Engaging International Students as Curriculum Co-Creators

1. Introduction

This chapter is an exploration of the link between business management student’s participation in co-curriculum design and their chosen career paths. It approaches this exploration via the recent conceptual shift in higher education in the perceived place of students – from subordinates to their lecturers and professors (traditionally seen as purveyors and creators of knowledge) to their co-producers and partners in imparting knowledge and stimulating learning. This conceptual shift is, in this chapter, encapsulated by the phrase ‘curriculum co-creation,’ and specifically the idea of students as co-creators of the curriculum alongside academics in the higher education sector. Furthermore, the chapter explains how international students on postgraduate business management courses have been involved in curricula co-creation and how their involvement connects them to their chosen career paths. In the 21^st Century how individuals plan their career paths may be related to their profession, qualifications or simply moving around to maximize progression.

Students’ participation in Higher Education curricula co-creation dates to Dewey (1916; William, 2017), who argued that education is a social contract facilitated by educators who, Dewey thought, could move individuals towards national identity, citizenship, and authentic democracy. These democratic ideals persist and endure within the contemporary higher education environment. In the UK, the base for those who participated in the research used for this chapter, international students arriving for postgraduate study are finding themselves positioned as important stakeholders whose experiences and unique perspectives are as equally valid as the academic staff tasked to teach them. They were encouraged to engage in their studies as co-producers of knowledge. That is, as active participants with their peers’ learning and development. In short, once in the UK, international students discover that they are studying at non-traditional, pragmatic, and increasingly Deweynian learning environments (Bacon & Sloam, 2010) that prioritize autonomous thinking over the deference to lecturers and professors expected of them in their home countries. In the UK’s pervading liberality (Kings College, 2023), increasingly higher education staff are involving students in curriculum co-creation and celebrating it as a late recognition of their equal validity.

But what is curriculum co-creation? According to Cook-Sather et al., (2014, pp. 6-7) it is “a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis”. Thus, they urge academics not to speak frivolously about partnering with students to improve learning and teaching. They ask them to establish curriculum co-creation on strong working relationships that foster respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility: and their emphasis are supported by literature. For example, Kolb (1984) and Tomlinson (2023) provided a range of rationales for involving students in the development and design of the curriculum, with the key among them being that learning deepens with engaged activity and through experience, i.e., that it is shared between the instructor (enabling conceptualization) and the student (reflecting from ontic experiences and actions). Bovrill et al., (2011) and Gironella (2023) have found that students’ participation in curriculum co-creation emboldens them to take more responsibility for their own learning and commitment.