggyback someone else through it too. Just five weeks in I’m feeling the drain. To be fair, it’s mostly other Chinese students with slightly better English who take on this responsibility day-to-day. There’s nothing stopping me leaving them to it and switching seats in class, but when it comes to assessment there is often no such option. The university assessment process is heavily weighted towards group activities, hence my barely-beyond-teenage friend’s free bilingual speed-tutorial on contemporary film making. Either he’s an exceptionally patient and placid specimen of 21st century masculinity or this isn’t his first time at the language-gap group assessment rodeo because he did a spectacular job and didn’t seem even slightly surprised at having to do it. Simply observing made me so furious I fired off an email to the head of the course offering some “feedback” on the group assessment paradigm as my privilege and middle-aged bad temper compels me to, but what of my young Chinese friends? “Group Assessment work enables the students to develop communication, cooperation and teamwork skills,” says a 2019 publication from my university titled “Assessment Processes”. The bloody cheek of it. It goes on, “Group assessment work is inclusive and accessible: it enables full participation by students from diverse backgrounds.” Mmm hmmm. It’s a pity the classes don’t. “Group assessment reflects collaborative work in the relevant industry or profession." Nope. I’ve never been on a film or television set where the crew is divided into two camps speaking different languages, and the production company running the show just refuses to acknowledge it or offer translation services. For that matter, I’ve never known a production company to be paid by its crew for the opportunity. I’m a committed multiculturalist from way back, from so far back I remember when Australian federal governments used the phrase “multiculturalism”. In a good way! I enjoy a diverse learning environment, and I understand the Australian university sector enjoys allowing Chinese parents to pay enormous amounts of money upfront to send their children here to study. It’s all good with me, but don’t we owe them some support when they get here? And when I say “we”, I don’t mean me and the kid I watched yesterday. I don’t need everyone to speak English when they get here, but if you’re going to take their money and they can’t, can you at least provide them with the support they need? Can you not slyly rely on other students to fill that gap? I don’t want to have to write another sternly worded email! Meshel Laurie is the host of the Australian True Crime Podcast. -- _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
