Ideas that the ‘uniqueness’ of study abroad programs lies in developing ‘global competence’ or providing cultural and language ‘immersion’ has been critiqued as goals that lack definition. In a COVID19 world, in which international travel is limited and border crossings are increasingly rare, education institutions have an opportunity to redefine international education and global competence.

A new draft Australian Curriculum has been released for debate. In this open letter, Asia education expert Hamish Curry argues it is time for a genuine focus on how the education system facilitates Asian engagement at a time when our Asia literacy is falling to critical lows.

Without Indonesian language skills and intercultural capability, Australians will struggle to navigate their relationship with one of Asia’s key players.

As Australia adjusts to life in a new ‘COVID-normal’ in 2021, the realisation that the ways people around the world communicate, interact and collaborate has irrevocably changed, provides a timely impetus to pause and reflect what this means for languages.

Reaffirming the AEF's commitment to creating shared learning opportunities in education across Australia and Asia-Pacific, AEF Executive Director Hamish Curry shares the new AEF Strategy 2020-2023.

2020 has been the most explicit example of ‘yin and yang’ – the ancient Chinese philosophy of dualism, where positive and negative forces flow with one another. Together they generate the kind of wisdom needed to understand the global perspectives of 2020. Read AEF Executive Director, Hamish Currys' 2020 year in Review.

Some may think that a focus on global competence is a distraction from the need for greater literacy and numeracy. Such narrow, selective perspectives ignore the interconnected world we live in and ways in which meaningful, relevant and contextual education works in tandem with foundational elements like literacy and numeracy.

School education partnerships continue to be active between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region despite the constraints of the COVID pandemic on schools.  These connections have been defined by three attributes: schools showing resilience in adapting and solving ways of communicating;  schools sustaining relationships as key to maintaining empathy and friendship and school networks showing resourcefulness in creating opportunities to learn from each other.

In a recent study, AEF found that ‘Respect’ is the key-value identified in Australian primary schools. Collecting data from over 650 primary schools across Australia including remote, regional, suburban and inner-city postcodes, AEF spoke with a number of schools to better understand what valuing respect looks like in the school’s programs, its curriculum, and in school communities.

AEF has developed an Intercultural Learning (ICL) Framework across its programs to better identify and articulate the development of intercultural understanding and capability.