Inter nat iona lism ha s ma ny more dimensions t ha n br ing ing
overseas students to study in Australia. Ideally the exchange
should be two-way. At QUT, a PhD student from Tongji
University, Shanghai, proved to be an exemplary ambassador
for internationalism in landscape education. Her PhD thesis
explores the cultural inconsistencies in interpreting and
managing World Heritage landscapes. She returned to Tongji
University and set up a small research hub on heritage
landscapes interpretations. Such was her scholarly input to
landscape architecture at QUT that one of the staff decided
to learn Mandarin and do her PhD at Tongji.
In 2014 I was asked to teach a unit on heritage landscapes at
Tongji University. Intriguingly, most of the students were from
Europe and South America and were full-fee-paying. But the
best interact ions were t he infor ma l work shops w it h four to f ive
Chinese PhD students who were researching the ways to
understand significant spiritual landscapes within
contemporary international heritage protocols. Conventional
communication was a challenge; their English was
rudimentary and my Mandarin was similarly basic and we
were dealing with difficult concepts. We spent many
inspirational afternoons drawing, explaining and discussing,
using our laptops as translators, as we delved into the concepts
and meanings of heritage landscapes in China and the West.
This was intercultural scholarship at its richest.
Looking at landscape architecture education in 2017, we see
how the deregulation of Australian tertiary education in 2009
has led to increased numbers of domestic and international
students studying landscape architecture in most programs.
With student places no longer capped by the government,
along with the addition of Commonwealth Supported Places
that support domestic students to study master’s degrees by
coursework, the two-tier education system that was emerging
during the 1990s (which saw domestic students studying at
undergraduate level and more international full-fees-paying
students continuing their studies with master’s) has shifted.
This has contributed to international and domestic landscape
students enrolled in the same professional courses. In
addition, the profile of international students has shifted to
predominantly Chinese, with a twelve-fold increase in Chinese
enrolments across Australian universities since 2001
(representing a quarter of all international students).^2There is no question that these political and economic shifts
have altered the delivery and experience of landscape
architecture education for academics and domestic and
international students. With this change comes both benefit
and challenges. Difficulties can arise over English proficiency
levels, with universities varying in their approach to English
standards, while the international cohort challenges
academics to present a globally relevant perspective on
landscape architecture. On the plus side, increasing student
numbers provides stronger financial support for landscape
programs, which have always struggled against the dominance
of architecture programs. The presence of international
students also brings more culturally diverse perspectives on
landscape architecture, establishes potentials for cultural
exchange and breaks from nationalistic framing of landscape
architecture.END NOTES- Tom Rivard, personal communication, 29 August 2017.
- Andrew Norton and Ben Cakitaki, Mapping Australian higher education 2016
(Grattan Institute, 2016), 24.
02
Work produced by students
of the Urban Islands studio run
by Tom Rivard, associate at
McGregor Coxall. Photo:
Tom Rivard02