BeePart International master’s students’ work placement experiences and socio-cultural engagement with Manchester local communities

About BeePart Project

The BeePart project is a social responsibility project led by Dr Rui He and Dr Alex Baratta from Manchester Institute of Education (MIE), University of Manchester. This project is tied to a PGT course unit at MIE - Intercultural Engagement at Work and in Communities where mandatory individual work placement is an embedded course unit component.

Many international students, mostly at PGT level, sometimes feel less connected to the context beyond their academic work during their one-year studies, than do their UG or PGR counterparts, with the recognised contributions from international students being somewhat more from the economic dimension rather than from socio-cultural aspects.

We held a one-day workshop at the end of May 2024 (when most work placement had finished) with "insiders":

  1. Students from the Intercultural Engagement at Work and in Communities course unit;
  2. Representatives from Manchester local communities which hosted our students for their work placement between January and May 2024 (during the course unit term time).

Let's see what the "insiders" have shared!

Why did we want to host international students?

One of our passions is to work with international students and local communities. To help them to solve real world problems together and to see how we can grow and change from it.

Local community 2

Why did I (as an international student) want to participate in the work placement at a local community?

‘Because UK is like totally new for me, and I think it would be a great experience if I participate in this kind of work placement project, and it will like benefit me so much, for if I would like to try to find a job here in the future.’

Student 3

Our BeePart activities during the work placement:

  • Pricing and working at tills
  • Chinese or English language teaching to various levels of students
  • Litter picking
  • Park yoga activity
  • International events and cultural festival organisation
  • Broadcasting
  • Mentoring young students
  • Social media operation
  • ......
(Photo copyrights belong to the BeePart project participants. Without the copyright owner's consent, it is illegal to copy or distribute these photos.)
This intercultural engagement experience is like...?

Cultural Engagement

I was here in a foreign country facing different cultures and people. So did they... And this shared experience created a deep emotional connection and understanding among us.

Student 1

Community Building

Working with students who are from different cultural backgrounds helps us building communities, not only they have those of the community in our shop but also because all the students who come from different cultural background...

Local community 1

Personal/Career Development

The identity shift experience during the program really helped me learned to take responsibility as a teacher.

Student 2

Social Impact

...we organised a activity to pick litters. We did the whole park... While [students] were doing that, people were coming, walking, and those who were used to throw the litter on the floor, stop doing that that day… they were even appreciating the student... It makes something positive, good sense of happiness.

Local community 6

Social responsibility means...?
(Content in the picture is from the BeePart project participants.)

To our participants, social responsibility is the need to help members of the local community, the connections and contributions seen through proactive actions, social engagement, cultural inclusion and intercultural competence.

Such interactive and hands-on social engagement opportunity supported our international students' learning via contributing real-life practice and made them feel more integrated within not just their education, but by implication, their time in the UK. At the same time, it also effectively involved the local communities in international students' educational experiences and allowed them to play a significant role in enhancing international students' social responsibility development as a global citizen.

Relevant project outputs

BERA blog: International students' social engagement in uk local communities

Contact Us

Dr Rui He (rui.elin.he@manchester.ac.uk) & Dr Alex Baratta (alex.baratta@manchester.ac.uk)

Thanks for the support from all our participants, SEED Social Responsibility Catalyst Fund and BeePart project research assistants Runhan Li, Arianna Martin, and Siyi Hao.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/