The 2022 Annual Conference of International Competency Development Committee of Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy & Forum Held In Beijing
Develop. Grow. Succeed.
On November 25 and 26, the International Competency Development Committee of the Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy (CSEDS), in collaboration with Shanghai Normal University, and the UNESCO Teacher Education Center, hosted the 2022 Annual Conference & Forum on Global Competence Development. The conference, jointedly organized by GEC Academy, brought together partners from across the spectrum. Several former senior officials of international organizations and professors from top universities in China attended the offline conference in Beijing, and more than 350 experts, including the teaching faculty of the Global Competence Development (GCD) project and officials from partnered Chinese universities, joined online.
The two-day event was an opportunity to discuss, exchange views and lessons learnt on talent development and training for international organizations guided by evidenced-based research and report. It examined past efforts and planned strategies to address the immediate as well as long-term needs of global competence among students, and ways to coordinate efforts that could promote educating for global competence in higher education. Discussions at the annual conference also covered a variety of topics, including changes and challenges in today’s global governance, explanations on policies proposed by international organizations and how to build a community with a shared future for humankind.
During the Annual Conference, Ning Zhang, President of the International Competence Development Committee in the CSEDS, put forward a 2023 working plan for the GCD project. He also stressed the efforts that GEC has made in the GCD initiative, including building an academic exchange platform, developing the course with the objects to promoting students’ working competence in the globalization context, and so forth.
The President of GEC Academy and Executive Director of GEC-Advanced Studies Institute (GEC-ASI), Edison Yan, delivered a speech on the practice of the GCD project and interdisciplinary innovation talent cultivation. Wendy Wang, the Academic Director of GEC Academy, introduced how the GCD project was designed and operated at the 2022 Annual Conference.
During the conference, the project team also streamed the presentation by important members of the GCD project teaching faculty, Professor Seth Freeman, Professor Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz, and Professor Richard Pettinger, who have been working with GEC Academy for several years, discussing their perspectives on how they designed, and developed the course in detail, as well as how they feel while teaching a GCD course.
“My focus is negotiation and conflict management, which is a very practical subject. It’s very much hands-on. We focus on active learning typically. So, even though I have done lectures, and GEC has honored me by letting me lecture on it very much. This is a learn-by-doing skill.” Seth Freeman, Professor in the School of International & Public Affairs at Columbia University, shared his focus on the Most Important Dialogue Skill course of the GCD project.
“I am a visual learner, and so I will just share literally some slides that came out of the modules because I teach in a multimodal fashion.” Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz, Associate Professor in Teacher’s College at Columbia University, is the lecturer of Public Speaking, another course mostly about practice. She discussed the framework of the course and particular questions for the students to ponder by showing several slides from her modules. “I approached it very much from a practical type of way, almost giving steps as well as giving readings and theory behind videos that I chose,” she said. “It took many more hours than I expected, but in the end, it was, I think, it’s a course that students will engage with both theoretically and practically. I think they’ll have fun. Having fun is very much important to me, and it was a great experience.”
Richard Pettinger, Professor of Management Education in School of Management at University College London, discussed the critical points he discovered while designing and delivering Operating Mechanisms: Multi-National Corporation. He considered the Q&A session to be very beneficial and valuable, “We spent a little bit of time in the Q&A session on providing further groundwork for people’s education and development. Underneath to look at things, the need to study things and go and cause it company visits and soon undertake project work and so get involved in any way that would advance an ordinance standing of how multinational corporations were.” he said.
Since the beginning of 2022, GEC Academy and the International Competence Development Committee has established a formal cooperation on international competence development research and course development. For the past year, both teams have worked together to design courses focusing on talent cultivation in international competence and to conduct case studies for further developments of relevant courses.
Till now, 39 Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, China Foreign Affairs University, Nankai University, and Beijing Institute of Technology, have introduced the GCD courses to their own curriculum and granted credit to students who finish the courses. In the following year, GEC Academy intends to update the GCD project course content, and develop new seminars, with an aim to encourage participation from more students and universities. GEC will continue to contribute to the promotion of global competency training in a transcultural and interdisciplinary framework.