One Thousand Flowers in Delft: A Bottom-up approach to improve teaching international students
conference paper
Delft University of Technology (DUT) is becoming more and more an international community. Since lectures on master level are all conducted in English, the numbers of students from foreign countries attending DUT are rising and international cooperation within educational projects is a necessity. To prepare educators for the continuing internationalization and globalization of education, a project named ‘One Thousand Flowers in Delft’ is launched at DUT. The key strength of this project is the bottom-up approach to internationalization. The Flowers project approach is a method to stimulate lecturers to turn the spotlights on internationalization in their own classrooms and to apply international skills, knowledge and attitudes in order to make these topics a more integrated part of the regular curriculum. This approach has proven itself over the years in ICT projects as an important motivational factor for lecturers, because it uses the challenges they themselves experience in class as a starting point. Instead of educational advisors prescribing lecturers what to improve on, lecturers come up with small-scale projects on topics they feel need improvement. The solutions participating lecturers find often turn out to be very valuable for a larger group of lecturers, since these solutions are rooted in and easily applicable to everyday education. In this paper, we will discuss the development and results of five Flowers and consider the possibilities the results have to offer other lecturers.
TNO Identifier
462695
Source title
Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies EDULEARN 09, 6-8 July 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
Pages
004331 - 004337