(Image source: Paula Santos via Wikimedia Commons).

By Arthur Sun, Education Studies BA

*From the 2024/2025 academic year onwards, the Education Studies BA has been renamed the Education, Society and Culture BA.

In September 2022, I took part in the first student-staff exchange between IOE and the Education Science programme at the University of Porto (UPorto) in Portugal. The visit was supported by IOE’s International Office and my department Education, Practice and Society, with the aim of fostering international relationships and piloting a possible short exchange scheme. I was extremely lucky to be selected with four other peers as student representatives from the BA Education Studies. We spent three days in Portugal that included a seminar with Porto staff, leading a day of activities with Porto students and taking a walking tour of the university’s historic campus.

We students were given the autonomy to develop a seminar to be shared with the students in Portugal on the second day of our trip.

As students, we didn’t need to teach, but wanted to share things with the Portuguese students. We knew the engagement of the students would be essential, so we created many engaging games: one guessing song titles and a truth or lie activity taking inspiration from the different colonial histories. We also shared some concrete knowledge with the students such as introducing the colonial histories of the UK and Portugal to demonstrate the different impacts of modern university education.

I personally learnt a lot and have been very inspired by this trip. The following are two key ideas that I want to share:

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