Enhancement of Australia’s globally engaged university sector: Bridging cultures and transforming student learning and assessment in accounting

Abstract

While there is a widespread recognition that skills and human capital are critically important to economic prosperity and social well-being in the 21st century (OECD 2012; UNESCO 2015) which has led to a heightened demand for higher education (HE) globally, Australia’s more than 100,000 discipline-based academic staff (Universities Australia 2017) face the resulting unprecedented set of challenges alone and on a daily basis. The development, implementation and review of curriculum and assessment models/strategies must be completed within the reality of the massification of access and participation in the Higher Education sector and the increasing internationalised frameworks which have become an essential dimension of national/state government and institutional strategy and policy (OECD 2008, 2012). In addition, academics must work within Enterprise Agreements that simultaneously demand success in research, commercialisation activity, teaching performance and scholarship, creative activity, administration, professional leadership and service/engagement. 
 
 Universities and the academics within them must also be more responsive to the needs of society and the economy in terms of maintaining a competitive edge while also addressing the demands of an increase in public accountability of HE institutions through the mechanism of ranking universities based on the quality of their teaching and learning outcomes. As a result, the curriculum designs and assessment practices of academic staff are under scrutiny, creating tensions between standardisation and measurability and the development of creative and reflective learners. These tensions are further highlighted in the context of the broader adoption and more integrated use of communications and educational technologies, large undergraduate subjects, increasing learner diversity and demands from universities, employers, professional bodies and global organisations such as the OECD and UNESCO to create educational programs for the 21st Century which will act to transform lives and ‘... build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development’ (OECD 2012; UNESCO 2015).
 
 Our response to these challenges, the primary subject of this presentation, was to develop the Bridging Cultures model that scaffolds the reflective focus process (developmental dimension) and the 4Rs scale (category-based dimensions) of the Ryan & Ryan (2012), Teaching and Assessing of Reflective Learning Model (TARL) to assist all academics and students to manage the diversity within their units. That is, by using the core psychological safety and acculturation literatures, the Bridging Cultures model facilitates the development of both fundamental cognitive competencies and social and cross-cultural skills including emotional resilience and empathy through the development of an integrated curriculum, assessment and in-class group work framework which builds trust and inclusion. In turn, it is delivering important 21st Century capacities as well as more traditional Accounting/International Business capacities for both domestic and international students. In fact, the assessment outcomes obtained, indicate that through a systematic and strategic focus on improving the how of peer review, reflection and cultural competencies, student engagement and learning of accounting/international business capacities have been significantly enhanced.