The second stop of the ELS Team on the Guizhou reconnection trip is Tongren University (TU). The Guiyang-Tongren highspeed train brought the team to the warm welcome by College of International Studies and Education headed by Professor Dr Li Qian, an outstanding alumnus of both the ELS MA and PhD programmes. It is such a great pride to SUT that half of the faculty members of this College are alumni of our programmes.
The main focus of this reconnection is to bring about formal collaboration through an MOU between SUT and TU. Representing TU at this roundtable discussion were Drs Shi Huimin and Luo Xue (ELS MA and PhD alumni), Ms Gao Qiongfang (ELS MA alumnus), and Ms Ping Wang and Mr Tang Xiaohui (ELS PhD students). The discussion was a fruitful one with the two universities identifying the mutually agreed areas of collaboration which include student and staff exchange, joint research undertaking and publication, academic resource sharing, and cooperative and work-integrated education. All of these will be formalised and implemented when the MOU is formally signed.
Again, academic service is what the ELS team happily offered to TU on the next day of the visit. As a way to update our TU alumni on teaching and research developments taking place at SFL since they left, the ELS team gave two lectures concurrently. Dr Jitpanat delighted undergraduate students on the topic of The Exploration of Using the Mobile Application on Speaking for Engineering Students with Different Learning Styles while Aj Issra, who came to teach at TU back in 2012, entertained TU colleagues with ideas for researching academic discourse and writing. These two sharing sessions aim also to stimulate the interests of TU students and colleagues to join our programmes for their academic and professional growth, which will be an additional outcome of this trip.
The ELS team said goodbye to the familiar faces at TU with a refreshed connection and tighter friendship. As the speed train was leaving Tongren, the ELS team is expecting already another train trip back to bring SUT-TU closer with more mutually beneficial and impactful collaborations.
