Teaching International Business Considering Students’ Multiple Facets

Students bring their whole selves to the learning environment, including their unique personalities, behavioral tendencies, ambitions and goals, prior knowledge, beliefs, values, and even their economic circumstances. Ideally, the learning environment will use pedagogies that work best for each student. While this ideal is generally very difficult or impossible to achieve in most cases, we should endeavor to get as close as possible. Such endeavors are likely to be more fruitful and a bit easier when there are high levels of uniformity in the personal characteristics and backgrounds among student groups. Unfortunately, students of international business are less likely to be uniformthan students of other subjects. Also, pedagogic ideals are most likely or more easily achieved in subjects that are more scientific and fact-based. Again, international business is less likely to meet these criteria as much learning in IB involves understanding various subjective topics and cultures. Thus, reaching for the ideal teaching pedagogy, where such pedagogy reflects the best set of teaching tools and methods for each student and their diverse and individual backgrounds, is likely to be more challenging in teaching international business. The very core of IB education is developing the ability to think and act internationally and interculturally. Such orientation naturally advocates the holistic philosophy of education and fosters students’ abilities to understand cultural contexts and appreciate behavioral differences from psychological, philosophical, historical, economic, and political perspectives. Therefore, it is critical that the whole-person holistic philosophy is imprinted in the process of designing IB courses, curriculums, and programs. We should address the program design to satisfying not only the academic needs of learning IB knowledge and having a global mindset but also the personal and social needs of IB students. One important aspect of considering students’ multiple personal facets in IB education deals with educating diverse sets of students, including international students. IB educators are no strangers to diverse student audiences. While many teachers are aware of student differences in language proficiency and