The International Classroom: Using Reflective Practice to Improve Teaching and Learning

As learning technologies increasingly facilitate the internationalisation of subject offerings, it becomes correspondingly important to try and ensure that the needs of diverse student groups are met, and to provide for ongoing improvement of their learning experiences. A variety of evaluation procedures is valuable in this respect, but particularly those that illuminate these experiences. This kind of information provides a rich source of data for teachers to use as a basis for reflective practice to inform the continuing refinement of teaching and learning approaches, and curriculum development. The nature of reflective practice also allows for its inclusion in the students’ learning processes, thus simultaneously providing a means for improving the quality of their learning and contributing to their future professional lives, whilst offering a further set of perspectives to inform subject development. This paper describes the use of reflective practice as a practical means of converging a range of non-positivist approaches to inform the teaching of a core undergraduate accounting subject; offered in Australia to on-campus students, distance education students and Victorian Year 13 school students, as well as to overseas students in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. It also shows that demands by the accounting profession for universities to improve learning to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent within professional life can be met, in part, by reflective practice.