Conference Presentation Shanghai on 24

Conference Presentation Shanghai on 24

Conference Presentation Shanghai on 24.10.09

International Learning in the Transition from School to University: The Rocks on which YewChungCommunity College (YCCC) and its Programmes are founded

Initial Background

  1. What are Community Colleges (CCs) and what do they do?

CCs started in USA and then spread to Canada.

In addition to serving community vocational needs, CCs provide an alternative route towards a Bachelor Degree for a wide range of students. In the USA and Canada, they provide the first two years of a University Programme, enable students to obtain an Associate Degree and then transfer to a University Programme for the final two years of a Bachelor Degree programme.

Students choose to go to CCs rather than a University, because:

  • they are cheaper;;
  • their entrance standards are less rigorous;
  • the classes tend to be smaller;
  • they are taught, rather than lectured at;
  • the teaching staff are dedicated to teaching rather than to research and publication;
  • students are guaranteed transfer into a University Programme, if they obtain the necessary Grades in their Associate Degree.

Community Colleges are so successful that some are accredited to run their own full 4 year degrees.

  1. CCs were launched in HK around 2001 to provide a much needed increase in post-secondary education provision of a diversified nature to respond to the needs of the employment sector for employees with greater knowledge and skill than schools are able to provide. Manufacturing had gone from Hong Kong to China, and Hong Kong required a workforce able to upgrade to knowledge-based industries.
  1. YCCC was launched in response to the need for a more diversified post-secondary provision through the setting up of Community Colleges offering a range of courses.

YCCC was set up by Yew Chung Education Foundation (YCEF) and is funded and subsidised at present by YCEF. It opened in HK in 2008.

YCCC recruits local and international students, employs local and international staff, and provides an international environment and international learning. In our first two years, as well as students from Hong Kong, we have had students from Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, The Ivory Coast in Africa, and from Columbia in South America.

YCCC Programmes are accredited in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications.

YCCC will extend its Programmes to Study Centres in China. The first YCCC Study Centre will open in YewWahInternationalEducationSchool in Shanghai in September 2010.

YCCC has 3 Programmes:

  • a One-year University Foundation Diploma (UFD) Programme;
  • a Two-year Associate Degree (AD) Programme; and
  • a Pre-UFD programme for those who require to upgrade their qualifications to meet the UFD entrance requirements.

The Programmes are all designed to enable YCCC graduates to transfer into English-medium Universities around the world.

YCCC has signed Articulation Agreements with around 32English-medium Universities in UK, Australia, USA, Canada, Europe and Asia. These permit UFD graduates to enter the first year of a large range of Bachelor Degree courses, and enable Associate Degree graduates to enter the final two years of over 100 University degree courses.

We hope soon to have an Agreement with a few Chinese Universities and to have a Chinese-medium stream for those who wish to prepare themselves for study in a Chinese-mediumUniversity.

The programmes that we will be running from September 2010 are in Social Sciences, International Business and Media and Communication.

Further information on YCCC can be had from our website by contacting is by email at

[To start the central part of my talk, I told the Philosopher’s Story about the Jar and the Rocks, Pebbles, Sand and Bottle of beer, in order to highlight the image about the real essentials – the Rocks – that we have to build on in a Programme designed to enable students to make the transition between School and University, but in this written version of my talk I will not include the story]

  1. YCCC is essentially aLiberalArtsCollege, in which education is designed to enable students to contribute, each in their different ways, to humanity and to the world in which they live, not just in vocational ways, but as whole persons. As a Liberal Arts College, we tend to see the essence of humanity and of human evolution and progress as resting on four fundamentals:

our requirement and ability to relate to others;

our ability to think [Je pense, donc je suis (I think, therefore I am) – Descartes];

our ability to learn and develop knowledge and skill; and

our capacity for language.

We are born totally dependent on our mother and are programmed to relate to her in ways that enable us to be fed and watered and played with. Gradually, if nurtured to do so, we develop the ability to relate to an ever wider circle of others. The better we are at relating and the wider we relate, the richer our life can be. The requirement to relate from birth, and our ability to continue to do so throughout our life is the first and most important feature of our humanity, but one that can be all too easily undermined, through, for example, being abused or bullied and then withdrawing into oneself, or through being over-criticised by parents or teachers and made to think that one is of little worth etc.

It is through relating to others and having access to their thoughts that we start to learn to think. The more we expose ourselves to ideas and the more we think and reflect on our experiences, the wiser we can become. The more we think, the more we can contribute to the world.

We are also given a capacity to learn in order to develop knowledge and skill and to evolve, improve and respond to an ever-changing set of circumstances. The ability to learn and to evolve is a third fundamental feature of our humanity.

These three intertwined features of our human nature – the ability to relate, to think and to learn – have over time enabled us through evolution to develop acapacity for languageand other visual and physical forms of communication. Language is our primary tool for relating, learning and thinking. Perhaps one day, our capacity to replicate our thinking ability and to imbue machines with the capacity to think will mark the next stage of our evolution, but I digress. These four essential features of our humanity - relating, thinking, learning and communicating seem to me to form the deep substrata on which we can safely ground our Liberal Arts education.

  1. I have chosen to outline 10 Rocks on which YCCC has built its College and itseducational Programmes to enable students to make the transition between school and university. You will readily see how these 10 rocks are grounded on the 4 essential features of humanity that I have outlined above.
  1. What I have tried to do in what follows is to set out where our students are in their learning with regard to each of the 10 rocks, to set out where our students need to be by the time they leave us, and to outline a few of the strategies we use to enable them to make the journey between the two. Like all educational ventures, ours is a work in progress.
  1. After my talk, my colleague, Simon LI, our Social Sciences and International Studies lecturer, will do the real work of providing examples of what we do in practice in his Subject Areas which combine Learning and Thinking and Social Sciences.
  1. The 10 Rocks or essential features on which our Programmes are built can be summarised as follows:

The provision of an international environment through which students can widen their ability to relate, overcome prejudice, gain better understandings, develop respect for “otherness” and cultural diversity, understand themselves better and enrich their lives;

Improving the students’ ability and confidence to think,and to think for themselves when exposed to the knowledge of others, to think rationally and at times to think creatively to solve problems ;

Improving the students’ ability to Learn;

Improving students’ Knowledge and Skill and their ability to apply them in a wide range of tasks and projects;

Improving the student’s ability to use language (in YCCC English) for study purposes, to obtain information and to make it part of their own knowledge resource, and to share it courteously with others +the ability to use Technologyeffectively to assist in all this;

Improving the ability tocommunicate in at least two languages effectivelyfor a range of purposes;

Improving appreciation of the artsas the most enriching form of communication;

Improving self-awarenessand self-confidence;

Improving the taking of initiative, the exercise of responsibilityas a young adult within a democratic community, anddeveloping organisational and sensitive leadership skills;

Exploring ethical values, encouragingethical and caring behaviour, and encouraging students to searchfor their own best way

I will try to outline briefly for each of these, where we have found students to be, where we believe they should move to, and the strategies used by the College to help them to get there. I have used a table form in which to map out the whole picture.

The Rocks / Where HK students are / Where students need to be / A few of the Strategies used
1 Provision of an international environment, in which students relate to those from another culture and learn to respect and enjoy cultural diversity / Students:
Tend to have had a narrow, mono-cultural and unilingual upbringing in Hong Kong and therefore have had little experience of “otherness”, leading at times to fear of the unknown, and even to the harbouring of discriminatory beliefs.
Possess little knowledge or understanding of other cultures, even of those in Hong Kong, and may have been taught to believe that the races and cultures are best kept separate.
When in multiracial and multicultural situations, tend to want to group together only with those from the same race and culture, for comfort’s sake.
Are nowadays strongly encouraged in Hong Kong to develop national pride to overcome the years of estrangement from Chinaand Chinese culture. It can be argued that this is being overdone at present to the point where it may disencourage international-mindedness, and actively encourage nationalism. / Students need to be able to:
Relate to a wide range of others and find one’s own identity. In contact with others from another culture, this may lead to having a wider sense of identity that is no longer rigidly defined by one’s own culture.
Experience “otherness” in an international environment leading to an understanding of the need to respect different views and practices.
Feel comfort in interaction with people from other races and cultures.
Shunning an aggressive promotion of one’s own particular race, nation and culture and developing the same level of critical thinking towards one’s own culture as towards the cultures of others. / The College:
Welcomes local and international students and staff from around the world to establish an international environment in which students learn to interact with others from other cultures.
Has zero tolerance for discrimination of any sort. This forms part of the Code of Ethics set out for staff and students.
Has this year benefited from YCEF’s generous offer of Grants to bring in international students from developing countries. We now have 2 students from the Ivory Coast in Africa and 1 from Columbia. This encourages all students to extend their range of cross-cultural experience.
In discussions, encourages students to adopt a critical stance towards their own culturally-transmitted ways of thinking and doing, by making them take and argue other view points and think through them.
The Rocks / Where HK students are / Where students need to be / A few of the Strategies used
Thinking
and the use of Reason / Students:
Prefer teachers to do the thinking for them.
Are heavily influenced by cultural patterns in thinking and by culturally-driven ideas. There is little incentive to think critically about them or to challenge them.
Students are very uncomfortable when having to work out a creative solution to a problem which cannot be solved in a previously rehearsed way.
Lack confidence in their own thinking, and avoid divergent thinking. They are afraid of being thought of as “odd” by others. They are generally afraid of “speaking out”. / Students need to be able to:
Think for themselves and express their own thinking clearly and logically.
Challenge “received ideas and practices” (i.e. culturally transmitted ones) sensitively but with confidence.
Use their thinking creatively when required for solving problems.
Take a stand that is divergent from others where necessary without fear of seeming odd. / The College and its lecturers
Teach thinking strategies and provide practice in a focused way on different ways of thinking.
Encourage and reward students in assessment for experimenting with thinking based on reason or evidence in all courses, applying the principle that can be summed up as follows: “How do I know what I think until I hear myself say or write something? How can I improve my thinking without trying it out on others and getting feedback from them?”
Encourage students to challenge received ideas and practices.
Develop student confidence through providing lots of opportunities to think aloud and to express opinion and reward divergent thinking.
The Rocks / Where HK students are / Where students need to be / A few of the Strategies used
Learning / Students:
Waitto be taught.
Are used to learning facts through memorisation from Textbooks/Notes. They tend to believe that in life there are right and wrong answers and that one simply needs to learn the right ones. They are uncomfortable with uncertainty.
Do few investigations of their own at school.
Learn in competition with others rather than against standards set out at different levels. / Students need to be able to:
Take initiatives andlearn independently with less and less guidance as they progress through the Programme.
Use a variety of learning strategies and multi-media sources from which to turn information into personal knowledge.
Undertake investigative projects, Field Studies etc. and present findings.
Learn in an interdependent group.
Learn independently against standards rather than classmates. / The College and its lecturers
Teach how to go about independent learning and providelots of practice in this through the building up of portfolios of work, journal-keeping etc.
Teach a range of Learning Strategies and provide practice in them, and engage students in investigations, discussions and presentations.
Have small classes (around 10 to 15 is the target) in which it is possible to get students to do small-scale research projects with data analysis and presentations of findings in all courses. Students are taught how to undertake investigations, write them up and present them.
Students undertake an Investigative Field Study or Internship outside HK where they explore a topic or event and report on their findings and experience.
Involve students in group projects and
In Independent assignments towards standards, with explicit grading schemes known to students in advance.
The Rocks / Where HK students are / Where students need to be / A few of the Strategies used
Knowledge and Skills and the ability to apply them / Students:
Are strong in Conceptual Knowledge–the “whats” in learning and some of the “whys”. HK students come top in international exams in their knowledge of “whats” and “whys” in science).
Are strong in Skill-based Knowledgein some subject areas (HK students are among the best in Maths in the world), but are sometimes rather weak in other skill areas associated with analysis, defining problems for themselves and language.
Are weak in Verbal Representational Knowledge, i.e. using language to describe, explain, argue etc, but strong in Visual Representational Knowledge (I.e. using tables, diagrams, flowcharts).
Are weak in Executive Knowledge (knowing how to go about things without being told), e.g. doing an investigative project.
Have some local knowledge but rather little Knowledge of the World or how it works.
Have some knowledge of local issues but little knowledge of global contemporary issues. (Students seldom read newspapers or listen to news or documentaries or show much interest in these).
Inevitably, have little specialist knowledge in the Concentration that they have chosen to study. / Students need to be able to:
Show continued strength in Conceptual Knowledge in a wide range of subject areas, and make connections in knowledge across these areas.
Apply skills-based knowledge in a wide range of task-types appropriate to the various subject areas.
Use language and visual representation effectively for sharing knowledge with others.
Conduct larger-scale tasks and projects in which they are responsible for carrying them out from start to finish.
Draw on knowledge of the historical context that lies behind today’s world to shed light on it, andexpress knowledge of how it works socio-culturally, politically, economically, and communicatively.
Discuss and contextualise issues of contemporary importance using a background of knowledge.
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