444th
Meeting at the Alliance Française, Chiang
Mai: “Cross National and Cross Cultural Education at Payap University”.
Tuesday,
12 March 2019.
A talk by Tony
Waters.
The Talk:
Chiang
Mai is quickly becoming known as an international city in Thailand.
Payap University is part of this movement and has begun recruiting
students internationally. In doing this, beginning in 2004, they have
developed an English-language curriculum (BA, MA, and PhD), leading to
the enrollment of large numbers of Chinese students in 2017. This is in
addition to the substantial enrolment of Thai students in a Thai
curriculum, which began in 1974.
In this context, Payap in 2017-2019 funded a study of how both English
and Chinese speaking students are adapting to life at Payap University.
Students were surveyed in order to understand issues of student
engagement, language abilities, friendship patterns, and cultural
orientation. Preliminary indications are that students from different
cultural backgrounds approach the experience at Payap University
differently, and take away different values from their educational
experiences. This data is
being developed in a fashion that policy makers can develop the best
cross-cultural education experience possible.
This talk will report on the preliminary results of the surveys, and
describe the issues, problems, and advantages of international
education at Payap University.
The
Speaker:
Dr. Tony Waters is on the faculty of the PhD
program in Peacebuilding at Payap University in Chiang Mai. He is also
Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico. His
international career began in Phrae, Thailand, where he was an American
Peace Corps Volunteer in the Malaria Zone Office in 1980-1982. After
that he worked for NGOs serving refugees in Thailand and Tanzania,
before returning to graduate school. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at
the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania in 2003-2004.
He has published books including Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan
(2001), When Killing is a Crime (2007), Max Weber’s Rationalism (2015)
and others. He has research interests in refugees, culture, language,
the nature of violence, and other subjects.
Want to
read more?
....click "HERE"(PDF
File for downloading or reading online - 15
pages).
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