This pedagogy encourages students to give feedback on each other's assignments to help with critical analysis skills and peer-to-peer learning.

Dr Bryan Brazeau has a background in various cultural and linguistic academic settings, which has helped him devise this concept and subsequent pedagogical practise. The idea seeks to encourage learning across ‘neighbourhoods’ or linguistic boundaries. In an academic setting, this looks at tapping and utilising the existing pool of linguistic and cultural variation within the classroom on a given topic. Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of this practice tied with the idea of linguistic hospitality, coined by Paul Ricoeur, the notion of welcoming foreign cultures and languages into one’s own. This practice is very much in the embryonic stages, but presents the opportunity to take a different perspective on language in western education while merging the borders of subject-based teaching.

Online Intercultural Exchanges offer a form of computer-mediated learning whereby students from geographically remote classes work together online (in pairs or small groups) on learning tasks developed by teachers or educational facilitators. They allow students to have a meaningful intercultural experience as part of their education, increasing mutual understanding and global citizenship. Besides, our students’ feedback has also shown that this pedagogy has helped them to boost their mental health and wellbeing. This was particularly evident during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Promoting student societies to help build a culture of student collaborative learning.

Students from a wide range of different backgrounds come together once a week to learn and/or practice different languages and partake in activities. This is an example of a session run by the Study Happy Team in the library.

We have made an executive decision as a department to actively select tutor and lab groups in a measured and appropriate manner that can provide an even distribution of international students. This has been a decision made by the Chemistry department committee as an active attempt to improve intercultural and international integration. This will require selecting students work groups prior to the start of each year and making sure that there is the opportunity for student engagement with different cultures and ethnicities within the learning environment. We hope this can negate the propensity for ‘cliques’ of international students to form, which is a natural reaction to studying abroad. However, we feel that the best engagement with the student experience and with the course is by embedding individuals within diverse settings.

In the Chemistry department, every student in their 1st year has compulsory intercultural training as part of their core modules.

Policy Briefings and Pitch assessments are “authentic tasks” that offer value beyond instrumental gains, and expand student reward, motivation and welfare. The model offers “assessment for learning” around a specific issue of personal interest, while demonstrating both substantive subject knowledge and relevant process skills: of rigorous research, transparent scholarly, engaging and persuasive presentation. Students receiving appropriate marks can revise work following summative feedback; where quality thresholds are met, Briefings can be published online. This immediately valorises assessment and creates evidence for employability. Briefings can be substituted for other disciplinary relevant artefacts.