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Making the global local: Sino-foreign cooperation universities, interdisciplinary study and 21st-century skills

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Making the global local: Sino-foreign cooperation universities, interdisciplinary study and 21st-century skills

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Making the Global Local: Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities, Interdisciplinary Study
and 21st-Century Skills
by
Yingjia Zheng

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education

May 2023

© Copyright by Yingjia Zheng 2023
All Rights Reserved

The Committee for Yingjia Zheng certifies the approval of this Dissertation

Cathy Sloane Krop
Helena Seli
Tracy Poon Tambascia, Committee Chair

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2023

iv
Abstract
Students in China have growing demands for a more diverse educational experience at colleges
and universities while China’s employment market urgently needs universities to cultivate talents
that meet the 21st-century requirements of the new employing market, Sino-Foreign Cooperative
Universities, a legal partnership between Chinese higher education and overseas counterpart —
were established as one of the responses to these growing trends for both sides. Sino-Foreign
Cooperative Universities in China are platforms to examine new and different educational
approaches that may be adopted to response to challenges in China’s vast and complex domestic
higher education sector. However, it also takes time for these new forms of higher education to
prove their values and build up their reputations. The purpose of this research was to examine
and evaluate how faculty at one Sino-Foreign Cooperative University develop interdisciplinary
programs that are part of the liberal arts curriculum and better understand how well this
university’s policies and practices cultivate the soft skills students need for the 21st century.
Recommendations for practice, including policy and management adjustments from the
university downwards, as well as peer-to-peer support and assistance, were presented. An
implementation and evaluation plan were also recommended at the end of the study.
Keywords: Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities, interdisciplinary study, liberal arts
curriculum, 21st-century skills

v
Dedication
First and foremost, I would like to express my heartful thank you to my family for your
unconditional love as always. To my mom, Ms. CHEN Xiaoling thank you for always being my
role model. You taught me to believe in myself and to keep striving to be the best I can be.
Thank you, my dad, Mr. ZHENG Chengde for always being my rock and letting me know that
you always back me up. During this journey, I undertook a very little role as a daughter, but you
two never complained. Thank you, my sister, Ms. ZHENG Yingying, my cheerleader. Thank you
for always encouraging me and bringing me unlimited positive energy. I wouldn’t be where I am
today without all the support you three gave me. I hope that I have not let you down and I make
you proud. 😊

vi
Acknowledgements
This journey of study was as if it was meant to be: every part of it was so carefully
designed that if it wasn’t in 2020, if it wasn’t for the delayed application date, if it wasn’t for the
epidemic that allowed for online completion of the course, then I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had
the honor of possibly completing this journey. Special thanks to these coincidences for making it
all come true!
First of all, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my dissertation chair, Dr.
Tracy Poon Tambascia. I caused you a lot of inconvenience because I could only participate
courses online, but you were still very patient and made me feel very at ease. More importantly,
you were also very efficient and professional in answering my confusion so as to have made my
distance learning experience extremely comfortable and fruitful. To my committee members, Dr.
Cathy Sloane Krop and Dr. Helena Seli, I would like to express my appreciation for your expert
advice. Thank you for believing in me and pushing me to my highest potential.
Furthermore, to my dearest C-9. Thank you for cheering each other on all the way. I
admired the personalities, wisdom and accomplishments that shone through you all with every
class discussion and every group assignment. What a blessing to have you all leading the way on
this not-so-easy, yet enjoyable path!
Last but not least, thank you to my dearest family and colleagues (Ms. Wu Yuexia and
Ms. Gao Shan), you are my inspiration! Thank you to all the participants for graciously sharing
your experiences and stories with me throughout this dissertation process, despite your busy
schedules. Thank you to everyone for your tolerance and support along the way, and thank you
to myself for not giving up and coming to this wonderful moment.

vii
Table of Contents
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ................................................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... vi
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................. ix
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. x
Chapter One: Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1
Background of the Problem ............................................................................................. 2
Purpose of the Study ........................................................................................................ 5
Significance of the Study ................................................................................................. 5
Organizational Context and Mission ................................................................................ 7
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology ................................................... 8
Definitions ....................................................................................................................... 9
Organization of the Study .............................................................................................. 10
Chapter Two: Review of the Literature...................................................................................... 11
China’s Exploration: Reform and Development in Education ........................................ 11
Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities in the 21st Century ............................................ 18
Residential Liberal Arts Education in China .................................................................. 27
Challenges to Residential Liberal Arts Education in China ............................................ 35
Activity Theory Framework........................................................................................... 37
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 39
Chapter Three: Methodology ..................................................................................................... 40
Participating Stakeholders ............................................................................................. 41

viii
Interview Sampling Strategy .......................................................................................... 42
Data Collection and Instrumentation .............................................................................. 44
Data Analysis ................................................................................................................ 47
Credibility and Trustworthiness ..................................................................................... 48
Ethics ............................................................................................................................ 49
Limitations and Delimitations ........................................................................................ 50
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 52
Chapter Four: Findings.............................................................................................................. 53
Overview of Study Participants...................................................................................... 53
Emergent Themes .......................................................................................................... 61
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 77
Chapter Five: Discussion and Recommendations for Practice .................................................... 78
Discussion of Findings .................................................................................................. 78
Recommendations for Practice....................................................................................... 82
Evaluation Plan ............................................................................................................. 88
Limitations and Delimitations of the Study .................................................................... 91
Suggestions for Future Research .................................................................................... 91
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 92
References ................................................................................................................................ 94
Appendix A............................................................................................................................. 108
Appendix B: Survey for Faculty .............................................................................................. 110
Appendix C: Recruitment Emails ............................................................................................ 113
Appendix D: Information Sheet ............................................................................................... 115

ix
List of Tables
Table 1: The Development of Higher Education in China Between 1998 and 2010 ................... 16
Table 2: Established Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities as of 2021 .................................... 23
Table 3: Potential Subskills and Conditions for Interdisciplinary Higher Education ................... 32
Table 4: Expected Outcomes of Liberal Arts Education and Interdisciplinary Education ........... 34
Table 5: Descriptive Statistics of Survey Participants (n = 20) ................................................... 55
Table 6: Characteristics of Interview Participants (n = 13)......................................................... 59

x
List of Figures
Figure 1: Activity System Triangle ............................................................................................ 38
Figure 2: Participants’ Experience at this University ................................................................. 57
Figure 3: Participants’ Interdisciplinary Degree Programs ......................................................... 62
Figure 4: Participants’ Responses to Question 7: “I Feel the Collaboration Work With Other
Faculty During My Curricula Design and Implementation Process in the Interdisciplinary
Program Is Smooth and Enjoyable” ........................................................................................... 63
Figure 5: Participants’ Response to Question 12: “At CUH, I Am Encouraged to Interact
With Colleagues From Other Disciplines” ................................................................................. 66
Figure 6: Participants’ Responses to Question 8: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and
Supports to My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Cultivate
Students’ Critical Thinking and Help Students Finding Solutions to Problems (One of the
Four 21st Century Skills)” ......................................................................................................... 69
Figure 7: Participants’ Responses to Question 9: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and
Supports to My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Cultivate
Students’ Creativity and Ability to Think Outside the Box (One of the Four 21st Century
Skills)” ...................................................................................................................................... 70
Figure 8: Participants’ Responses to Question 10: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and
Supports to My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Improve
Students’ Collaboration Skill and Ability to Work With Others (One of the Four 21st
Century Skills)” ........................................................................................................................ 72
Figure 9: Participants’ Responses to Question 11: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and
Supports to My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Improve
Students’ Communication Skills and Ability to Talk to Others. (One of the Four 21st
Century Skills)” ........................................................................................................................ 73
Figure 10: Participants’ Responses to Question 13: “I Will Recommend CUH’s
Interdisciplinary Programs to Colleagues, Friends and Family Who Want to Teach or/and
Do Interdisciplinary Research” .................................................................................................. 76

1

Chapter One: Introduction
Globalization, together with new information technology advancements and innovative
processes, has led to a wave of international economic, political, cultural, and educational reform
(Liu & Fang, 2009). Education has played a critical role in globalization in advancing societies,
both technologically and socially (Bevins, 2011). Today’s emphasis on human capital is no
longer only on the physical aspect of labor but also on individuals’ knowledge and skills (Bevins,
2011). Therefore, the traditional specialized curriculum may no longer prepare future university
graduates to meet the ever-changing skill requirements of 21st-century employment (Cheng &
Wei, 2021). Education needs to be dynamic to adjust and adapt to meet the changes in various
forms of technology applications.
After more than three decades of reform, which began in 1978, China has joined the
globalization process with Chinese characteristics (Liu & Fang, 2009). Starting from the 1990s,
China’s higher education has been under a profound process of restructuring and upgrading to
meet the developments of society (Zhao & Guo, 2002). During this educational reform, Chinese
academics and experts have been looking to Western concepts, theories, and approaches of
curriculum and pedagogy to further investigate whether there are initiatives in other countries
that are suitable for China and can be learned from to better prepare young talent in China for the
changing environment (Ryan et al., 2009).
In response to the challenges of globalization, the Chinese government made a broad
move to open up the education market by allowing overseas universities to provide programs on
the mainland. With the expeditious pace of higher education’s internationalization in China,
Sino-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (SFCRS) was considered an effective means for
educational leaders to attract high-quality educational resources from overseas and had been
2

proliferating (Liu et al., 2017). SFCRS has become one of the most important higher education
reforms in China. According to data from the Ministry of Education, there were 2,431 SFCRS
programs in China as of June 2019, with student enrollment of over 600,000. Schools at all
levels are encouraged to run Sino-Foreign cooperative running projects, including various forms
of international exchanges and cooperation to explore ways to make use of high-quality foreign
resources (Mok & Yu, 2013). In SFCRS programs and universities, curricula and courses are
usually prepared and offered by both Chinese universities and foreign partner universities based
on international academic standards (Liu, 2007).
By 2021, nine Sino-Foreign Cooperating Universities were established as independent
legal entities to provide international learning experiences for students in mainland China. The
liberal arts model of education was introduced and implemented in Sino-Foreign Cooperating
Universities, such as Ningbo Nottingham University and Duke Kunshan University. Although
liberal arts curricula have not yet become mainstream in Chinese universities, the idea of
utilizing its interdisciplinary approach to develop well-rounded graduates was considered a
positive response to the Fourth

Industrial Revolution and is increasingly popular and acceptable
in China (Jiang & Guo, 2017). Liberal arts education is arguably the key to cultivating the soft
skills that will prepare a workforce for the 21st century (Lee et al., 2019).
Background of the Problem
China is experiencing a transition from a labor-intensive economy to a market economy
that requires people to solve increasingly complex problems in daily life and evolving
professional contexts (Jonassen, 2011). As other countries offer cheaper labor, the advantage of
low labor costs in China is shrinking, so boosting innovation and improving human resources
through the university system has become essential to China’s competency globally (Li et al.,
3

2017). There is widespread concern that Chinese universities prepare less independent and
critical thinkers than their international competitors (Abrami et al., 2014), which will diminish
the global competency of young Chinese talents. McKinsey Global Institute found that in 2005,
only 10% of Chinese engineering graduates were considered globally competitive, whereas
engineering graduates in the same year from the USA rose to an 80.7% globally competitive rate
(Farrell et al. 2005). In other words, China faces a serious shortage of college graduates who can
compete globally (Wang et al., 2018). According to China’s 13th Five-Year National Science
and Technology Talent Development Plan (Ministry of Science and Technology, 2017), the
talent needs for specialized or trained workers to meet the 21st-century skills workforce as of
2014 was about 3,710,000 and reached over 4,800,000 by 2020.
Even though the market’s talent needs are growing, the unemployment rate for new
college graduates is also growing. The unemployment rate for people aged 15–24 seeking
employment was 10.61% in 2014 and 11.01% in 2019 (National Bureau of Statistics of China,
2020). In a survey conducted by China’s Statistics Bureau in mid-April 2021, about 44% of
90,000 industrial companies and firms reported that in recent years, worker recruitment had
become their largest obstacle. The National Bureau of Statistics also reported in 2021 that about
14 million people are looking for job opportunities, of whom 9.09 million are university
graduates.
This phenomenon of companies looking for skilled talent and new graduates struggling to
get jobs indicates that there is a skill preparation mismatch in China’s higher education, which
leads to many university graduates not being prepared for the labor market (Mok & Qian, 2018).
China lacked the labor force to meet the demands of the economy at the time and potentially for
the future. There is a large talent supply gap currently in China for innovative talents, high-end
4

research and development talents, and skillful talents in future science frontiers (Wang et
al.,2018). Therefore, the reform and transformation of higher education continue with the goal of
improving the quality of higher education to meet the new challenges of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution. The Fourth

Industrial Revolution is considered a way to describe the blurring of
boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds, which represent a collective
force behind many products and services in our modern life, including a fusion of technologies
like artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, genetic engineering, and quantum computing
(Skilton & Hovsepian, 2018). This Fourth Industrial Revolution has led to a fundamental change
in how we live, work and relate to one another (Ross & Maynard, 2021).
As new technology development is reshaping society, corresponding changes must be
made in retraining the current workforce and educating the future workforce. To ensure that
students are well prepared to meet the 21st-century challenges, researchers and experts have
identified the essential skills needed. The National Research Council (2010) proposed that five
skills are critical in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment: adaptability, complex
communication/social skills, non-routine problem solving, self-management/self-development,
and system thinking. The highly specialized model of higher education that has guided China’s
higher education system for years has significant drawbacks. Recently, efforts are being made to
move away from the over-specialized and segmented curriculum to create an education model
that can prepare a more flexible, broadly educated and capable labor force (Chai, 2016). Liberal
arts education is intended to develop students into well-rounded individuals who are socially,
morally, psychologically, academically, and emotionally balanced and integrated and who have
critical thinking skills and a sense of moral responsibility (Jiang & Guo, 2017); therefore, this
5

kind of education has been actively introduced to China’s higher education system and is
growing in significance in Chinese higher education.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this project was to examine and evaluate how faculty at one Sino-Foreign
Cooperative Running university are developing interdisciplinary programs that are part of the
liberal arts curriculum and to better understand how well the policies and practices of Cristal
University of Han (CUH, a pseudonym) are cultivating students the soft skills needed for the
21st century. This study focused on the Activity Theory (Engeströ m, 1987, 1999; Leont’ev,
1974, 1981a, 1981b) that affects faculty collaboration and teaching in interdisciplinary programs
at CUH. The questions that guide this study are the following:
How do faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approaches in a liberal arts
education to assist students in cultivating the soft skills they need in the 21st century?
This question can further be understood by also considering the following sub-questions:
1a. How does the community present in a liberal arts college’s environment and culture
influence collaboration among faculty?
1b. How do tools, rules and division of labor mediate faculty’s development of said
interdisciplinary curriculum?
Significance of the Study
This study is important for two reasons. First, understanding how faculty are developing
interdisciplinary programs at SFCRS may provide a model for other Chinese universities seeking
to develop integrative liberal arts curricula that will better prepare talents for the 21st-century
labor market. Second, suggestions from the faculty will be collected for the future development
of this model.
6

This study focused on interdisciplinary programs because the global and local challenges
societies face rarely fall neatly into one discipline or can be addressed by one discipline.
Singular disciplinary sources in higher education can no longer prepare graduates to address all
of the current and emerging challenges, as many of the challenges we face today are new ones
that require innovative approaches and solutions to tackle them (Jacob, 2015). Interdisciplinary
approaches to research and training are essential to best meet the dynamic needs of today’s
higher education students (Jacob, 2015). Therefore, it is increasingly important to produce
collaborative, interdisciplinary knowledge (Pfirman et al., 2005; Rhoten, 2003). Different from
traditionally divided singular disciplinary curricula, the purpose of interdisciplinary programs is
to promote interaction, learning, and research across disciplinary boundaries (Klein, 1990;
Newell, 2001). Meanwhile, “interdisciplinary courses provide an effective vehicle for promoting
traditional liberal arts skills” (Newell, 1990, p. 69).
This shifts the focus of the discussions from “benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to
pragmatic questions of how to develop and sustain interdisciplinary programs” (Stone et al.,
2009, p. 323). Successful change strategies involve efforts of the key stakeholders, as
interdisciplinarity is achieved through the active integration of concepts, ideas, or knowledge
from traditionally distinct fields of study (Holley, 2009). Moreover, the successful
implementation of interdisciplinary initiatives relies on the changes of the institutional
organization and its facilities and the institutional culture related to the interdisciplinary
endeavors (Holley, 2009). Thus, this study examined the liberal arts environment in SFCRS to
study how faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary curricula to cultivate students with
21st-century skills. This study aimed to uncover effective practices and offer insight into how an
interdisciplinary curriculum can be effectively implemented.
7

Organizational Context and Mission
The educational institution of focus is Cristal University of Han (CUH, a pseudonym).
The university was founded in 2014 by the People’s Republic of China Regulations on SFCRS
upon approval by the Ministry of Education. CUH is committed to providing top-quality higher
education that integrates the East and the West and fosters an enriching research environment.
CUH’s mission is to cultivate innovative talents with a global perspective, Chinese cultural
traditions, and social responsibility.
Currently, more than 7,000 students are studying at the CUH. Over the years, the
university has established seven schools: the School of Management and Economics, the School
of Science and Engineering, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Life
and Health Sciences, the School of Data Science, the School of Medicine and the School of
Music, offering 22 undergraduate programs and 24 postgraduate programs. Different from other
mainland institutions that are largely organized by academic departments aligned with traditional
disciplines, CUH structures its schools to align with interdisciplinary purposes. Aside from the
structure of the school divisions, the innovation of this residential liberal arts university is that, as
of 2021, 43.35% of the student body is taking STEM programs, of which six are running
interdisciplinary degree programs to upgrade the higher education talent preparation process.
These six interdisciplinary degree programs are biomedical engineering, data science and big
data technology, computer science and engineering, financial engineering, electronic information
engineering, and new energy science and engineering. CUH is strengthening its research teams
of experts and professionals in big data and data science, future intelligent networks,
bioinformatics, new materials and energy, finance and logistics, robotics and intelligent
manufacturing, drug discovery and precise medicine, and other areas of sci-tech innovation. As
8

of December 2021, the total number of undergraduate students active in the university and taking
an interdisciplinary degree program is 1,200.
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology
Activity Theory (AT; Engeströ m, 1987, 1999; Leont’ev, 1974, 1981a, 1981b), as a social-
cultural and social-historical lens, offers an approach to developing an understanding of a
complex social system. The later sections, by using this conceptual framework, provide a broader
view of the outcomes and value of the interdisciplinary approach in a Sino-Foreign Cooperation
university’s liberal arts education setting that prepare students’ soft skills needed to meet 21st-
century requirements. Activity theory provides a framework for analyzing needs, tasks, and
outcomes for faculty members designing interdisciplinary curricula to identify an effective
design and implementation method. There are four interactive components to evaluate the
interdisciplinary curricula design strategy: collective structures of the organization, primary
actors, practical activities where interactions occur and the strategic practices through which
interaction is conducted (Jarzabkowski, 2003). Analyzing data through the lens of AT will
provide a broader view of the design and implementation of the interdisciplinary approach in an
SFCRS and help to develop a more complete understanding of how faculty develop these
programs through specialized pedagogy and collaboration. The AT lens enables this research to
disentangle the influential factors and the interactions of faculty, students, relevant tools and
environment to see how this kind of education prepares students’ competencies for 21st-century
employment.
This study adopted a mixed-methods approach. A survey was designed to delve into
faculty members’ interdisciplinary curricula design performance to better understand their
perceptions of their curriculum design strategies and implementation. The qualitative aspect of
9

the study will be designed to gather deeper insights into faculty members’ experiences,
perceptions, and real practices of running interdisciplinary programs. Since faculty members are
involved in designing the curriculum and guiding how the university’s instructional direction is
implemented to the student body on a daily basis, their participation in this study is essential. In
addition, the faculty members’ curriculum design, including the academic goal of each course, in
and out-of-class activities, assignment design, and teaching strategies, were examined.
Definitions
Liberal arts: college or university studies (such as language, philosophy, literature,
abstract science) intended to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop general
intellectual capacities (such as reason and judgment) as opposed to professional or vocational
skills (Merriam-Webster, 2018). Liberal arts education should provide students with both breadth
and depth and ensure broad knowledge of culture, science and society and in-depth study in a
specific area of interest. In addition to that, it should help students to develop a sense of social
responsibility; and also develop strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as
communication, analytical, and problem-solving ability, and a demonstrated competency to
apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings (Glass, 2008).
Twenty-first-century skills: a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character
traits that are believed—by educators, school reformers, college professors, employers, and
others—to be critically important to success in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs
and contemporary careers and workplaces. The four C’s are by far the most popular 21st-century
skills. These skills are also called learning skills. The four C’s of 21st Century Skills are (a)
Critical thinking: Finding solutions to problems; (b) Creativity: Thinking outside the box; (c)
Collaboration: Working with others; and (4) Communication: Talking to others.
10

Interdisciplinary study: “inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines and
which lead to an integration of disciplinary insights” (Newell and Green, 1982, p. 24).
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: a term coined in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, Founder and
Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. It is characterized by the convergence and
complementarity of emerging technology domains, including nanotechnology, biotechnology,
new materials and advanced digital production technologies. The latter includes 3D printing,
human-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence, and is already transforming the global
industrial landscape (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2020).
Organization of the Study
Five chapters were designed to organize this study. Chapter One provided the key
concepts and terminologies commonly found in a discussion about the interdisciplinary approach
in liberal arts education in the Chinese higher education context and its goal of equipping
students with 21st century skills. The organization’s mission, goals and stakeholders and the
framework for the study were explained. Chapter Two provided a review of the current literature
surrounding the scope of the study. The reforms and development of Chinese higher education,
the role of the Sino-Foreign Cooperative Running University, and the interdisciplinary approach
within liberal arts education and its implementation in the Chinese context were introduced.
Chapter Three detailed AT as well as the research methodology, sampling and choice of
participation, and data collection and analysis. In Chapter Four, the data and results were
assessed and analyzed. Chapter Five discussed recommended solutions for improvement based
on the data and literature.
11

Chapter Two: Review of the Literature
This chapter includes a review of the literature on the reform and development of China’s
higher education, including the government’s objective for reforms and the main events and
measures. The literature review then examined the role of SFCRS in the 21st century and its
interdisciplinary educational models, which were intended to promote residential liberal arts
education to prepare young talent to become globally competitive in the 21st century. The AT
(Engeströ m, 1987, 1999; Leont’ev, 1974, 1981a, 1981b) will be used as the lens for this research
to examine the faculty’s activity system needed to achieve the organizational goal of preparing
students for global engagement in the 21st century in China.
China’s Exploration: Reform and Development in Education
China, as one of the ancient civilizations in the world, has emphasized the value and
importance of education since 551 B.C-479 B.C, when Confucius claimed that education is an
important component of social development (Xu & Mei, 2018). The educational system has
undergone a series of unprecedented reforms in recent decades, which has allowed significant
progress in building human resources and fostering innovation in economic, political, cultural,
and social development to reach the national goal of modernizing China (Oyeniran &
Uwamahoro, 2017). When discussing higher education in China and its rapid development, it is
critical to understand its development path and the deliberate decisions that have shaped the
higher education system (Li, 2001).
Reforms and Developments in the 20
th
Century
The system and the model of China’s higher education were adopted from the former
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the 1950s (Li, 2001). However, with the 10-year cultural
revolution from 1966 to 1976, China’s higher education system underwent a deep crisis
12

(Oyeniran & Uwamahoro, 2017). Not until 1978, when Deng Xiaoping, leader of the People’s
Republic of China, encouraged China to learn from the West, was the new chapter of reforms
and opening up to the Western world started (Yang & Ni, 2009). According to Xu and Mei
(2018), since 1978, the educational policies in China can be categorized into four stages: (a) the
recovery and reconstruction of the educational order (1978–1984); (b) the total start-up of
educational system reform (1985–1992); (c) the adjustment of educational policy facing the
reform of the market economy system (1993–2002); and (d) new development of educational
policies under the guidance of “Scientific Outlook on Development.”
The two major themes of the reforms during these four stages, according to Zhao and Qiu
(2012), were decentralization and marketization. Starting from the 1985 Decision to Reform the
Education System policy, China has transferred education responsibilities and authority from the
central government to provincial governments and even lower-level institutions like universities,
including administration, finance, curriculum, examination, and enrollment （Zhao & Qiu,
2012). As for the other major theme of China’s educational system reform, marketization, it was
not until the 1980 Decision (Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 1980) was
instituted that the market mechanism was introduced into education. The market mechanism
requires effective central policies to fully consider local governments’ interests and the market’s
law (Byrd, 2019).
Before 1980, the central government owned all education institutions (public
institutions), which students could attend free of charge (Zhao & Qiu, 2012). The main purpose
of the later educational reform was to decentralize and streamline administration to expand local
school autonomy (Fan, 2020). Different from the definition of private schools in many Western
countries, Chinese private educational providers are highly regulated and must follow the same
13

curriculum as public schools do. These educational institutions are called “Minban ( 民办)”
schools. Mok (1997) defined China’s education marketization as quasi-marketization because
Minban schools in China do not operate in a free market but have incentivized competition
among schools and apply business logic to school governance. Since the mid-1990s, universities
run by the government, such as Beijing Normal University and Zhejiang Universities, started to
build up cooperation with non-government partners and sources to establish private education
sectors. These kinds of institutions are called “independent colleges,” which were considered an
experiment at the initial stage and then became legalized in 2002 when the Law to Promote
Minban Education in China was released to encourage public universities to work with private
entities to establish “independent colleges.”
In 2000, there were 1,041 regular higher education institutions in China (Ministry of
Education, 2000). With the trend of readjusting leadership from central to local, by the end of
2000, the total number of regular higher education institutions that were entirely under the
administrative control of the central government had dropped to only 120. At the same time, the
number of higher education institutions under the leadership of local governments soared to 896
(Chen, 2001).
Building First-Class Universities for the 21st Century
Among the many reforms in China, one of the most important has been the effort to
improve the competitiveness of Chinese higher education in the global marketplace (Cai, 2013).
The Chinese government launched “Project 211” in 1995 and “Project 985” in 1998 by
reallocating financing and resourcing to further develop top Chinese universities.
“Project 211” was initiated by the Chinese government and is named after the
abbreviation of the 21st century, and approximately 100 universities are included in the project
14

to be strengthened through the development of teaching, research, and administration (Cai,
2013). A total of 18.6 billion (yuan) was invested in 99 universities during the Ninth Five-Year
Plan (1996–2000), and another 18.8 billion (yuan) was allocated to 107 universities during the
10th Five-Year plan (2000–2005), and during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010), 10 billion
(yuan) was spent on 112 universities in the “Project 211” (Chinese Ministry of Education, n.d.).
“Project 985” was a follow-up project to advance Chinese universities into world-class
universities in the 21st century. At the beginning of the project, only Peking University and
Tsinghua University received 1.8 billion (yuan) in 1999–2001 from the central government for
special development funds. In 1999–2003, 33 additional universities were included to receive co-
financing from the central and regional governments (Wang, 2008).
In 1995, as one of the key aspects of higher education reforms toward the 21st century, a
policy of “cultural quality education,” considered an equivalent of “liberal arts education” and
evidence of the central government’s initiative to improve the young generation’s critical
thinking and creativity towards the traditional curriculum, was proposed and instituted by the
Chinese Ministry of Education (Jiang, 2014). “Cultural quality education,” which in Chinese is
Wenhua suzhi education ( 文化素质教育), is the term used in official policy documents. This
was an important aspect of education reform as the Soviet style of education highly emphasized
occupational training and STEM, sacrificing students’ humanities and social sciences skills. The
lack of these skills was not meeting the needs of the new generation and the society in which
they lived (Postiglione, 2016). This cultural quality education was aimed at broadening students’
knowledge and rectifying the overly-emphasized professional focus or career-oriented education
(Ma, 2018).

15

Massification of Chinese Higher Education During the Reforms and Developments
The reforms in the past three decades have led China’s education system to a new degree
of achievement. This includes the dramatic increase of students pursuing higher education,
greater investment in teacher preparation and improvement of training methods, diversification
of school financing, privatization of education provision, development of universities with
international competitiveness, and the internationalization of higher education (Wang & Liu,
2009).
Important and unprecedented changes have taken place in China’s higher education
system since 1998 (Table 1). China’s universities have been developing rapidly since 1998, from
the number of universities to the number of students. Prior to 2003, there was a period of
particularly high growth; more recently, the development rate slowed and reached a stable level
of growth.

16

Table 1
The Development of Higher Education in China Between 1998 and 2010
Year Number of
higher education
institutions
Average student
number/
institution
New intake of
undergraduate
students (1,000)
New intake
growth rate over
the previous year
1998 1,022 3,335 1,083.60 8.32%
1999 1,071 3,815 1,548.60 42.91%
2000 1,041 5,289 2,006.10 29.54%
2001 1,225 5,870 2,682.80 33.73%
2002 1,396 6,471 3,037.60 13.22%
2003 1,552 7,143 3,821.70 25.81%
2004 1,731 7,704 4,473.40 17.05%
2005 1,792 7,666 5,044.60 12.77%
2006 1,867 8,148 5,460.50 8.24%
2007 1908 8,571 5,659.20 3.64%
2008 2,263 8,931 6,076.60 7.38%
2009 2,305 9,086 6,394.90 5.24%
2010 2,358 9,298 6,617.60 3.48%

Note. From Statistics Communique of National Education Development 1998–2010.

These growth rates in higher education have continued. In 2019, there were 2,688 Higher
Education Institutions (HEIs), of which 1,265 were universities, 257 were independent colleges,
and 1,423 were vocational colleges. In 2019, the total enrollment of undergraduates in the HEIs
was 30,315,262. The total enrollment of postgraduate (Master’s) students in the regular HEIs
was 2,863,712 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2020).
17

Historically, China’s education development focused on quantitative expansion instead of
quality education and therefore did not fully adapt to the country’s socioeconomic development
and the growing demands of the people. In view of the growth of the higher education sectors,
China recognized the importance of improving higher education’s competitiveness and placed
great emphasis on developing the quality of education (Mok, 2007). The Outline of the National
Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020) was
instituted by the State Council in July 2010 (People’s Republic of China, 2010). The major goals
of higher education reform and development in the new decade included
• Raising higher education quality overall;
• Improving cultivation of talents or professionals;
• Elevating research levels;
• Bettering social service capacities;
• Optimizing a distinctive higher education structure.
Following the guidance to form a modern higher education system with both Chinese
characteristics and in line with world standards promoted by the government (People’s Republic
of China, 2010), education practitioners are increasingly aware of the importance of the
interdisciplinary curriculum design to inculcate new generations with critical thinking, creativity,
moral reasoning, analytical skills, and a sense of social responsibility. Therefore, education
policy development and transformation regarding higher education are transitioning into new
directions (Jiang & Guo, 2017).
Policy Trends in the Next Decade
In 2015, Education 2030: In Cheon Declaration (United Nations Educational Science
Cultural Organization, 2015) stipulated a series of sustainable development goals, among them a
18

goal (goal 4) of ensuring quality education that is inclusive and equitable for all and lifelong
learning opportunities by 2030 were emphasized. In response, China’s Position Paper on the
Implementation of the 2030 Agenda was issued by the Chinese government in which China
proposed to “deepen the progress of modernizing education.” By highlighting both quantity and
quality and the combination of elite and universal education, the agenda for higher education
required modernization overall to shoulder the responsibility of building a strong China (Sui,
2020). It is further claimed by Sui (2020) that “internationalization, thus, constitutes an effective
approach to reaching the most advanced level of higher education in the world in the shortest
time by learning and borrowing from more advanced methods, experiences, and technology” (p.
135).
During globalization, developed countries that run the world’s prestigious universities are
expanding their influence worldwide by establishing branch campuses or joint programs in
destination countries (Varghese, 2014). These branch campuses have become part of the new
higher education forms in China.
Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities in the 21st Century
China has been known as the “World Factory” for the past decades (Zhang, 2006). As the
manufacturing mode of economic development is no longer a healthy economic model that can
sustain a high growth position, China has been exploring advanced teaching models and adopting
different strategies to educate young generations with the knowledge and skill sets needed for the
country’s new sustainable economic growth model, which is a knowledge-based economy (Mok,
2021). The current changing society is also recognized as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with
artificial intelligence technologies changing the dynamic of our life, economy and our education.
With this, the traditional specialized curriculum cannot fulfill the needs of the ever-changing
19

working environment and the skill sets needed for the 21st century (Cheng & Wei, 2021). As
part of its investment in building a knowledge-based economy, China has invited renowned
overseas universities to set up their branch campuses in China through Sino-Foreign cooperation,
thus accelerating the introduction of high-quality higher education resources into China (Mok,
2021). This form of university brought a change toward reshaping the image and rebuilding the
meaning of nonpublic higher education in China socially, economically and politically since the
late 1980s when Sino-Foreign programs were established in China’s local universities (Mao,
2021).
Definition and Major Policies of Sino-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools
In defining Sino-foreign cooperation, according to the State Council (1995),
Chinese-foreign cooperation in running schools mentioned in these provisions refers to
educational undertakings enrolling Chinese citizens as the main objectives and run by
educational institutions (hereinafter referred to as cooperative educational institutions)
established in cooperation by foreign bodies corporate, individuals and relevant
international organizations and Chinese educational institutions and other social
organizations with the status of legal person. (Chapter 1: Article 2)
In the early 1990s, SFCRS was established and developed in higher education. Since
then, legislation and policy have been regulating the fast-growing industry of transnational
higher education. There are currently two major policies related to SFCRS: interim provisions
for SFCRS (State Education Commission, 1995) and regulations of the People’s Republic of
China on Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (State Council, People’s Republic of
China, 2003). This kind of newly developed education model is defined in the “Regulations of
20

the People’s Republic of China on Sino-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools,” executed on
September 1, 2003, as
Chinese-foreign Cooperation in Running Schools belongs to non-profit undertakings and
is a component of Chinese education. The country carries out the policy of expanding
openness, standardizing school running, managing pursuant to the law and facilitating
development for Chinese-foreign cooperation in running schools. China encourages
bringing in Chinese-foreign cooperation in running schools with high-quality foreign
educational resources. China encourages conducting Chinese-foreign cooperation in
running schools in higher education and vocational education and encourages Chinese
institutions of higher education to cooperate in running schools with well-known foreign
institutions of higher education (Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Sino-
Foreign Cooperation in Running School, 2003).
The goal of the SFCRS is to promote China’s education development by introducing
high-quality foreign educational resources. The State encourages SFCRS to establish
partnerships with high-quality foreign educational institutions to provide high-quality education
(State Council, 2003). In 2010, the state again proposed to encourage schools at all levels to
initiate international exchanges and cooperation in the National Long-Term Education Reform
and Development Plan Outline 2010–2020.
Sino-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (SFCRS) can take different forms, such as
franchising, branch campuses, online programs, and twinning (Huang, 2007). Depending on the
forms and scope of the partnership, joint cooperation can operate on three levels: university,
institute, or degree (Lu, 2018). At the university level, joint institutions are established as
independent legal entities with the new establishment of campuses, facilities and administrations.
21

There are currently nine cooperative universities approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education
(MOE). On an institute cooperation level are projects without legal status within or attached to
an existing Chinese institution and considered joint education programs. At the degree level,
cooperative projects and programs can be offered for degree purposes (Lu, 2018). According to
the MOE, applications are made through the Chinese partner. Universities in Hong Kong SAR,
Macau SAR and Taiwan need to establish joint ventures if they plan to expand their operations in
mainland China (State Council, People’s Republic of China, 2003). This study only focuses on
the university level of cooperation between overseas and local universities in offering higher
education programs.
Sino-Foreign Cooperation in Running Universities in the 21st Century
The SFCRS is now an indispensable part of Chinese higher education (Zeng et al.,)
2019). In 1995, there were only two officially approved CFCRS programs. By June 2004, the
number had increased to 754, with approximately 51,000 students enrolled. By February 2007,
there were more than 1,400 CFCRS institutes and programs (Iftekhar & Kayombo, 2015). In
2010, the total number of Sino-foreign cooperation programs and institutions was more than
1,100, among which there were 148 institutions and 951 programs. The total number of students
enrolled was 430,000, including 290,000 students in higher education, which equaled 1.5% of all
full-time higher education students in China (Liu et al., 2013). As noted on the MOE official
website, by March 2018, in terms of institute and degree cooperation level, 36 out of 39
universities in the “985 project” had established their own SFCRS, while 101 out of 112
universities, which is more than 90% of “211 project” universities, had established CFCRS. The
cooperation focuses mainly on economics, management, electronics and information technology,
22

and electrical and mechanical engineering, which have been experiencing stable advancement in
recent decades (Lin & Liu, 2009).
Among all these Sino-foreign cooperations, joint institutions established as independent
legal entities are still in the early stages of development. This study is mainly focused on Sino-
Foreign cooperative universities, which means the partnerships between the two cooperated
universities are at the university level. Table 2 shows the development of the Sino-foreign
cooperation universities, which entails cooperation between a home university in mainland China
and a renowned university abroad. The Sino-Foreign Cooperatively-Run University Union was
formed in 2014 to make these universities operate in a more uniform manner (Lu, 2018). As
shown in Table 2, it was not until 2004 that the first Sino-foreign cooperatively-run universities
was established, and most of the joint campuses are located on the southeast coast of China,
home to the most affluent provinces. This type of cooperation in higher education has been in
development for 18 years.

23

Table 2
Established Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities as of 2021
Name Province/Municipality Start Year
University of Nottingham Ningbo Zhejiang Province 2004
United International College (jointly founded by
Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong Baptist
University)
Guangdong Province 2005
Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University Jiangsu Province 2006
Duke Kunshan University Jiangsu Province 2013
Shanghai New York University Shanghai 2013
Wenzhou-Kean University Zhejiang Province 2014
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) Guangdong Province 2014
Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology
Guangdong Province 2015
Shenzhen MSU-BIT University Guangdong Province 2015

Note. From “List of Institutions and Programs Approved by MOE” by Ministry of Education,
2019. (http://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn/ndex/sort/1006)

Currently, China is entering a new era of reform in higher education, with rebalance and
competitiveness becoming two very important key development strategies (Zeng et al., 2019).
One approach is to strengthen the role of universities in the process by building a new
mechanism of cooperation among universities, research institutes, industries, and enterprises
(Cai, 2013). The aim of introducing high-quality foreign educational resources into Chinese
universities is to introduce advanced education and teaching concepts, updated talent training
24

models, curricula, teaching materials, teaching methods, educational administrative systems,
qualified teachers, administrative teams, quality assurance systems and other leading advantages
around educational resources on a global scale (Lin, 2016). Lin (2016) stated that these high-
quality educational resources should be well-paired and matched to local institutions, disciplines
and majors where the strength, standards and characteristics of Chinese educational institutions
have to be fully considered, improved and strengthened. Instead of pursuing a surge in quantity,
SFCRS is at the stage of steady growth now (Zeng et al., 2019).

25

Renewed Interest in Boya, Liberal Arts Education and Impact on the New Era
Modern liberal arts education is influenced by both Western (ancient Greek) and Eastern
(Confucian) education philosophies (Cheng & Wei, 2021). In China, since the late 19th century,
the practices of liberal arts and general education have had an impact on China’s modern
universities. This was replaced by the Soviet model later in 1949, which had become a
mainstream educational model, and resumed its popularity after the opening up reforms in 1979
(Hayhoe, 1989)
Liberal arts education has deep historical roots and refers to the education provided for
free men with three pedagogical principles: (a) active learning, (b) meaningful learning, and (c)
reflective learning (Roche, 2010). Modern liberal arts education can often be found in small,
private, liberal arts colleges or universities which share the common features of (a) the
curriculum is broad-based; (b) an interdisciplinary approach of study is encouraged and
emphasized; (c) with small student-teacher ratio, students are more comfortable and encouraged
to be engaged with the teachers both in and out of the class; and (d) students are equipped with
general skills in communication, teamwork, leadership, global awareness, and social
responsibility (Cheng & Wei, 2021).
As a result of globalization, “liberal arts education” or “general education” is expanding
its influence and student population in university undergraduate education (Gillespie, 2002).
There is a growing interest and an increasing trend in liberal education worldwide (Van der
Wende,2014), especially in Asia, which accounts for 37% of liberal education initiatives outside
the United States. Among them, three-fourths of the Asia liberal education initiatives are located
in China, India, and Japan (Kirby & Van der Wende, 2016). The education model in Chinese
higher education is frequently criticized for lacking innovation and the capability to cultivate
26

top-notch innovative talents for the current society (Cai, 2013). The benefits of integrating liberal
arts education with professional and technological training, such as a combination of a broad-
based curriculum design and rich extracurricular or co-curricular activities designed to be a
critical part of the preparation of future talents, deserve attention (Cheng & Wei, 2021).
The recent growing significance of liberal arts education in the world is due to the right
skill sets it provides in the information technology era to guide students to identify and tackle
unstructured problems, while the traditional specialized curriculum may no longer be the best
education to prepare graduates to meet the ever-changing working environment (Cheng & Wei,
2021; Van der Wende, 2013).
Studying the Impact of the Liberal Arts
Using the first wave data of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, Seifert
et al. (2008) adopted a randomized experimental approach with a sample of over 1,000 students
and found that a liberal arts education is positively connected with the following outcomes: (a)
intercultural effectiveness, (b) inclination to inquire and lifelong learning, (c) well-being, and (d)
leadership. Similarly, Detweiler (2021) conducted a study that interviewed 1,000 US university
graduates between the age of 25–65 to evaluate the relationship between liberal arts education
and long-term life outcomes. He found that among all the factors, positive life outcomes are
related more to educational context than educational content. The research findings showed that
positive life outcomes, such as leadership and fulfillment, were closely related to the following
liberal art education practices by their order of importance: (a) Frequent conversations with
faculty about both non-academic and academic subjects outside of class; (b) having a college
mentor with lasting impact; (c) discussing issues such as peace, justice, human rights, or equality
with fellow students outside of class; (d) taking more than half of courses outside one’s major;
27

(e) most professors knowing students’ first names; (f) actively participating and being involved
in university organizations and activities; (g) having coursework that frequently involved
questions to which there is not necessarily a right answer; (h) having classes where discussion
was a critical part of learning; (i) college experiences involving activism; and (j) living in
campus housing for at least three years.
Comparing Boya and Liberal Arts Education
“Boya” is the transcription of the Chinese term “ 博雅” that refers to a broad-based
curriculum for whole-person development that originated from China’s Six Arts: property ( 礼),
music ( 乐), archery( 射), charioteering( 御), writing( 书), and mathematics( 数) during the second
to fourth centuries (Cheng & Wei, 2021). During this time in medieval Europe, the fundamental
basis of education consisted of logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and
astronomy (Roche, 2010). Cheng and Wei (2021) explained that the main purpose of the ancient
Chinese Boya education was to pave the way for talents to take the Imperial examinations
designed for the civil service and required students to have a broad-based knowledge of ethical
and philosophical values rather than specific knowledge. Therefore, the core values of Boya
education in the tradition of Confucius and Mengzi are: 仁（benevolence, compassion, human
goodness); 义 (justice, responsibility); 礼 (propriety); 智 (intelligence) and 信 (trustworthiness).
This has been maintained in today’s higher education but has been heavily influenced by a
Western liberal arts education model where the fundamental subjects changed to Western-style
subjects in arts, humanities, and sciences.
Residential Liberal Arts Education in China
The goal of the SFCRS is to introduce high-quality education overseas into China to
improve the quality of teaching and learning (Du, 2018). After 30 years of development, SFCRS
28

has become a unique way to boost the internationalization of higher education (Zeng et al.,
2019). Residential liberal arts colleges and institutions play a transformative role in students’
lives and have essential purposes and values as a form of education (Zhou, 2020).
The residential college system originated in England and dates to the 13th and 16th
centuries. It has been practiced at Oxford University and Cambridge University since their
founding (Zhou, 2020). Zhou (2020) explained that in a residential college system, every faculty
member and every student belongs equally to a department, which is by selected major, and a
college, which is related and could be assigned randomly to encourage intercommunication
across disciplines. Each residential college has a range of directors responsible for the planning
and organization of rich social and recreational activities and academic seminars. According to
Wu (2020), the residential college has formed a structure and framework to include students,
faculty, fellows, tutors, and advisors to provide all-around guidance and assistance for students to
think, learn and practice opportunities on various platforms to adapt to internationalization and
diversification. The residential college is not just an architectural concept but a community that
is people-oriented, people-interrelated and fulfilling (Riker & DeCoster, 2008). There are two
elementary assumptions that explain how the residential college takes on the role of education.
First, the environment influences behavior. The environment here refers not only to the physical
environment, like dorms, classrooms, and library but also to the interpersonal and social
environment with peers, teachers and administrators. Second, learning is a process. Students’
character and beliefs are influenced and formed by culture, spirit and psychological development
(Chopp et al., 2016).

29

Interdisciplinary Attempts in the Chinese Higher Education Context
Innovative approaches in liberal arts education are taking place through small-scale, high-
quality and well-resourced programs. For example, Yuanpei College at Peking University is now
offering interdisciplinary curricula. Students take general lessons at the college in their first year
and later can select one of the areas in the following four disciplines: humanities, social issues,
natural science or science history, and art or art theory. Xinya College at Tsinghua University is
a residential liberal arts college established in 2014 emphasizing interdisciplinary learning.
Students can choose their specialization from 15 concentrations, namely classical and
contemporary literature, linear algebra and quantum mechanics. Among them are two
interdisciplinary degree programs: Creative Design and Intelligent Engineering and “Philosophy,
Politics and Economics. Fudan University’s Upgrade Plan 2020, targeting undergraduate
education, provides a fusion of courses enabling students to broaden their general knowledge
during the first 2 years of college study. Students then choose their major subject in the third year
according to interests and academic performance. Lingnan University in Hong Kong, to cultivate
students’ crucial transferable skills, offers a common core with four required courses and five
interdisciplinary “clusters” to focus on students’ five areas of personal development, irrespective
of their majors. The core curriculum aims to offer students a broad and balanced knowledge and
worldview through exposure to a wide range of cross-disciplinary subjects.
Among the SFCRS in China, several practices regarding localization and diversification
of Chinese higher education are worth studying. For example, New York University Shanghai
implements general education to diminish boundaries between different disciplines. Wenzhou-
Kean University connects with the local environment to make collaborative innovations between
industry, the university, and research centers to diversify students’ learning experiences to better
30

design their interdisciplinary courses. Duke Kunshan University innovatively designs its
undergraduate majors that have interdisciplinary and disciplinary components and adopts a
strategy of “being small and being elite” (Zeng et al., 2019). The Chinese University of Hong
Kong was the first university to implement the collegiate system (residential system) in
combination with the reform of general education (Zhou, 2020). When the Chinese University of
Hong Kong-Shenzhen was established, the residential liberal arts model experience was
introduced to the cooperated universities in mainland China.
In the STEM curriculum model, a student has to study STEM subjects. A STEM
curriculum in a liberal arts education model may increase the students’ creativity and design
thinking abilities (Aithal & Aithal, 2020). By blending different practical life skills and creative
areas into the systematic science-based curriculum, liberal arts and design education at the
college level are expected to expose students to various traditional humanities subjects. This is
expected to increase the competency of the students and make them more well-rounded, giving
further confidence to graduates in the future job market (Aithal & Aithal, 2020).
If a liberal arts education places equal importance on science, technology, engineering,
arts & design, and mathematics, it can be called the STEAM model (Madden et al., 2013). This
STEAM model aims to engage learners in team-based multidisciplinary problem solving through
mentoring, learning communities, research projects, and partnerships with outside agencies,
which will prepare talents with innovative minds in modern science and technology to address
complex societal problems (Madden et al., 2013). Only a few of the education pioneers in China
focused on STEAM education before 2010; it was not until 2015 that the national guidance
document by the MOE first emphasized its importance (Zheng, 2020). Even with attention at the
national level, STEAM education is still a relatively new concept. The success of a STEAM
31

model in liberal arts education does not depend merely on its educational concept or a good
curriculum design but largely on the active participation and commitment of the instructors
(Jiang & Guo, 2017).
Interdisciplinary Approach Responding to 21st-Century Talent Preparation
The 21st-century liberal arts education has brought renewed enthusiasm for
interdisciplinarity in the curriculum as a means to prepare talent (Rhoten et al., 2006). Drawing
from Newell and Green (1982), interdisciplinary approaches can be defined as “inquiries which
critically draw upon two or more disciplines and which lead to an integration of disciplinary
insights” (p. 24). It is an integration of knowledge from different disciplines to pursue an
outcome that cannot be achieved by a single discipline (Holley, 2017). Interdisciplinary practices
in higher education refer to the integration of two or more disciplines or fields of study in
relation to research, instruction, program certification, and/or degree offerings (Jacob, 2015, p.
2). An interdisciplinary approach is an exciting avenue for potential curriculum enrichment
(Nutting, 2013). Table 3 provides an overview of the potential subskills and conditions for
interdisciplinary higher education.

32

Table 3
Potential Subskills and Conditions for Interdisciplinary Higher Education
Overview of Potential Subskills and Conditions
Interdisciplinary
thinking
Having
knowledge
Knowledge of disciplines
Knowledge of disciplinary paradigms
Knowledge of interdisciplinarity
Student Having skills Higher-order cognitive skills
Communication skills
Personal
characteristics
Curiosity, respect, openness, patience, diligence, self-
regulation
Prior
experiences
Social
Educational
Learning
environment
Curriculum Balance between disciplinarily and interdisciplinarity
Disciplinary knowledge inside or outside courses on
interdisciplinarity
Teacher Intellectual community focused on interdisciplinarity
Expertise of teachers on interdisciplinarity
Consensus on interdisciplinarity
Team development
Team teaching
Pedagogy Aimed at achieving interdisciplinarity
Aimed at achieving active learning
Aimed at achieving collaboration

Assessment Of students’ intellectual maturation
Of interdisciplinarity
Learning
process
Pattern Phased with gradual advancement
Linear
Iterative
Learning
activities
Milestones with encountering questions
Aimed at achieving interdisciplinarity
Aimed at achieving reflection

Note. Adapted from “Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic
review,” Educational Psychology Review, 21(4), 372–378.

33

Table 3 indicates that to foster interdisciplinary thinking, one needs to have the
knowledge and skills to achieve it. Eight categories enable interdisciplinary thinking: personal
characteristics and prior experiences from the students’ side: curriculum, teacher, pedagogy,
assessment from the learning environment, and pattern and learning activities from the learning
process. Under each of the categories, there are also subskills and conditions that require
attention, such as curiosity and openness to welcome interdisciplinarity, pedagogy aimed at
achieving active learning, and intellectual community as a positive learning environment. The
primary goal of a liberal arts education is to ensure that students acquire intended
interdisciplinary skills as a result (Rhoten et al., 2006). As Klein (1990) summarized, “neither a
subject matter nor a body of content. Is a process for achieving an interpretive synthesis, a
process that usually begins with a problem questions, topic, or issue” (p. 188). Therefore, a
successful interdisciplinary program must develop students’ capacities to integrate or synthesize
disciplinary knowledge and thinking (Rhoten et al., 2006), which requires faculty members’
attention. Table 4 is the expected outcomes of liberal arts education and interdisciplinary
education.

34

Table 4
Expected Outcomes of Liberal Arts Education and Interdisciplinary Education
Liberal arts education Interdisciplinary education
Thinking critically or possessing broad
analytic skills

Tolerance of ambiguity or paradox
Learning how to learn Sensitivity to ethical dimensions of issues
Thinking independently The ability to synthesize or integrate
Empathizing, recognizing one’s own
assumptions, and seeing all sides of an issue
Enlarge perspectives or horizons
Exercising self-control for the sake of broader
loyalties
Creativity, original insights, unconventional
thinking
Showing self-assurance in leadership ability Critical thinking
Demonstrating mature social and emotional
judgment; personal integration
A balance between subjective and objective
thinking
Holding equalitarian, liberal, pro-science, and
antiauthoritarian values and beliefs
An ability to demythologize experts
Participating in and enjoying cultural
experience
Increased empowerment

Note. Adapted from A New Case for the Liberal Arts. Assessing Institutional Goals and Student
Development by D. G. Winter, 1981. Jossey-Bass and Klein, J. T. (2002). Assessing
Interdisciplinary Learning K-16 by J. T. Klein, in J.T. Klein (Ed.), Interdisciplinary education in
K-12 and college: A foundation for K-16 dialogue (pp. 179–196). The College Board.

As noted in Table 4, interdisciplinary learning enhances cognitive skills and builds
students’ synthesis and integration ability which aligns with the goal of 21st-century skills,
meaning a broad set of knowledge, skills, and work habits, targeting (a) critical thinking: Finding
solutions to problems; (b) creativity: thinking outside the box; (c) collaboration: working with
others; and (d) communication: talking to others. Compared to the expected outcomes of liberal
arts education and its interdisciplinary approach with the 21st-century skills required by the
employment market, these two concepts have a very high degree of overlap in students’
35

cognitive skills preparation for complex real-life problems. In other words, liberal arts education
with an interdisciplinary approach has a positive effect on preparing students for 21st-century
skills to be competitive.
Challenges to Residential Liberal Arts Education in China
Higher education in China has been significantly transformed in recent decades (Mok &
Xu, 2008). Different kinds of higher education offerings have increased in number, and
diversification and marketization have changed the conventional governance model of higher
education (Mok & Xu, 2008). In order to meet the globalized trend in the 21st century, SFCRS,
as a new form of higher education in China, will have to be diversified, including the openness
and flexibility in guiding ideology, innovative models and forms of running the program or
institute, carefully and skillfully selected disciplines or majors, and new methods of admission or
teaching (Zeng et al., 2019). Problems and dilemmas have accompanied higher education’s
internationalization reforms in establishing CFCRS, such as a low level of proficiency in
curriculum design, as faculty members and policy-makers may not fully understand liberal arts
education and how an interdisciplinary approach is developed. There may also be a mismatch
between universities’ talent and skills training and society’s demands, as well as the related
employment pressures that result when graduates do not find employment (Cai & Kivistö , 2011).
According to Lopes (2019), “employability” does not mean “getting a job;” instead, it
should be considered as a set of skills that a student will need to increase the chance of finding
employment or achieving success in the work environment. The interdisciplinary thinking
developed in a liberal arts education provides the skills required by the 21st-century employment
market. Along with the rapid development of higher education, there are insufficient resources
and measures to ensure high-quality education in the 21st century (Sui, 2020). While the
36

expansion of interdisciplinary activities is ongoing, from the prospective to the sustainable
development of this educational model, quality should be examined and maintained (Jacob,
2015). Therefore, the educational authorities and universities need to take concrete steps to
tackle the existing problems and challenges by properly controlling the development pace and
optimizing the structure of SFCRS, enhancing the quality assessment system to filter out the
unqualified programs or institutes, and upgrading the existing cooperation or highlighting their
uniqueness (Zeng et al., 2019).
During this period of transformation, China’s practices of introducing and importing
foreign education to develop a modern higher education system have aimed to keep useful
Western elements without losing the essence of Chinese values (Cai, 2013). However, Chung
(2013) identified a potential conflict here, as the traditional way of teaching and learning in Asia
is teacher-centered, lecture-based, and directed toward one correct answer; this teaching tradition
does not align with the ideas of liberal arts education, which encourages different voices and
values. Cultural factors may impede the full understanding of the value of liberal arts education
and, therefore, the implementation of this kind of education in China (Jung et al., 2016). Against
China’s background of vocational training, and specialized education, liberal arts education and
its interdisciplinary approach is not an easy system to adopt (Beck, 2012). The lack of
generalizable methods to evaluate interdisciplinary education and its impacts on student learning
is still a challenge (Klein, 1996; Lattuca, 2001). The complexity exists on multiple levels:
between different disciplines, institutional cultures, faculty members, work and the structure of
higher education (Holley, 2017). Moreover, the question of how to sustain the development of
interdisciplinary education for long-term viability is also crucial, as faculty efforts may change
according to institutional or individual priorities (Holley, 2017). Therefore, cultivating a faculty
37

able to engage in interdisciplinary education under the liberal arts curriculum is an important
element in successful efforts.
The following section focuses on the AT (Engeströ m, 1987, 1999; Leont’ev, 1974,
1981a, 1981b) and discusses how AT may provide a useful lens for examining how SFCRS can
renew and strengthen its liberal arts interdisciplinary curriculum.
Activity Theory Framework
Activity Theory (AT) has evolved from theories based on Marxist philosophy and Soviet
psychology and the related traditions (Vygotsky, 1978; Leont’ev, 1979). The AT developed by
Engeströ m (1987) is widely applied to understanding human behaviors and how they are situated
in a social context. The theory examines the rules of the community, the division of labor within
it, and how that mediates actions and influences how people behave. In this study, AT provides
the socio-cultural and socio-historical lens to analyze the interaction of human activity and
consciousness within the relevant context (Jonassen & Murphy, 1999).
Activity Theory provides a framework and language to describe developments (Russel &
Schneiderheinze, 2005). Engeströ m (1987, 2001) used AT to analyze how different elements
play critical parts in mediating the individual and group learning processes, as shown in Figure 1.
“There are three mutual relationships between the subject, the object and the community. The
relationship between subject and object is mediated by tools, while the relationship between
subject and community is mediated by rules” (Issroff & Scanlon, 2002, p. 9). This framework
incorporates the subject (in this study, the subject refers to faculty members), the object
(representing the motive, task or learning situation) and the tools through which the activity is
mediated. Engeströ m (1987) added to this basic triangle three further components: the
community, rules/regulations and division of labor, each of which has a mediating role in the
38

activity. Therefore, the intentional use of tools, or mediating artifacts, by human beings to
accomplish goals is of great importance (Cole, 1990).

Figure 1
Activity System Triangle

Note. Adapted from Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental
research by Y. Engeströ m, 1987, Oriental-Konsultit Oy.

39

Activity theory, providing an expanded list of relevant features, enables the study of the
influential factors and the interaction of teachers, students and the learning tool (Russel &
Schneiderheinze, 2005). Moreover, it helps to examine how different outcomes are influenced by
the interaction between varies learning situations. This involves using activity system concepts to
study the learning settings and the influence of learning needs, tasks, and outcomes to identify an
operational framework for designing and implementing an interdisciplinary curriculum in CUH.
Conclusion
This chapter presented a review of the current literature regarding the history of the
Chinese higher education system to point out the role and importance of establishing SFCRS in
recent decades in China. Moreover, with the historical review of residential liberal arts education
and its revival in SFCRS in the 21st century, its interdisciplinary education model to effectively
prepare young talents for the Fourth

Industrial Revolution was discussed. Factors, limitations and
elements needed to contribute to the Chinese higher education developments, especially SFCRS,
were also provided. The coming Chapter Three presented the methodology, including the
sampling and recruitment of the stakeholder groups to collect data on how environment and
culture influence faculty’s effective design and implementation of interdisciplinary programs in a
residential liberal arts education of SFCRS. How 21st century skills were incorporated in
interdisciplinary curriculum, if at all, will also be explored. Data collection design according to
the AT framework was fully explained and applied to further validate the outcomes.

40

Chapter Three: Methodology
This chapter provided the methodology approach of this research study. It began with an
overview of the organizations to be studied and then provided a description of the population and
how the sample was selected. It then explained the instrumentation, data collection process, and
data analysis. At the end, the trustworthiness, ethical considerations, limitations and
delimitations in this research study were discussed.
The purpose of this project was to explore how faculty in CUH interdisciplinary
programs collaborated to prepare interdisciplinary approaches under the liberal arts education to
cultivate students with the soft skills needed for the 21st century. This study focused on faculty
members as the key stakeholder group as they played a critical role in students’ learning and
engagement. A mixed methods approach using surveys and interviews was applied to examine
the faculty’s role in the design and implementation of interdisciplinary education in an SFCRS.
This study also examined the influence of the university’s residential liberal arts model and
culture on the development and pedagogy in interdisciplinary education. The mediating role of
the tools, rules/regulations and division of labor was studied to see how each affected faculty
collaboration and teaching in interdisciplinary programs at CUH. The following sections discuss
the research design and methods for data collection and analysis. The questions that guide this
study were as follows:
How do faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approaches in a liberal arts
education to assist students in cultivating the soft skills they need in the 21st century?
This question can further be understood by also considering the following sub-questions:
1a. How does the community present in a liberal arts college’s environment and culture
influence collaboration among faculty?
41

1b. How do tools, rules and division of labor mediate faculty’s development of
said interdisciplinary curriculum?
Participating Stakeholders
The stakeholder group of focus for this study was faculty at CUH who were intensively
involved in the interdisciplinary degree program’s design and teaching. At CUH, over 400
professors have joined the faculty group, each with teaching or research experiences overseas.
Some have been exposed to liberal arts education in their past studies or teaching roles, while
others have not had these experiences. Since this study is highly focused on the interdisciplinary
curriculum design, the target of the faculty group is narrowed. Among all the faculty members,
around 52 faculty members are involved in interdisciplinary degree program design and
teaching. All of the 52 faculty members were invited to take an online survey that could be
completed either on a computer or cell phone. Given the limited time and the diverse
backgrounds of these faculty members and the essential perspectives they might bring to this
study, I implemented criterion-based selection for more in-depth interviews. As Patton (2015)
argued, “the logic and power of qualitative purposeful sampling derives from the emphasis on an
in-depth understanding of specific cases: information-rich cases” (p. 53). Through this type of
purposeful sampling, researchers can collect rich and influential opinions of the research inquiry.
Because CUH is growing quickly, every semester, there is a large number of faculty joining this
teaching team. To screen teachers with sufficient experience to participate in this research
project, I prioritized faculty participants who had been teaching at the school for at least 1 year to
ensure that each participant understood the CUH culture. As the survey contained a question
asking faculty about the length of employment at the university, it was not difficult to locate the
target participants.
42

Survey Sampling Strategy and Rationale
Taking into consideration that the total number of faculty members who were involved
with the interdisciplinary curricula design and implementation in CUH was around 52, the
survey was open to all these faculty members to collect their feedback. The survey invitation was
sent out to the faculty by email and WeChat, the most widely used social media platform in
China, and a popular method for daily working communication at CUH, from the Centre for
Learning Enhancement and Research (See Appendix C for the recruitment email). Even though
the survey was not directly related to the evaluation of the faculty’s teaching performance, it still
collected information anonymously to ensure that faculty were safe to provide their honest
answers.
Interview Sampling Strategy
To identify faculty participants in this study, I used purposeful sampling and snowball
sampling strategies to locate participants with particular experiences and competence (Johnson &
Christensen, 2015). As Patton (2015) stated, “By asking a number of people who else to talk
with, the snowball gets bigger and bigger as you accumulate new information-rich cases” (p.
298). Purposeful sampling was chosen and considered suitable for this study because I was
interested in collecting data from the participants who had the best knowledge concerning the
research topic. I paid special attention to faculty members’ experience in interdisciplinary
programs, liberal arts education and their home discipline department, but their gender and age
would not be considered as part of the purposeful sampling.
The intention of this study was to recruit 10 to 15 faculty members who were eligible and
willing to participate in this research study, and ultimately 13 were recruited. As the total scope
of the faculty members who were actively involved with interdisciplinary degree curriculum
43

design and implementation was around 52, I expected to recruit a minimum of 10 participants.
Taking into consideration the possibility of participants withdrawing from the interview process
at some point, the amount of time required for each participant’s interview, and the depth of each
participant’s story that I would like to explore, I believed ten was an optimal sample size for this
research study. As Lincoln and Guba (1985) recommended, the sample size is determined by
informational considerations or sampling until saturation or redundancy is reached. Therefore,
the final sample size could be adjusted based on the data collected.
I approached the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Research to explain the purpose
of this study and to request that they send out a recruitment email on my behalf to faculty
members who have worked at CUH for over one year. As the response rate was very low, I
identified a few early key participants who met the criteria and preference, then asked them to
refer other participants who met the criteria to me. I prioritized participants who met both the
criteria and preference listed for further interviews.
Interview Sampling Criteria and Rationale
Below are the interview sampling criteria for this study. Participants were chosen based
on two criteria: (a) at least 1 year of teaching experience at CUH and (b) involvement in
interdisciplinary programs at CUH for more than one semester. To be eligible for the interview,
faculty members must meet the abovementioned two criteria. Faculty members with previous
exposure to liberal arts education overseas before joining CUH were highly prioritized during the
selection process.

44

Criterion 1
Faculty members must have at least one year of teaching experience at CUH. With
adequate exposure to CUH, participants were expected to have a more rounded understanding of
the dynamics of the research questions.
Criterion 2
Faculty members must have been involved with CUH interdisciplinary programs for at
least one semester. With experience designing and teaching interdisciplinary curricula at CUH,
the participants could provide constructive feedback on this research context.
Preference
Faculty members have previously served or studied in at least one residential liberal arts
college or university or experienced elements of liberal arts education curriculum overseas
before joining CUH. The reason for designing this preference was to find out more about how
overseas liberal arts colleges differ from those established in China and further locate the gap
between them, if any.
Data Collection and Instrumentation
This study applied two data collection tools: survey and interview. The survey was an
efficient way to collect the faculty’s points of view on their interdisciplinary programs’ design
and implementation. It was followed by a qualitative interview with the faculty that provided
more in-depth data points for further inductive analysis. See Appendix A for the dissertation
protocols. As research interview is “a process in which a researcher and participant engage in a
conversation focused on questions related to a research study” (DeMarrais & Lapan, 2004, p. 55)
and aims “to describe and clarify experiences” (Polkinghorne, 2005, p.138), this can help me, the
45

researcher, to find out what is “in and on someone else’s mind” (Patton, 2015, p. 426) during the
interview.
Survey
The survey for faculty in this study consisted of 16 questions (presented in Appendix B).
The design of the questions aimed to collect faculty’s perspectives on the interdisciplinary
program design at CUH, which provided a general understanding of the faculty profile
(demographics, gender, years of experience in liberal arts education, and years of teaching at
CUH) and faculty’ views on the current development of the programs. As Creswell and Creswell
(2017) stated, a survey is an effective method of answering descriptive questions to collect data
on the attitudes and opinions of a population. Questions about the faculty’s collaboration in
curricula design were asked to see how faculty view their own interdisciplinary curricula
development and their own performance in the context of CUH. The survey ended with one open
question about their suggestions about interdisciplinary degree programs at CUH, which aimed
to generate a discussion during the interview with the faculty members. There were 16 questions
in the survey. The first part of the survey was a consent form, followed by five questions
regarding the participants’ demographic information, including their citizenship and gender. Ten
questions were dedicated to assessing the assumed influences, which were formatted as
statements with a 5-point Likert-type scale. At the end, the survey collected data on whether the
participant was willing to participate in a later interview.
The survey to faculty was sent by the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Research
along with a recruitment email requesting their participation. The recruitment email stated that
the survey would take approximately 5–8 minutes to complete and included the information
sheet so faculty could understand that the survey was voluntary and anonymous. The survey
46

remained open for one month. I asked for a reminder email to be sent every other week. Once the
surveys were completed, the data was securely stored.
Interviews
The interview invitation was sent out to recruit faculty participants by email and WeChat,
the most widely used social media platform in China, and a popular method for daily working
communication at CUH, from the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Research. I then
followed up with faculty members who responded and scheduled interviews as soon as possible.
I asked the office to send a reminder every other week until I had recruited the ideal number of
participants. At the same time, I actively contacted potential professors to get their support for
the research and asked them to participate in the project if they were willing. I also asked
professors to make further recommendations if possible.
Once the faculty responded to my recruitment email, I corresponded with them to
schedule an individual interview. A total of 13 interviews were conducted for this research, each
lasting about 30–45 minutes. The interviews took place in person on campus, such as in a
campus café , office, meeting room, or classroom, depending on the preference and convenience
of the interview participants. If in-person interviews could not occur due to COVID restrictions,
they took place online using a web-based platform, such as Zoom. As one of the purposes of the
interviews was to understand and explore the assumed activity system influences on the faculty’s
performance goal, a semi-structured protocol was utilized to guide the interview process. The
interview questions focused on how the faculty interacts with the subjects, objects and tools at
the interdisciplinary degree programs at CUH. The questions also explored how the community,
rules/regulations and division of labor had a mediating role in the activity (see Appendix A).
47

I asked permission to record the interview, and I also took notes. The interview protocol
design contained an information sheet (presented in Appendix D) to provide information to the
participants about the purpose of the study and how the interview data was collected and used,
and most importantly, how their privacy was protected. The participants were also asked if they
were comfortable with the interview being recorded and frequently reminded that their
participation was voluntary, so they could stop and leave the interview at any time.
Data Analysis
After each interview was conducted, I transcribed and coded the recording. Analysis of
interview data started once interview transcripts were available. Analytic memos were written
after each interview. I also documented my thoughts, concerns, and initial conclusions about the
data related to my conceptual framework and research questions.
In the first phase of the analysis, I used open coding, locating the empirical codes and
applying a priori codes from the conceptual framework of the activity system (Engeströ m, 1987).
In the second phase of my analysis, empirical and priori codes were consolidated into
analytic/axial codes. In the third data analysis phase, I identified pattern codes and themes that
emerged correlated with the conceptual framework and study questions.
From the survey response pool, I first categorized the data by programs, schools, and
gender. I then arranged the close-ended question data based on each question to see the faculty’s
responses. With the collected data, I prepared questions for the interview with the faculty. All
quantitative data from the survey was imported into the analysis software and coded for analysis.
Descriptive data from the survey were coded to provide a valid analysis of qualitative data.

48

Credibility and Trustworthiness
Credibility and trustworthiness were crucial in a qualitative study (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016), as the transparency of the conduct of the study was critical to the usefulness and integrity
of the findings (Cope, 2014). Trustworthiness refers to the degree of confidence in data,
interpretation, and methods used to ensure the quality of a study (Pilot & Beck, 2014). Therefore,
during the preparation phase, special attention was given to the data collection method, sampling
strategy, and the selection of a suitable unit of analysis.
The advantage of qualitative research was the richness of the collected data (Moretti et
al., 2011), and such data needed to be interpreted and coded in a valid and reliable way. Creswell
and Poth (2013) emphasized “validation” in qualitative research as the “accuracy” of the results,
which should be assessed and best described by the researcher, the participants, and the readers.
Credibility also had its techniques available to establish it. This study focused on the two most
important techniques: triangulation and member checking.
Triangulation was a technique to analyze a study’s results using different data collection
methods, which might involve utilizing multiple data sources, observers, or theories to gain a
more complete understanding of the subject being studied. Triangulation “increases credibility
and quality by countering the concern (or accusation) that a study’s findings are simply an
artifact of a single method, a single source or a single investigator’s blinders” (Patton, 2015, p.
674). This study took the findings from the interview data to cross-check with the data collected
via survey to further strengthen the credibility of the research. With responses and data from
multiple ends to ensure triangulation, validity could be assured (Creswell & Miller, 2000).
Member checking or respondent validation was another technique applied in this study to
ensure credibility and trustworthiness. According to Pyett (2003), a good qualitative researcher
49

cannot avoid the time-consuming work of member checking to avoid bias in the data
interpretation or analysis. By doing so, I could try the best from my end to rule out the possibility
of misinterpreting the meaning provided by the participants and identify my own biases and
misunderstanding during the process (Maxwell, 2012).
Ethics
I had carefully designed my interview and survey process in line with the standards of
ethics required by the University of Southern California Institutional Review Board (IRB) so that
the assumed activity system influences could be explored and validated differently. Multiple
questions related to each kind of influence were raised so that the data collected could be
crosschecked and confirmed. As such, the approach to data collection focuses on protecting the
rights and welfare of participants in this study. By paying careful attention to the study’s
conceptualization and how data were collected, analyzed, and interpreted, credibility and
trustworthiness could be achieved (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). According to Glesne (2016), the
researcher must provide sufficient information to the participants about the design of the
research. Therefore, an information sheet was prepared and provided to each of the faculty
members I interviewed to make sure the participants were aware of the purpose of the study and
that I had their permission to keep and analyze the collected data.
I stated both in written form and orally to the interviewees that they could, at any point,
freely withdraw from the study without any penalty. Glesne (2016) noted that researchers should
eliminate all unnecessary risks to the study participants. Therefore, none of the information
regarding participants’ identities, such as name, age, and title, was disclosed. As privacy and
confidentiality were highly valued elements, prior to the interviews, I asked permission to audio
record the interviews. During the interviews, I made sure I did not provide any personal opinions
50

or stories to influence responses. After the interviews, I provided the transcripts of the interviews
to each of the participants to assure them that I did not change their words. Recordings, text
messages, email exchanges, and interview transcripts were kept confidential and carefully saved
in a password-protected folder on my computer at a trusted location. Moreover, all the papers or
notebooks I used to take notes during the interview process were shredded in a timely manner.
As I am a staff member of the organization I studied, even though I did not have any
direct working relationship with the target groups, it was possible that faculty members involved
in the study only provided the aspects of the stories or opinions they considered appropriate to
share. Therefore, I only offered a cup of Starbucks coffee and provided a thank you card at the
end of the interview, but I did not provide any other incentives to minimize the possibility that
participants felt coerced.
By following these ethical steps, I ensured the respondents’ privacy and confidentiality
were well protected and respected. As Maxell (2012) stated, “Making validity an explicit
component of design can help you to address this issue” (p. 122).
Limitations and Delimitations
Limitations are matters or issues that arise in a study that are out of the researcher’s
control (Simon, 2011). In order to make the study a scientifically rigorous investigation,
limitations and delimitations should be addressed in a study. Firstly, the sample in this study is
an anticipated limitation. Even though purposeful sampling and snowball sampling were chosen
as the strategy to find the best group of participants who had the knowledge to answer the
designed research questions, during the interview, it was the participants’ free will to share with
me their opinions, attitudes and feelings, which were very difficult to evaluate for truthfulness.
Second, collecting information through a self-report had its limitations as well. When people
51

share their own experiences, they may include bias in their statements and are more likely to
report their experiences that were considered socially acceptable or preferred. This limitation
was addressed through data triangulation, which included faculty interviews and survey
responses. Second, this study was not targeting all the stakeholder groups. Third, as I am the
interviewer and the conductor of the related document analysis process, my role as an employee
of the CUH could lead to a possible limitation of lacking available data. Participants may refuse
to answer a particular question because they are uncomfortable or do not want to answer the
question. This limitation was partially addressed by assuring the confidentiality of the
participants during the data collection process.
The delimitations of a study refer to characteristics or elements identified by the
limitations in the scope of a study and by the decisions made during the development of the
study (Simon, 2011). The main delimitation of this study was limiting the research focus to one
stakeholder, faculty members, as faculty members were the key designers and conductors of the
residential liberal arts curriculum. Non-teaching staff and students will not be included in the
study. In order to have a thorough understanding of the faculty members involved in the
interdisciplinary programs at CUH, the mixed method approach was selected as the best data
collection method to answer the research questions. Moreover, this study was especially focused
on the SFCRS with liberal arts education, and its teaching language was English. The findings
and recommendations of the study do not apply to other universities that are not SFCRS, are not
liberal arts, or do not adopt English as the medium of instruction. Lastly, this research was based
on the AT frameworks as its interview protocol design. The assumed activity system influences
were chosen and identified via the set spectrum, which did not have guidelines to apply to but
52

required the researcher to take sufficient time to understand the objects of people involved in
activities.
Conclusion
As the methodology of this research study was set, the following step was the data
collection. The data collection was expected to take about 3 months and was followed by data
analysis. During this time, I recruited 20 professors to fill out the questionnaire, and from them,
13 professors scheduled an interview. The interviews were then transcribed and cleaned up for
data analysis. Later, the participants were asked to confirm the accuracy of the information
before moving to the next step. The next chapter presents the findings of this research study.

53

Chapter Four: Findings
This chapter summarizes the data collected and analyzed from the pre-interview survey
and in-depth interviews with faculty members involved in the interdisciplinary degree programs
at CUH and expressed willingness to participate. An overview of the study participants,
including their demographic and background information and their perceptions about the
interdisciplinary degree programs in a residential liberal arts education at Sino-Foreign
Cooperative Running University, will be presented.
This research aims to examine and evaluate how faculty develop interdisciplinary
programs that are part of the liberal arts curriculum and to better understand how well the
policies and practices of CUH are cultivating the soft skills students need for the 21st century.
The question that guides this study is:
How do faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approaches in a liberal arts
education to assist students in cultivating the soft skills they need in the 21st century?
This question can further be understood by also considering the following sub-questions;
1a. How does the community present in a liberal arts college’s environment and culture
influence collaboration amongst faculty?
1b. How do tools, rules and division of labor mediate faculty’s development of said
interdisciplinary curriculum?
Overview of Study Participants
This study focused on 52 faculty members who were involved in interdisciplinary degree
program design and teaching at CUH. All 52 faculty were invited to take an online survey.
Faculty members who responded to the online survey based on the following criteria: faculty had
been teaching at CUH for at least one year, faculty had been involved with interdisciplinary
54

programs of CUH for at least one semester, and faculty showed a willingness to participate based
on survey responses. These faculty were then invited to participate in an in-depth individual
interview.
Survey Participants
There were 20 responses to an online survey sent to 52 faculty members (response rate =
38.5%). The online survey was open for two weeks, but because the response rate was low, the
survey was re-opened for two more weeks. The demographic backgrounds of survey participants
by gender and nationality are listed in Table 5. Sixty-five percent of online survey participants
were faculty members from mainland China, 30% from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan,
People’s Republic of China (PRC). The remaining 5% were international faculties. Ninety
percent of survey participants were male, 5% were female, and 5% were not willing to disclose
their gender.

55

Table 5
Descriptive Statistics of Survey Participants (n = 20)

Survey Participants
Number Percentage
Gender
Male 18 90%
Female 1 5%
Rather not say 1 5% 1.9%
Nationality
China 13 65%
Hong Kong, Macau
and Taiwan (PRC)
6 30%
Other
counties/region
1 5%
School
School of
Management and
Economics
2 10%
School of
Humanities and
Social Science
2 10%
School of Data
Science
1 5%
School of Science
and Engineering
9 45%
School of Life and
Health Sciences
1 5%
School of Medicine 5 25%
School of Music 0 0
Interdisciplinary
degree programs
Biomedical
Engineering
6 30%
Data Science and
Big Data
Technology
2 10%
Computer Science
and Engineering
4 20%
Financial
Engineering
1 5%
Electronic
Information
Engineering
3 15%
New Energy Science
and Engineering
4 20%
Other 10 50%
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As a newly-built university positioned to face the new challenges and opportunities of the
21st century, CUH has gone beyond the disciplinary limitations of traditional universities when
designing and planning its curriculum, taking into account the importance of interdisciplinary
programs. There are several degree programs for students to choose from within the university.
Among them are biomedical engineering, data science and big data technology, computer
science and engineering, financial engineering, electronic information engineering and new
energy science and engineering majors. In addition to faculty who teach in the degree program
majors listed above, there are also faculty involved in interdisciplinary teaching and research
who do not come from any of the abovementioned programs.
The number of years that participants had been working for the university was a critical
element to be considered when inviting participants for an interview. As shown in the figure
below, four teachers had been working for less than 1 year, accounting for 20% of the total
participants. Nine teachers had been working for more than one year and less than three years,
accounting for 45%. Also, 25%, five faculty members, had been working for more than 3 years
but less than 5 years. Two faculty members, 10% of the total participants, already had more than
5 years of work experience at this university.

57

Figure 2
Participants’ Experience at this University

The pre-interview survey contained eight statements regarding the participants’
perceptions toward CUH. Participants were asked to respond on a six-point Likert scale ranging
from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The statements were phrased positively, and the overall
data showed that most participants expressed agree and strongly agree with the statements. Only
a few participants selected no comments, and no participants chose the option strongly disagree.
Overall, more than 90% of participants felt that the campus environment supported
interdisciplinary courses and research; no negative feedback was given. Two participants
expressed that interdisciplinary collaboration with other colleagues was not very smooth, and
three did not provide comments, while the remaining 12 expressed that collaboration was
smooth, with three of those 12 having selected “strongly agree” in their responses. There were
four consecutive questions regarding whether “CUH offers necessary tools, rules and supports to
my interdisciplinary curricula design and implementation process to improve students’ four 21st-
century skills: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication skills.” Responding
58

to all four of these questions, more than 50% of participants reported agreement or strong
agreement with these statements.
Interview Participants
Among the 20 survey participants, 15 expressed their willingness to participate in an
interview to share more of their insights about this study and provided their contact information.
Thirteen of the 15 participants were selected for a further interview based on the sampling
criteria detailed above. Interview participant determined their preference for the location of the
interview. Four participants chose to be interviewed online via Zoom, and nine chose to be
interviewed in a physical location on the campus (office, meeting room or café ). All interviews
were scheduled after the survey was closed and were organized around the faculty members’
availability. Each interview varied in length, ranging from 20 minutes to an hour. A cup of
Starbucks coffee was offered as a small token of appreciation for the participants’ time and
generous sharing. In addition, offering coffee assisted in creating a positive and trusting
atmosphere during the interview. All interviews were transcribed through an online professional
transcription service, with interviewees providing manual revisions and confirmations.
Table 6 shows the demographic information of the interview participants. For
confidentiality and easy reference, pseudonyms were used for the interview participants. From
the table below, we can see that the participants who were willing to be interviewed were all
male professors. This may be due to the low proportion of female professors at the university. In
addition, the current interdisciplinary degree programs are mainly in science and technology, and
there are very few female professors in these departments. I approached female professor
participants individually, but they were not willing to be interviewed. It is possible that women
professors were less willing to participate in the study because they had less involvement or
59

experience in interdisciplinary teaching or they were busy. This is difficult to know because
there were only a few female professors who would have qualified for the study. Due to the
reluctance of female professors to participate, this was the most representative group of
participants I could recruit.

Table 6
Characteristics of Interview Participants (n = 13)
Participant Role/Gender School Program Citizenship Years of
experience at CUH
Marcus Professor
Male
School of
Management
and
Economics
Financial
Engineering
Hong Kong 6.5
John Assistant
Professor
Male
School of
Science and
Engineering
Computer
Science and
Engineering
China 4
Peter Assistant
Professor
Male
School of
Science and
Engineering
Electronic
Information
Engineering
Hong Kong 3
Richard Associate
Professor
Male
School of
Management
and
Economics
Financial
Engineering
China 2
David Assistant
Professor
Male
School of
Science and
Engineering
New Energy
Science and
Engineering
Hong Kong 4.5
Josh Associate
Professor
Male
School of
humanities
and Social
Science

other
China 2
Jack Assistant
Professor
Male
School of
humanities
and Social
Science

other
China 4
Stephen Professor
Male
School of
Data Science
Data
Science and
Big Data
Technology
China 5
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Participant Role/Gender School Program Citizenship Years of
experience at CUH
Allen Associate
Professor
Male
School of
Life and
Health
Sciences
Biomedical
Engineering
Taiwan 2
Aaron Associate
Professor
Male
School of
Science and
Engineering
Computer
Science and
Engineering
China 1.5
Charlie Assistant
Professor
Male
School of
Science and
Engineering
Computer
Science and
Engineering
Taiwan 4
Jay Associate
Professor
Male
School of
Medicine
Biomedical
Engineering
Other
country
2.5
Arthur Associate
Professor
Male
School of
Medicine
Biomedical
Engineering
China 1.5

Activity Theory
In the following section, findings generated from analyzes of the survey and interviews
are presented in subsections, noted as Subject (in this study refers to faculty members), Object
(representing the motive, task or learning situation), and Community (referring to the CUH). As
Engeströ m (1987, 2001) explained, in AT, the human subject applies tools to achieve tasks
(object). The object is the motivation for the activity, and the activity is mediated by tools,
instruments, or technologies. Therefore, under each subsection tools, rules, and division of labor
are examined through the findings from the research. At the end of this chapter, a summarized
analysis is provided.

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Emergent Themes
Three themes have been identified from the information obtained from both the survey
responses and the thirteen interviews. These themes are that proactive individuals are the key to
interdisciplinary collaboration, that the significance of interdisciplinary learning needs to be fully
delivered, and that a positive and open working environment amongst colleagues encourages
interdisciplinary collaboration.
Theme 1: Proactive Individuals are the Key to Interdisciplinary Collaborations
In the AT framework, Theme 1 discusses a subject finding as it relates to faculty at CUH
and their role in developing interdisciplinary programs. Based on feedback from the
interviewees, successful interdisciplinary teaching and research rely largely on frequent
interactions among the team members. These team members must discuss many issues, including
the roles of team members, the means of collaboration, and shared values around leadership. The
perceptions and experiences of the participants heavily influence both the continuity of this
collaboration and its effectiveness.
In interdisciplinary course preparation, professors are required to attend regularly
scheduled group preparation sessions so that they can work together on the design of the course.
According to the interview data, faculty at CUH follow tended to follow a particular process.
First, the professors together determined the learning goals of the course. Based on the
determined learning goals, they then collaborated to develop a course syllabus that reflected
units, assignments and readings that would give students access to the knowledge needed. In
addition, professors worked together to organize appropriate learning experiences, such as
designing and arranging lab sessions and/or field study sessions. Finally, professors worked
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together to design meaningful ways of assessing what students know and can do as a result of
their participation in the course. Faculty also worked together to design midterm and final exams.
The participants in this study were drawn from the university’s main interdisciplinary
degree programs, as described in Figure 3.

Figure 3
Participants’ Interdisciplinary Degree Programs

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Based on the collected data from the survey, 60% of participants agreed, and 15%
strongly agreed that “the collaboration work with other faculty during my curricula design and
implementation process in the interdisciplinary program is smooth and enjoyable.” Ten percent
of the participants disagreed with the statement, and 15% provided no comment.

Figure 4
Participants’ Responses to Question 7: “I Feel the Collaboration Work With Other Faculty
During My Curricula Design and Implementation Process in the Interdisciplinary Program Is
Smooth and Enjoyable”

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According to the interview data, all participants had some liberal arts education
experience as researchers, faculty, or students. Also, all participants had experience in
interdisciplinary teaching at CUH. Interview participants who had experienced liberal arts
education were more actively involved in interdisciplinary teaching and research activities at
CUH. Although interview participants expressed themselves in variable ways, all 13 interview
participants addressed in some way the absolute importance of the program coordinator in
creating opportunities for effective collaboration. Ten participants expressed that whether an
interdisciplinary program was a great experience depended heavily on whether it was led by a
reliable program coordinator.
The role of the program coordinator is complex, as many participants explained. As the
leader of a co-teaching course, the program coordinator is ultimately responsible for the course
design direction, depth, and pace throughout the preparation process. He or she also must resolve
disagreements when multiple people prepare a course together or must mediate when work
efficiency is not consistent amongst colleagues or the workload is not evenly distributed. At
CUH, program coordinators are usually assigned by the school dean and are responsible for
organizing interdisciplinary collaboration while also being part of the teaching group. As
Marcus, who had been working in a liberal arts environment, said, “(the) Program coordinator is
the one who makes it (experience) different.” Peter echoed, “if you have a very strong program
coordinator, you will have a very smooth cooperation experience and will enjoy the process very
much.” Allen, who just joined the university two years ago but has been exploring
interdisciplinary teaching and research for years, said:
I usually decide whether to join the interdisciplinary teaching based on the selection of
the program coordinator. The difficulty with interdisciplinary collaboration is the
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question of who is/are willing to go extra miles. Willingness from the professors to
devote more time and efforts to the design of the interdisciplinary teaching and to
develop curricular goals and tasks accordingly, are critical for the development of the
interdisciplinary curriculum. Especially, if there is a proactive candidate who is also
willing to take responsibility and be the communication bridge, then such a collaboration
will extend confidence and support to all the professors involved.
While every participant commented on the importance of project coordinators, Jay shared
a story about how a lack of accountability on the part of the coordinator led to a poor
interdisciplinary co-teaching experience for both students and teachers. He said,
Once there was a program director [who] did not do a professional work in arranging the
sessions of the professors, there was a lack of coherence and a lack of clarity in the
objectives of the sessions among the professors, which is a very unprofessional
circumstance. More seriously, the student evaluations for that semester were also very
negative.
Proactive leadership by all persons involved in the development of interdisciplinary
curriculum was noted as important in both survey and interview responses, with the significance
of the role of the program coordinator being noted as particularly critical for the success of a
given course.
Strong Commitment Needed by the Faculty

Among all invited interview participants, five had experience as program directors, and
the remaining eight had experience being invited to participate in co-teaching. Although they
were invited to participate in co-teaching, six of the eight faculty members stated that in addition
to the program director’s strong initiative in interdisciplinary collaboration, the faculty members
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involved in teaching collaboration also needed to have a strong commitment to interdisciplinary
teaching in order to do a satisfactory job.
The survey data showed that 35% of the participants strongly agreed that they were
encouraged to approach colleagues from other disciplines, and 50% indicated they agreed. Only
5% disagreed, and 10% reported no comment (Figure 5).

Figure 5
Participants’ Response to Question 12: “At CUH, I Am Encouraged to Interact With Colleagues
From Other Disciplines”

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At CUH, although each discipline has its characteristics, the stereotypes often held about
individual disciplines are fading away within the university atmosphere, as many professors
raised this same concern. Whereas in traditional research, individual insights are often necessary
for breakthroughs, in interdisciplinary work, some professors expressed that these possibilities
can be even more significant, with professors expressing fresh insights can come when
professors step out of their traditional disciplinary boundaries and bring a fresh perspective and
understanding to each other’s work. Jack, who works for the School of Humanity and Social
Science (HSS), said,
As professors in our HSS, much of our research actually relies on our individual insights
to make breakthroughs. But in interdisciplinary teaching, it is even more important for
professors to take the initiative to step outside the boundaries of their own disciplines to
explore collaborations.
Arthur agreed, saying that “a good interdisciplinary co-teaching team requires each
professor to recognize the significance of interdisciplinary teaching and the active involvement
of understanding each other’s work.”
As emerged from interviews, collaborative teaching and research across disciplines
require a deep relationship of mutual trust among the participating professors. In addition,
professors must build consensus and work together to create a win-win situation. One reason all
mentioned the importance of a coordinator is that such a person is not only convincing in his or
her professional area but is also able to organize experts from different fields to team together
and create a space where the shared task is beneficial and spurs growth for all participants.
Theme 2: The Significance of Interdisciplinary Learning Needs to be Fully Delivered
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Here, using the model I drafted in Theme 1, in the AT framework, Theme 2 discusses an
object finding as it relates to the goals of CUH and its important role in developing
interdisciplinary programs.
The significance of interdisciplinary study and research has profound implications for the
human resource development requirements demanded by the 21st century (Saavedra & Opfer,
2012). Interdisciplinary learning enhances cognitive skills and builds students’ ability to
synthesize and integrate knowledge, an ability deeply rooted in 21st-century skills. These skills
necessitate a broad set of knowledge, skills, and work habits, targeting (a) critical thinking:
Finding solutions to problems; (b) creativity: thinking outside the box; (c) collaboration: working
with others; and (d) communication: the ability to speak effectively, listen carefully and respond
to others.
The reason these professors are engaged in interdisciplinary teaching and research
projects is that they share the same goals for student development.
Critical Thinking
The significance of critical thinking was reported in almost all of the participants’
statements, and it is also a goal for participants to cultivate their students’ critical thinking skills
for any of the students’ future pursuits.

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Figure 6
Participants’ Responses to Question 8: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and Supports to My
Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Cultivate Students’ Critical
Thinking and Help Students Finding Solutions to Problems (One of the Four 21st Century
Skills)”

Marcus, the most experienced teacher of all the participants, said that in all his years of
teaching, he has never simply been interested in delivering course content alone. In addition, he
said he wishes to develop his students’ learning skills, and in his opinion, critical thinking is one
of the most essential. Stephen, who is from mainland China, had his academic training in the
United States and emphasized that what he appreciates about CUH is that, unlike the one-sided
knowledge output on offer in a traditional Chinese university, professors at CUH have the
autonomy to provide students with opportunities for independent thinking and decision-making
embedded in their instructional design.
Josh, who is also from mainland China, expressed similar thoughts, describing how he
designed his course assignment with faculty from other disciplines to reach that goal. He said,
“There is no longer a single answer to the social challenges that students will face in the future,
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but the ability to think and to make judgments on their own is what we should be developing.”
David, who has rich experience in liberal arts education from the United States, stated, “Once
faculty members are aligned with the same teaching goal, the team-teaching cooperation will be
very successful.”
Creativity
Nine out of thirteen interview participants emphasized the goal of developing creativity
in their design of an interdisciplinary curriculum. Four participants doubted their curriculum
design could help students to develop creativity.

Figure 7
Participants’ Responses to Question 9: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and Supports to My
Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Cultivate Students’ Creativity
and Ability to Think Outside the Box (One of the Four 21st Century Skills)”

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Aaron and Arthur, two young professors who provided similar thoughts, expressed that
creativity is a skill to be developed within each student’s ability and that while students could
develop creativity from the curriculum itself, interdisciplinary courses can open students’ minds
as well. Nine faculty said that student creativity can benefit from an interdisciplinary curriculum.
Stephen, who had firm beliefs about developing students’ creativity ability in his
curriculum, said: “I am from the School of Data Science. For us, the ability to process data is
only technique; if there is no integration with other disciplines, there is no way for us to make
breakthroughs.” Jay, who was teaching in the biomedical engineering program, echoed, “Data is
meaningless unless you know how to interpret it.”
Especially at CUH, where the liberal arts environment encourages interdisciplinary
integration, all students have the opportunity to participate in course work and activities in
different disciplines in addition to the specific degree programs, and all students can select
courses out of their major to open up their knowledge of different disciplines. Jay stressed that
“Such a free academic and living environment will certainly boost innovation and creativity.”
Collaboration
Collaboration was a key word addressed by eleven of the participants. Faculties’
collaboration is the foundation of an interdisciplinary curriculum, while student collaboration is
the extent of the interdisciplinary curriculum.

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Figure 8
Participants’ Responses to Question 10: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and Supports to
My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Improve Students’
Collaboration Skill and Ability to Work With Others (One of the Four 21st Century Skills)”

Eight faculty members provided examples of intentionally designing student assignments
to reach their goals for students to benefit from a collaborative learning experience. Using Josh’s
response as an example, he explained that students in their interdisciplinary program are usually
asked to do team projects. Faculty members from different disciplines were grouped so each
could provide an evaluation from their area of expertise. Due to the opportunity to evaluate
student work together that this type of team assignment provided, eight interview participants
said that the regular peer discussion that occurred was a helpful means whereby they could
reflect upon their teaching effectiveness. According to Jay, Allen, Richard and Josh’s responses,
they also saw similar responses from students on their course evaluations.

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Communication
Communication skills are highly valued in interdisciplinary teaching and throughout all
the programs at CUH, and professors are keen to cultivate strong communication skills in their
students. As Marcus suggested, “in interdisciplinary communication process, students need to
speak from the perspective of different disciplines, which is a great exercise for their
communication skills.” Interdisciplinary dialogue requires not only one-sided information output
but also communication in a language that the other person can understand, which develops both
students’ higher-order thinking skills, and their communication skills simultaneously.

Figure 9
Participants’ Responses to Question 11: “CUH Offers Necessary Tools, Rules and Supports to
My Interdisciplinary Curricula Design and Implementation Process to Improve Students’
Communication Skills and Ability to Talk to Others. (One of the Four 21st Century Skills)”

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Five of the participants stated that “collaboration requires communication.” Peter
emphasized,
In interdisciplinary conversations, the communication skill we actually want students to
develop is how to get people from different backgrounds to understand the language of
our profession, which requires techniques and patience.
Based on the responses received, participants who experienced liberal arts education
themselves are more actively involved in interdisciplinary teaching and research activities at
CUH. This shows that teachers involved in the current interdisciplinary development are also
very much in favor of interdisciplinary education and humanities education. Because they have
experienced the benefits of interdisciplinary research in their own intellectual lives, such teachers
are more aware of the value of offering these opportunities to their students. This group of
professors had clear expectations for interdisciplinary humanities education and were willing to
explore how to better design interdisciplinary education in the context of a liberal arts university.
They were willing to discuss the current shortcomings of education and to improve the quality of
interdisciplinary education and the pleasure of collaboration. It is also important to note that 20-
25% of the participants were not sure if CUH offered the necessary tools, rules and supports to
interdisciplinary curricula design and implementation processes.
Theme 3: A Positive, Open Working Environment that Provides Support and Encourages
Interdisciplinary Collaborations
In the AT framework, Theme 3 discusses the community finding as it relates to the rules,
tools and support of the CUH community and its important role in developing interdisciplinary
programs.
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Tools, Rules and Support Needed for Successful Design and Implementation of
Interdisciplinary Curricula
Fifty percent of the professors surveyed believed that CUH offered the necessary tools,
rules and supports to their interdisciplinary curricula design and implementation process to
cultivate students’ critical thinking and creativity, and 20% strongly agreed with this view
(Figures 6 and 7). Only one participant disagreed with this idea, and five provided no comment.
In Figure 8, it is similar, with 50% who agreed that collaboration skills are also provided with
tools, rules and supports from CUH, while 25% of participants strongly agreed. As for
communication skills, 40% of participants agreed, 25% strongly agreed that CUH offered
necessary supports, 20% provided no comments, and 5% disagreed (Figure 9). From this data, it
can be concluded that the professors who participated in the survey were supportive of the
general CUH environment as it pertains to supporting interdisciplinary teaching.
In a campus culture with strong elements of a liberal arts university like CUH, professors
were more willing to leave their comfort zones to seek dialogue and collaboration with
professors in other fields. Richard, David, Charlie, Peter and Jay all commented that it was
because of the university’s diverse and inclusive culture that they chose to return to China from
overseas. They also recognized the value of the university’s interdisciplinary programs and were
more motivated in such an environment, as they were free to explore more possibilities in
teaching and research.

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Figure 10
Participants’ Responses to Question 13: “I Will Recommend CUH’s Interdisciplinary Programs
to Colleagues, Friends and Family Who Want to Teach or/and Do Interdisciplinary Research”

However, eight participants said that they could not find any tools or rules that supported
interdisciplinary cooperation even though they felt that the community was very supportive.
Among 13 participants, 10 asked for incentives for participating in interdisciplinary
collaborations. Richard and Allen said they think the annual teaching award might be the one
encouragement for faculty to put more effort into their teaching performance. Other than that,
there was no policy that explicitly encouraged interdisciplinary collaborations.
Professional Guidance and Promotion Needed
Marcus, John and David stated they would like more interdisciplinary professional
guidance available to junior faculty, which could smooth the team-teaching process when
collaborating. Six interview participants said the university should have more incentives and
promotions to raise faculty awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary education for
students and to encourage more faculties to participate in such teaching and research. As of now,
interdisciplinary explorations do not impact faculty end-of-year evaluations.
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Overall, the environment at CUH is open and inclusive, and professors who were
interview participants were mostly satisfied with the current teaching and research climate at the
university. However, early career professors may need more professional support and
recognition for promotion, with a promise of tangible benefits, before making an
interdisciplinary commitment.
Conclusion
Feedback and responses collected from the survey and interview participants were useful
and valuable for answering the research questions. In general, faculty members were positive
about developing students’ 21st-century skills via the interdisciplinary curriculum in the liberal
arts environment.
However, data from the survey and interview also indicate that improvements are needed
to provide a better community for the faculties to do an interdisciplinary collaboration.

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Chapter Five: Discussion and Recommendations for Practice
The purpose of this study was to understand how faculty collaborate to develop
interdisciplinary approaches in liberal arts education. To better understand this topic, two sub-
questions were asked: How does community (liberal arts environment and culture) influence the
performance of the collaboration among faculty? How do the tools, rules and division of labor
that serve as mediators of the environment affect the faculty’s development of an
interdisciplinary curriculum? To answer these questions and understand the impact of faculty
collaboration, this study examined surveys and interviews looking at tools, rules and division of
labor using Activity Theory (Engeströ m, 1987, 2001). Survey data from 20 participants and
interview data from 13 participants were collected and analyzed, which led to three emergent
findings.
This chapter will discuss these three emergent findings, followed by recommendations. In
addition, an evaluation plan is included so that the effectiveness of the recommendations can be
determined. In conclusion, a summary of the study’s limitations and recommendations for future
research will be presented to conclude this chapter.
Discussion of Findings
This section will examine the findings of the study based on the research question and
two sub-questions.
Research Question
From this research project, we examined how the participants at CUH were working
collaboratively in an interdisciplinary approach to nurturing students to meet the demands of the
21st century through the three dimensions of subject, object and environment. From the data
collected, it was apparent that the most important aspect of interdisciplinary collaboration was
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the initiative of the participants. Whether it was the faculty members who teach or the course
coordinators involved in the organization, each participant needed to contribute their professional
insight, extra work effort and time to hone the team during the collaborative process.
According to the feedback collected from the interview, there is a protocol for initiating
an interdisciplinary program. First, interdisciplinary programs in CUH were discussed by the
university leadership committee, and then these programs were given to faculty teams to further
design using collaborative teaching models. Once the faculty received this directive from the
leadership committee, they were given consent to work autonomously to design and develop the
interdisciplinary curriculum. The faculty developed a preparation team led by a program
coordinator to design a high-quality, team-taught teaching model intended to ensure student
progress. The program, or course, coordinator, was the designated supervisor, and this role was
particularly vital in organizing the interdisciplinary faculty team. Professors from various
disciplines tend to bring with them their own bias towards valuing their particular discipline’s
knowledge, research and communication styles, and so it is the role of the course coordinator to
develop team cohesion and lead the process in a balanced way.
First, a strong program coordinator needs to consider what kind of interdisciplinary
degree programs are best geared to meet the challenges of the 21st-century job market; second,
they need strong communication skills to make all professors involved in collaborative teaching
understand the significance of interdisciplinary course design and the setting of the educational
goals. In addition, they must put in extra time to address and resolve communication challenges
due to professors being trained in different disciplinary backgrounds. Program coordinators also
need to have a strong professional background and social reputation to play a persuasive leading
role in the communication and coordination process.
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CUH’s interdisciplinary degree programs were still in an exploratory stage and were not
mainstream majors of the university. Therefore, many starting points for launching
interdisciplinary majors emerged directly from the leadership’s driving force. However, thanks
to the university’s integrated liberal arts environment, there was a strong atmosphere of
cooperation and communication among the professors. Under the leadership of the course
coordinators, the professors had a high degree of autonomy and, overall, took pleasure in
exploring the process of collaborative class preparation.
Research Sub-Question 1
In order to better answer the research question above, two sub-questions were designed in
parallel to explore further. The first sub-question focused on understanding how the university’s
liberal arts environment affects the performance of collaboration among professors in the larger
context. According to the feedback collected from the participants, there was a consensus among
professors that in the daily research and living environment at CUH, professors do not develop or
interact only according to the disciplinary boundaries and therefore encourage collaboration.
CUH’s inclusive liberal arts environment is reflected in the design of campus activities, whether
academic or non-academic. In the classroom, this collaboration among the different disciplines in
courses allows professors to better develop the whole student and the 21st-century competencies
critical for the student’s success in today’s world. This cross-disciplinary whole-person
education fosters critical thinking skills and challenges students to develop the ability to draw
their own conclusions. Instead of looking for the one right answer, collaboration among
disciplines allows students to be more engaged in classroom projects and develop argumentative
and persuasive skills. Liberal arts education has deep historical roots and rests upon three
significant pedagogical principles: (a) active learning, (b) meaningful learning, and (c) reflective
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learning (Roche, 2010). Outside of the classroom as well, professors and students initiate
conversations crossing different academic disciplines in their daily lives as they live in a
collegiate system. There are five colleges in CUH, different colleges may place varying degrees
of emphasis on different aspects of student development, but all acknowledge their responsibility
to support their students as multi-faceted, multi-dimensional beings. The collegiate system at
CUH directs the students’ and faculty’s attention beyond the classroom to the surrounding
community’s needs. A successful interdisciplinary program must develop students’ capacities to
integrate or synthesize disciplinary knowledge and thinking (Rhoten et al., 2006), which requires
faculty members’ attention.
Research Sub-Question 2
The second sub-question for this study is to understand how tools, rules and division of
labor serve as mediators that affect faculty’s development of interdisciplinary curriculum. Tools,
rules, and division of labor reflect components of activity theory, in which faculty, tasks/goals
and organizational elements are interrelated and largely inseparable. Both the subjects of the AT
(internal) and the wider community (external) mediate activities through tools, rules, and roles.
Through data collection, we found that CUH did not have policies directly related to
interdisciplinary teaching or research. For CUH, at this stage, interdisciplinary teaching and
research was more often the result of top-down university decision and then handed over to the
teaching teams to undertake. Developing interdisciplinary teaching and research through policies
to guide or incentivize professors’ spontaneous development was lacking, or even absent, in the
university environment at CUH. In the meantime, because professors involved in
interdisciplinary teaching and research were not yet mainstream in the university, CUH needed
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to help grow this group of professors, especially by increasing the number and percentage of
younger professors who need to be mentored by more senior faculty.
Interdisciplinary teaching is an exciting avenue for potential curriculum enrichment
(Nutting, 2013). Persons who participated in this teaching and learning environment have
commented that much of the interdisciplinary dialogue requires intentionally developing an
environment and a medium to facilitate it. For example, professors meet in a forum of their
specialization, where they are all peers of their specialty, but when they participate in a thematic
event of the college, professors of different specializations come together. This more relaxed
context for interaction is a good way to promote interdisciplinary communication. Another
example was that professors might work together due to sharing a laboratory platform. Such
convergent exchanges may facilitate professors discovering the possibilities of collaboration
between different disciplines.
Recommendations for Practice
Recommendation 1: Appoint an Office to Coordinate the Interdisciplinary Degree
Programs
Interdisciplinary degree programs and co-teaching teams of professors are not currently
the university’s dominant focus. University management has never established a dedicated office
or committee to coordinate and manage interdisciplinary development, nor is there a special
expert team to support any difficulties and problems encountered in the interdisciplinary
development process. Absent any special organizational group, such as a committee or dedicated
office with responsibility for the coordination of interdisciplinary work, the interdisciplinary
programs built within a single school may overlap with programs in another. and such
information cannot be known in advance during the preparatory process if a school is working
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independently. Therefore, it is recommended to set up a university-level administrative office or
coordinator to avoid overlap and waste of resources among schools. In a broader sense,
interdisciplinary development should be justified by a team of experts from multiple areas who
understand the progress of discipline development at each school and how to develop
cooperation between or among different disciplines.
In addition to the fact that experts are needed to verify whether interdisciplinary teaching
meets the needs of talent training in the 21st century in the early stage of construction,
interdisciplinary operation and development mechanisms throughout the entire interdisciplinary
operation process are needed. Therefore, establishing a centralized department for planning and
management is essential. The current interdisciplinary building process relies purely on the
team’s program coordinator to control the quality and direction of the curriculum. No one from
the administrative level guides the coordinator or assesses the quality of the course. Since there
are no clear assessment criteria, even if a new interdisciplinary program does not meet the
pedagogical objectives or the 21st-century talent training requirements, there is no protocol to
help improve it or suspend or cancel it if necessary. At the same time, as professors explore new
programs, all participants, particularly program coordinators, need to spend more time and effort
in class preparation. Appropriate incentives and rewards should be included in the consideration
of the management mechanism as well. For example, CUH can develop professional guidance
and incentives for workload considerations for those professors participating in interdisciplinary
teaching, either as workload substitutes or as a financial bonus for additional workload, to
encourage initiative and continuity.
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CUH needs an effective mechanism for establishing, training, developing, managing and
eliminating interdisciplinary programs so that the educational significance of interdisciplinary
programs can be better realized through a chain of management approaches.
This recommendation involves the inclusion of key stakeholders in developing university
policies and curricula, namely the vice president, who oversees academics, school deans, and
program heads, and the establishment of university policies. Once identified, stakeholders are
engaged and consulted. Then, an incentive policy can be developed to address the challenge of
developing interdisciplinary cooperation among faculty aligned to meet the university’s
overarching educational goals and strategies. As curriculum development is related to the work
schedule of professors, policies and changes related to curriculum need to be designed and
introduced on an academic year basis. Ideally, a semester can be spent collecting data to map the
situation. Then, the senior-level management team should be invited to discuss the developed
policy based on the information gathered. Once the first draft of the policy is launched, the
university should test-run it for a semester to see how it works.
Recommendation 2: Build a Culture That Values Interdisciplinary Work
Feedback received from the participants indicated that professors who do
interdisciplinary teaching and research had limited support at the university. Because the current
community of professors teaching across disciplines was still relatively small, little attention and
support were extended to these professors by the university. The following are suggestions for
improving the impact of interdisciplinary programs by building a community of interdisciplinary
exploration.
First, CUH should better publicize interdisciplinary degree programs so that there is more
awareness about them, their significance, and their success in student learning. One way to
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publicize the good work of these programs in to present on their significance to faculty so that
more professors understand the importance of these degrees. Another way to publicize this work
is to encourage outstanding professors and students to present to students at university-level
events to attract additional attention and more applications to these programs.
Second, CUH can better lean into some of the interdisciplinary aspects of the liberal arts
curriculum that already exists at CUH and use those as a starting point to promote more
participation in true interdisciplinary programs. As a Sino-foreign cooperative university, CUH
is more flexible than universities in mainland China in terms of its mechanisms and systems for
discipline development. By taking full advantage of the university’s existing arts and science
integration, more guidance and help can assist those professors in interdisciplinary instructional
design by guiding them to target the 4 Cs (critical thinking, communication, creation and
collaboration) in their course design.
At CUH, 100% of professors have experience studying, researching or teaching overseas.
A large percentage of these professors already have a deep understanding of, and experience in,
the integration of arts and sciences, liberal arts elements and the construction of interdisciplinary
curricula. CUH should fully leverage the experience of its professors by setting up an
interdisciplinary faculty mentorship program. Such a program could empower experienced
professors to help young professors develop. A mentorship program can also further pinpoint
some of the difficulties and challenges professors face when advancing interdisciplinary teaching
and research and yield information that can lead to providing more targeted guidance and
assistance. At the same time, a summary of common difficulties and challenges can be
summarized to form a guidebook with helpful advice and solutions on overcoming frequent
issues that can be shared in the community.
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To better run this community, the university must conduct a university-wide survey and
data collection to get to know faculty’s thoughts toward interdisciplinary initiatives. It is
important to truly understand professors’ needs and difficulties from their perspectives when
designing a course and during the implementation process. University leadership and the human
resource office should work together on this. In addition to creating a community to expand its
impact and providing sufficient assistance within the group of already existing professors,
leadership should consider the importance of this issue during the recruitment process. The dean
of the college and the director of the human resources office are best positioned to help with this,
as they are the ones who can most effectively find and recruit talent who have a passion for and
are interested in committing to interdisciplinary teaching and research.
Recommendation 3: Provide More Mediums to Create Interdisciplinary Dialogue
There is no single process by which interdisciplinary programs are created and sustained.
There is not just one template or map upon which to rely. Currently, many interdisciplinary
explorations are in the process of starting from scratch. Developing the process that works best
for the university will require patience, perseverance and flexibility. It will require sufficient
possibilities for dialogue between professors from different disciplines to create a multitude of
possibilities. To help facilitate possibilities for growth in this area, CUH should increase the
number of platforms and mediums within the university, such as Interdisciplinary Forums, a
multidisciplinary research competition and an interdisciplinary teaching competition.
It is important for professors to have an idea of fellow faculty’s research directions and
progress before initiating the interdisciplinary collaboration. In general, at CUH, except for the
existence of personal relationships outside of work, it is common for professors to know more
about professors in their fields, and it is not easy to know the research progress of professors in
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different departments at the same school, let alone professors at other schools in the university.
Therefore, it is important to provide professors with a platform where they can learn about each
other’s research progress. For instance, a dedicated person in an office for interdisciplinary work
could organize professors to share their research results regularly. This could be done in a
relaxed atmosphere and in a way that does not waste professors’ time, for example, in a series of
lunch meetings where professors can share information.
CUH can also engage professors through shared spaces and labs. In a shared research
space, professors will more naturally generate dialogue that encourages them to think about the
possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with expensive and advanced research
equipment not affordable for every separate research group. If large research groups are willing
to share their lab platforms with others, then it may be possible to generate interdisciplinary
dialogue.
Another possibility for exploring interdisciplinary dialogue is developing joint training
between students of different disciplines. Finally, professors can generate interdisciplinary
dialogue from their research topics. Depending on the requirements of the research project, the
professors may need to form teams to complete it, giving a space for the importance of
interdisciplinarity to emerge.
The medium referred to here requires further consideration and design by the university
in both academic and non-academic fields. Schools can undertake the development of
communication platforms in the academic field, like the establishment of academic sharing
platforms and the design of mechanisms for the joint training of students. Schools and related
administrative departments can undertake the design of activity platforms in the non-academic
field and can organize interdisciplinary dialogues in a theme-based or topic-based design. In
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conclusion, for CUH, it is necessary to help professors create spaces for interdisciplinary
dialogue. With a university environment where there is already a residential liberal arts character
and the arts and sciences are already intertwined, CUH has built-in advantages to lowering the
barriers to interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation.
Evaluation Plan
Introducing new policies and regulations requires an explanation for their need,
justification and discussion and a corresponding evaluation tool to evaluate the outcome of the
new policies after their launch. According to the Kirkpatrick model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick,
2006), an internationally recognized tool for evaluating and analyzing the results of educational,
training and learning programs, there are four levels of evaluation: reaction, learning, behavior,
and results.
The Kirkpatrick model of evaluation (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006) is a popular tool
for evaluating training programs. Nevertheless, despite this model being famous for targeting
training programs specifically, it is also broad enough to encompass any program evaluation.
Although the three previously noted recommendations may not require the full four steps of the
Kirkpatrick Model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006), they are still instructive for the entire
evaluation process.
Level One: Reaction
The first step in evaluating the recommendations is to look at the response to the proposal
from each main stakeholder group involved. Each participant’s level of understanding,
acceptance and attitude will have an important impact on a new policy’s advancement
(Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006).
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For the three recommendations, CUH first needs to collect data on professors’ real needs
and ideas. In a questionnaire that can be promoted both online and offline, direct questions can
be raised about professors’ needs and how they interpret existing and proposed new policies. At
the same time, for the design of the new mechanism described in Recommendation 1, the
mentorship support model for professors in Recommendation 2, and the workshops or forum
possibilities in Recommendation 3, professors can be invited to provide their suggestions and
opinions anonymously from time to time. In these examples, efforts are made to collect data
about how the participants initially react to the approach or event, and this data can be used to
decide how to best deliver the policy, training or approach.
Level Two: Learning
Level 2 focuses on learning performance (Kirkpatrick, 1996; Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick,
2006), which sets out three important points that need to be evaluated in this second level:
knowledge, skills and attitudes. Therefore, at this level, CUH focuses on measuring what
participants have and have not learned and what professors think they will be able to do
differently as a result.
For mentorship programs that might involve changes in knowledge progression, the
course designer can provide a pre-knowledge test before starting the lecture or event and then
provide a post-summary test to have a window into how and what the participants learned.
However, since our participants are targeting the group of professors, it may not be the most
appropriate way to use the written test form. In that case, CUH can consider using a
communication dialogue form to do the verification. To establish the institutional mechanisms
stated in Recommendation 1, there is no increase in the participants’ knowledge, so this Level 2
evaluation plan might not be suitable.
90

Level Three: Behavior
This level helps to understand how well participants apply what they learned in a real-life
situation (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006). For this research project, the behavioral feedback
from the professors can be observable in several ways. One is whether professors have made
updates and adjustments in the design of the course syllabus through the exchanges and learning
opportunities provided by CUH. Another is whether the professors themselves feel more
confident about their ability to do interdisciplinary collaborations after the learning sessions. The
last is whether the professors received better teaching evaluations at the end of the semester than
before. The university can organize a return visit for professors and ask whether professors
believe they have improved their teaching experience and the efficiency of lesson preparation
because they participated in the relevant training.
Level Four: Result
This level evaluates the degree to which targeted outcomes are achieved as a result of the
training or the support and accountability design (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006). For this part,
there exists a challenge to identify which outcomes, improvements, benefits, or final results are
most closely matched to the training purpose and come up with an effective way to measure
these outcomes in the long term. CUH can divide long-term goals into several phased goals for
evaluation. In response to the recommendation stated earlier, CUH can first develop measures
standard by stage goals. Surveys and interviews serve to collect participants’ responses.
However, for interdisciplinary teaching, we look at the performance of the faculty members and
the students taking these programs. Therefore, student surveys and interviews should also be
included for further data collection. Moreover, other than the teaching faculty themselves,
91

supervisors or colleagues in the team are also observers of faculty development. It will be very
helpful to involve them to help with result evaluations.
Limitations and Delimitations of the Study
It is worth noting that there were unavoidable limitations that constrained this research
from generating more impactful insights. As there are only nine established Chinese-foreign
cooperative universities in mainland China, as of 2022, under this unique university system,
where 100% of CUH professors have overseas teaching and studying experience and the
university’s teaching language is English, there are not many universities with such conditions
and environment in mainland China. Thus, the experience summarized and extracted in this
study is the outcome of a specific system of Sino-foreign cooperative education, while it may
have a different form of realization or evaluation scheme in other mainland Chinese universities.
Moreover, the scope of the subject of this study is a non-mainstream faculty group. Therefore,
the sample size that can be screened is relatively small. From the final data collected, the amount
of feedback from the female perspective was inadequate.
Lastly, this study focused on professors who have participated in interdisciplinary degree
programs in a liberal curriculum at CUH. While they have the most intuitive experience in better
understanding the role of interdisciplinary programs in developing 21st-century talents, the study
would be richer in perspective if more diverse roles were involved, such as students, student
affairs office staff, and global exchange program staff.
Suggestions for Future Research
For future researchers in this area, in addition to increasing the diversity and richness of
the stakeholder groups, it would be useful to continue studying the target populations so that the
researchers can trace the development over the years. More comparative studies among other
92

Sino-foreign cooperative universities would also be important so that best practices can be
observed and summarized. Moreover, the current study is a summary of the internal environment
of the university. If possible, it would be ideal to further analyze and compare its external
environment so that the university’s development experience can be shared with other
universities in mainland China.
Conclusion
This study focused on a Sino-Cooperative University in mainland China and adopted
activity theory to examine how subject, object and community factors influence faculty
members’ collaborations in interdisciplinary teaching and research under the liberal arts
curriculum to prepare students with 21st-century skills. Faculty members, as the stakeholder of
this study, were surveyed and interviewed to collect data and further validate three emergent
themes in the area of subject, object, and community. Three recommendations were proposed
accordingly and followed by implementation and evaluation plans.
Establishing Sino-foreign cooperative education is an innovative attempt in the higher
education system in mainland China. As an educational system that is still being explored, Sino-
foreign cooperative education shoulders the responsibility of being a pioneer in creating a new
educational model. As the volume of Sino-foreign cooperative universities is relatively small, it
is easier to make optimization at any time by offering a pilot program. Plus, its successful
example can be learned by other public universities.
Nowadays, the high speed of social development has changed the work landscape, and
how higher education can better cultivate students to face the talent needs of future work has
become the driving force and goal of such universities to explore new educational models. As a
new type of young university with an integration of arts and sciences, CUH is actively exploring
93

the establishment of institutional mechanisms to prepare students for the 21st century. At the
same time, it is fostering educational innovation attempts from faculty members’
interdisciplinary cooperation as well. In addition to changes in university climate, the professors’
initiative is one of the keys to the success of the change. Therefore, CUH should dedicate more
attention and support to the team of professors as they are also learners in the process.
There is no doubt that professors are experts in their research fields. However, most of
them are still relatively new to interdisciplinary collaborative teaching. Therefore, they need
policy, resource, and spiritual support from the external environment of the university for
interdisciplinary collaborative teaching. They also need support from elders, peers, and juniors in
the faculty circle so that they can be led in this process from both the external circle of the
university and the internal circle of the professorial team, which is the direction of future efforts.
Especially in these years when the epidemic is still affecting, Sino-foreign cooperative
universities have become a second choice for many students who originally planned to study
abroad, as it is a model that allows them to study in their home country with international
elements without going abroad. Therefore, the responsibility and obligation that Sino-foreign
cooperative university now undertakes have become more and more profound, and it is required
to realize its future significance with a higher level of design and implementation.

94

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Appendix A
Research Questions
The questions that guide this study are the following:
How do faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approaches in a liberal arts
education to assist students in cultivating the soft skills they need in the 21st century?
This question can further be understood by also considering the following sub-questions:
1a. How does the community present in a liberal arts college’s environment and culture
influence collaboration among faculty?
1b. How do tools, rules and division of labor mediate faculty’s development of said
interdisciplinary curriculum?
Interview Questions
Analyze the activity system
Define the subject, object and the
relevant community.
1. In the interdisciplinary program you are involved in,
who are the participants in the curriculum design
process? What are their roles?
2. What are the outcomes or skills that you expect
students to develop or achieve in your designed
curriculum so as to prepare students’ competency for
the 21st century?
3. How will the community encourage the participants to
fulfill the goals and tasks? To what extent does the
work community influence the activity?
Analyze the activity structure
Define the activity 4. How are tasks divided or shared among participants?
How flexible is the division of tasks?
5. How do you view the efficiency of the current
practice? Are there any difficulties or contradictions
in the implementation process?
Analyze Mediators
Tools, Rules and context
(community) mediators
6. What formal or informal norms, rules, procedure, or
assumptions that guide the faculty collaboration on
the interdisciplinary curricula design and
implementation activity?
7. How might these rules have evolved (formal-
informal, internal-external)? Are they task-specific?
109

8. What are the physical (instruments, machines,
materials) tools and cognitive (methods, languages,
signs, procedures) tools you used to implement the
interdisciplinary course in different settings?
9. What tools do you find most helpful in your
interdisciplinary course?
Analyze Activity Dynamics
Internal or external context 10. What do you think are the factors that contribute to
the formation of the interdisciplinary teaching group?
11. What do you think are the most valuable aspects of an
interdisciplinary approach in the residential liberal
arts curriculum?
12. What are your recommendations on interdisciplinary
curriculum design and implementation in the
residential liberal arts university for other faculty
members?

110

Appendix B: Survey for Faculty
The purpose of this survey is to identify faculty’s perceptions about their collaboration in an
interdisciplinary degree program design and implementation process under the residential liberal
arts education at Sino-Foreign Cooperative university (CUH) and the effectiveness of this kind of
higher education to prepare students for their further pursuits.

This survey will take about 5 to 8 minutes to complete. Please kindly select the best answer(s)
according to your background, situation, understanding and perceptions.

By selecting “I consent” below, you acknowledge that your participation in the survey is voluntary.

Please select to proceed:

• I consent
• I do not consent

Demographic Information

1) How long have you worked for the CUH?
a. Less than 1 year
b. More than 1 year but less than 3 years
c. More than 3 years but less than 5 years
d. More than 5 years

2) What is your citizenship?
a. Chinese Mainland
b. Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan, China
c. United States
d. Other countries/regions

3) What is your gender?
a. Male
b. Female
c. Other (Please specify) ____________
d. Rather not say

4) Which school in CUH do you belong to?
a. School of Management and Economics
b. School of Science and Engineering
c. School of Humanities and Social Science
d. School of Life and Health Sciences
e. School of Data Science
f. School of Medicine
111

g. School of Music

5) What is/are the interdisciplinary degree program(s) at CUH you are involving in?
a. Biomedical Engineering
b. Data Science and Big Data Technology
e. Computer Science and Engineering
f. Financial Engineering
g. Electronic Information Engineering
h. New Energy Science and Engineering

6) CUH has established a campus culture that embraces interdisciplinary curricula.

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

7) I feel the collaboration work with other faculty during my curricula design and
implementation process in the interdisciplinary program is smooth and enjoyable.
1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

8) CUH offers necessary tools, rules and supports to my interdisciplinary curricula
design and implementation process so as to cultivate students’ critical thinking and
help students finding solutions to problems (one of the four 21st century skills).

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

9) CUH offers necessary tools, rules and supports to my interdisciplinary curricula
design and implementation process so as to cultivate students’ creativity and ability
to think outside the box (one of the four 21st century skills).

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

10) CUH offers necessary tools, rules and supports to my interdisciplinary curricula
design and implementation process so as to cultivate students’ improved students’
collaboration skill and ability to work with others (one of the four 21st century skills).

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

11) CUH offers necessary tools, rules and supports to my interdisciplinary curricula
design and implementation process so as to improved students’ communication skills
and ability to talk to others. (one of the four 21st century skills).

112

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

12) At CUH, I am encouraged to interact with colleagues from other disciplinary.

1 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

13) I will recommend CUH’s interdisciplinary programs to colleagues who want to teach
or/and do interdisciplinary research.

2 2 3 4 5
Strongly disagree Disagree No comment Agree Strongly agree

14) What are your concerns and/or suggestions for interdisciplinary programs in the
residential liberal arts education at CUH?

15) Volunteering for Interview

Thanks for answering the above questions. Will you be interested in participating in an
interview to share your thoughts on interdisciplinary curriculum design and
implementation at CUH? The interview is voluntary and anticipated to last about 30
minutes or so.
• Yes, I will be happy to participate in the interview and share more thoughts
• No. I don’t want to be invited.

16) If your answer to Question 15 is “Yes”, please provide your name and email address for
contact purpose. (Text boxes for name and email address)

113

Appendix C: Recruitment Emails
Dear faculty,
I hope this email finds you well. I am a doctoral student at Rossier School of Education,
University of Southern California. As I am now conducting dissertation research on how do
faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approach in the residential liberal arts education
at Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities can prepare students for the 21st century, I would like
to invite you to share your valuable experience and thoughts with me.
This survey will take about 5 to 8 minutes to complete and can be accessed at this site
_____________________. Please kindly select the best answer(s) according to your background,
situation, understanding and perceptions.
Thank you very much for your help!

Sincerely,
Yingjia ZHENG
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
Email: yingjiaz@usc.edu

114

Dear faculty,

I hope this email finds you well. I am a doctoral student at Rossier School of Education,
University of Southern California. As I am now conducting dissertation research on how do
faculty collaborate to develop interdisciplinary approach in the residential liberal arts education
at Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities can prepare students for the 21st century, I would like
to invite you to be my research participant and share your valuable experience and thoughts with
me.
This interview will be conducted on campus where you feel comfortable (e.g. small meeting
room or café) and will take about 30 to 45 minutes. If you are interested and would like to share
your wisdom with me, please kindly reply to this email.
Thank you very much for your help!

Sincerely,
Yingjia ZHENG
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
Email: yingjiaz@usc.edu

115

Appendix D: Information Sheet
University of Southern California
Rossier School of Education
Waite Phillips Hall
3470 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089

INFORMATION SHEET FOR EXEMPT RESEARCH

STUDY TITLE: Making the Global Local: Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities,
Interdisciplinary Study and 21st-Century Skills
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Yingjia ZHENG

FACULTY ADVISOR: Tracy Poon Tambascia, Ed.D.

You are being invited to take part in this research project. Your participation is voluntary.
This document explains information about this study. You should ask questions about anything
that is unclear to you. Before you decide to do so, it is important you understand why the
research is being done and what it will involve. Please take time to read the following
information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Ask us if there is anything that is not
clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether or not you wish to take
part. Thank you for reading this.

PURPOSE
The purpose of the study is to examine how faculty in CUH interdisciplinary programs are
implementing an interdisciplinary approach under the liberal arts education to cultivate students
with the soft skills needed for the 21st century.

You are invited as a possible participant because you are a faculty member involved with the
interdisciplinary programs in CUH who has related knowledge about this research topic.

PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT
If you are selected and you agree to participate, you will be asked to join a 30–45 minute
interview with no other commitments associated with. There will be audio-recording during the
interview, and the recording will be used for data confirmation for this research study only. You
116

may decline to be recorded before or during the interview. It is up to you whether or not to take
part. If you do decide to take part you will be able to keep a copy of this information sheet. You
can still withdraw at any time and do not have to give a reason.

Participating in the research is not anticipated to cause you any disadvantages or discomfort

COMPENSATION FOR PARTICIPATION
Interview participants will each receive a cup of Starbucks coffee worth RMB 45 (USD 6.5).

CONFIDENTIALITY
The members of the research team and the University of Southern California Institutional
Review Board (IRB) may access the data. The IRB reviews and monitors research studies to
protect the rights and welfare of research subjects.

All the information collected during the research will be kept strictly confidential. Your
institution will also not be identified or identifiable. A transcript application Otter will be used to
process the audio-recording of the interview. You have the right to review the audio-recording or
transcript to confirm the authenticity. Any data collected, including the audio-recording,
transcript, or other related data will be stored in a local drive with passwords protected. And the
audio-recordings will be erased in approximately five years. You will not be identified or
identifiable in any reports or publications. Pseudonyms will be used when discussing the findings
in the research study and personal identities will be disguised.

INVESTIGATOR CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions about this study, please contact the investigator Yingjia Zheng at
yingjiaz@usc.edu or +86 (0755)23516134 and Tracy Poon Tambascia at tpoon@rossier.usc.edu
or (213) 740-9747.

IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant, please contact the
University of Southern California Institutional Review Board at (323) 442-0114 or email
irb@usc.edu.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Students in China have growing demands for a more diverse educational experience at colleges and universities while China’s employment market urgently needs universities to cultivate talents that meet the 21st-century requirements of the new employing market, Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities, a legal partnership between Chinese higher education and overseas counterpart —were established as one of the responses to these growing trends for both sides. Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities in China are platforms to examine new and different educational approaches that may be adopted to response to challenges in China’s vast and complex domestic higher education sector. However, it also takes time for these new forms of higher education to prove their values and build up their reputations. The purpose of this research was to examine and evaluate how faculty at one Sino-Foreign Cooperative University develop interdisciplinary programs that are part of the liberal arts curriculum and better understand how well this university’s policies and practices cultivate the soft skills students need for the 21st century. Recommendations for practice, including policy and management adjustments from the university downwards, as well as peer-to-peer support and assistance, were presented. An implementation and evaluation plan were also recommended at the end of the study.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zheng, Yingjia (author)

Core Title Making the global local: Sino-foreign cooperation universities, interdisciplinary study and 21st-century skills

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Global Executive

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 04/12/2023

Defense Date 01/11/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 21st-century skills,interdisciplinary study,liberal arts curriculum,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sino-foreign cooperative universities

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tambascia, Tracy Poon (committee chair), Krop, Cathy Sloane (committee member), Seli, Helena (committee member)

Creator Email yingjiaz@usc.edu,zhengyingjia@cuhk.edu.cn

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113013930

Unique identifier UC113013930

Identifier etd-ZhengYingj-11616.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-ZhengYingj-11616

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Zheng, Yingjia

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Source 20230413-usctheses-batch-1021 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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