21 October 2013 Exporting design expertise to Inner Mongolia

Lincoln University’s Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, Mike Barthelmeh, has recently returned from three weeks teaching at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (IMAU) in the city of Hohhot.

Mike was invited to teach there as part of an official invitation from the IMAU after a recommendation from a visiting researcher of the Chinese University to Lincoln earlier in the year.

During his stay Mike taught a version of his Planting Design and Management course to a class of 65 bilingual students. He also took the time to give six seminars to 35 Master’s degree students in such topics as design thinking, design critique, the design attributes of the Sydney Olympics, and education for sustainability.

Upon receiving the invitation, the idea of spending three weeks somewhere in Inner Mongolia initially sounded a little mysterious or ‘remote’. What he encountered, however, was a modern city of some two million people and broadband speeds that put New Zealand’s performance to shame.

Other early assumptions also proved false: “The city only receives about 400 millimetres of rainfall every year. As such, I was expecting a very dry, stark, desert-like city. Instead, I was immediately taken by how green the city was; how many trees there were lining the streets,” says Mike.

In terms of university life, he noticed some fairly obvious differences: “The University has over 35,000 students, all of whom live on campus in dorms of six to eight students. Lectures are two hours long, and students will frequently have four of those a day. They will often have weekend lectures, as well,” he said.

“As well as the high number of lectures, the material presented in them is often quite text heavy and requires significant rote learning.

“As such, I think some students may have been a little intimated at first by having a foreign lecturer with a more open, questioning style, but in the end I think they really enjoyed it. I know that I certainly enjoyed working with them. In fact, my best memory of the trip as a whole is the wonderful, friendly, hospitable people who would gladly open up their home to you.”

There is the possibility of Mike returning to IMAU next year to work with some postgraduate students, which might also include a research project in Tibet.

Mike’s experience teaching in Hohhot is very much in line with Lincoln University’s commitment to share its expertise around the world: other examples of this being the University’s Linc Wantok programme in Papua New Guinea, and recent work by Professor Bruce McKenzie assisting with pasture management in Nigeria as part of the Nigerian Montane Forest Project.