Teaching ‘tacit knowledge' in cultural and creative industries to international students

Introduction

Universities in Australia – as in many other Anglophone countries – have benefitted in the last decade from an influx of full fee paying international students for its postgraduate degrees. ¹ In Australia, this was enhanced by the country’s ‘skilled migration policy', ² a two-year postgraduate degree being a potential route into a longer visa/work permit. Coursework Masters programmes very quickly became a money spinner for many of these universities, and accusations that academic or pedagogical integrity have given way to other logics derived from those of increasing market share are common (cf. Wade, 2018). Neither Monash nor Australia is unique here. ³ This paper uses the case study of the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries (MCCIs), offered at Monash University, launched in 2016 ⁴ to critically reflect on experience of teaching pedagogy in coursework masters which is a key debate in the neo-liberalisation of tertiary education across Anglophone universities. Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), as an emergent post-industrial study, mostly associated with national context of western developed countries, has given universities in these countries the privilege of knowledge transfer in the international educational market.

One key trend in this now mass education market space has been an increase in coursework master's programmes in soft disciplines such as CCIs and media and communications. Because of their non-cognate nature, they attract large number of international students, most of which are Chinese, who pay for an experience of ‘western education' in areas that are reflexive of growth of these industries in their home countries. For instance, Chinese students have come to study media in Australia in significant volumes over the past decade largely because of domestic growth in media industries. As a newer addition, CCIs have drawn unprecedented attention from the Chinese government and has become a popular subject to study amongst Chinese students. We will focus on Chinese students in this paper not only because they are the absolute majority within our international cohort (over 85% in MCCIs are Chinese) also because of the correlation between student numbers and international cultural policies. The latter has meant that unlike traditional disciplines, CCIs are more volatile in the international educational market driven by policies that are out of control by universities in Australia. The unprecedented growth in MCCIs, for example, was because of the perception amongst these students that the West (and Australia included) is more advanced in those subjects than their home institutions can offer. These students often have zero working experience in CCIs in their home countries, neither do they want to learn about the context of CCIs in the place where they come from (as deemed primitive/undesirable). This dis-connectivity between the students' home context and their host in Australia thus presents specific challenges when it comes to teaching CCIs as we will explain later.

With now majority of the students come from outside of Australia, MCCIs like many other similar coursework masters are faced with a new challenge in making its content relevant to local students who are seeking professional training opportunities in CCIs, which is how these courses are marketed to them. In order to address diminishing domestic student number in masters, Monash University has launched the ‘change it' marketing campaign promising new career opportunities, skills training and industry connections targeting mostly domestic students. Ironically, because of their pragmatic focus on ‘job ready' skills, coursework masters tend to attract students who do not possess the necessary skills to work in industries like the CCIs. In this paper, we present some observations on how the internationalisation of course content driven by increase in international student number may present some solutions to the problem of managing expectations amongst local students.

The issue of mis-matching expectations presents unexpected challenges to those who teach the programmes. Like many of the coursework Masters programmes in Australia, and other Anglophone countries – some of which are discussed in this special issue – they designed the curriculum based on local experience, cultural imaginaries and industry connections, and targeted professionals embedded in the local CCIs – or with strong aspirations to be so. These programmes often have connections with local cultural milieus, built up through field trips, case studies, guest speakers and staff members’ own academic research. This local embeddedness also contributes to the competitiveness of these programmes. London has a huge international cachet, not only as a major cultural destination but also as a cultural industry hub, one strongly associated with the UK originated discourse of ‘creative industries’. ⁵ Melbourne has been a prime location for studying CCIs despite that Australian creative industries have little external profile – the country’s main association here is with the creative industry research conducted by Queensland University of Technology over a decade ago. ⁶

The surge of international students from very different cultural and economic backgrounds and domestic students looking for a second chance in career have increasingly put the curriculum at odds with its original intent. Those teaching the programme have to adapt the content for this now ‘majority' international cohort and providing local internships in CCIs becomes an urgent necessity. Despite some academics giving in to the pressure of real world experience (Bridgstock, 2011), we argue through our experience in MCCIs that what makes up of this ‘real world' experience is open for contestation. By focusing on ‘local tacit knowledge' as one critical ingredient in the ‘real world' education package, we suggest that the real world experience cannot be equated to job ready skills in CCIs. It is much broad than the job description per se. In our case, the real world experience entails a deeper relationship with the local cultural infrastructure as consumers, producers and any sorts in between. This is not to suggest that students are required to specialise in any sub-sector of CCIs as practitioners or to become cultural entrepreneur of any sort. The primary focus in our approach is to engage with the concept of the cultural eco-system that is constantly evolving. We want our students to become active participant in local CCIs scene through which to acquire a deeper knowledge of local know-how.

We are faced with three key challenges in such approach. First, the course relies extensively on experiential learning; but international case studies brought in to cover ‘international' interests might be taught easily in classrooms but cannot be experienced locally. Second, local networking, real world case studies, field trips and internships cannot be learnt easily as other in classroom activities. In CCIs, local know-how has to be ‘earned' not ‘learnt' as we argue in this paper, presenting barrier to international students who do not possess the basic cultural capital to enter the field. Third, there are significant disparities between local and international CCIs' contexts, resulting in challenges not just to the specifics of teaching delivery but also the framing of programme content, with its presumption of shared understanding between staff and students of how local cultural industries work and the values that might be at stake in them. It is not uncommon for students in MCCIs to hold instrumental view of the creative industries, seeking to understand how they might be developed and expanded as economic sectors. Chinese students in MCCIs, for example, are often surprised and disoriented by the introduction of debates concerning the dissonances between the cultural and economic dimensions of the creative sector. They often hold unarticulated views about a deep and continuing Chinese civilisational culture which bear little resemblance to notions of artistic autonomy and creativity that (perhaps residually) continue to animate Western conceptions of culture.

Our approach is based on research around the soft infrastructures of CCIs in the inner cities and what we might call the ‘creativity bundle’. This involves a set of closely linked assumptions that have emerged since the 1990s and which were more or less subsumed by the creative industries from an earlier cultural industries agenda. First, the provenance of the word ‘creative’ linked the autonomous artist to the formation of new creative subjects (cf. McRobbie, 2011) and to the kinds of entrepreneurship to which this (ideally) gives rise (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Gu, 2010). Second, the ‘creative milieu’ captured a semi-autonomous network embedded in particular urban places and through which new ideas emerge, circulate, mutate and accelerate (Currid, 2007; Evans, 2009; Scott, 2010). Third, the SME (or more recently ‘start-up’) economy operates in a zone between the firm (internal, hierarchy) and the social (external, network), between competition and collaboration, between the market and ‘civil society’, and which is conceived as a kind of ‘ecosystem’ not amenable to top-down state planning or corporate control (Foord, 2009; O'Connor and Gu, 2014). In short, creativity demanded new kinds of cities (or at least, zones therein) which encouraged creative milieus, new kinds of industrial organisation (SME ecosystems), and new kinds of subjects able to autonomously create and innovate (Banks and O’Connor, 2017).

This ‘bundle’ implies that a certain habitus is required for success. Though the creative industries are high on the policy radar, the ability for graduates to enter this field as a career and operate effectively within it involves a high level of tacit knowledge – shared understandings of habitus and milieu, of the complex and often delicate negotiation of cultural and economic benefits, and how to signal and register such shared understandings at the level of the body, of affect, of comportment as much as through a verbal register. Whilst academic rigour and reflective practice are part of these Masters programmes, the inculcation of a more tacit understanding of the creative field, or in this case, Jonathan Raban’s idea of a ‘special kind of city knowledge’, are crucial (Raban, 1992). Tacit knowledge of the symbolic/aesthetic as well as the broader ethical and cultural dimensions of the cultural industries was itself rarely articulated (O'Connor, 2004). In Raban’s account the sort of person able to access this special kind of city knowledge was exemplified by ‘pimps and dandies’, ‘occupations’ that require a deep investment of the persons’ habitus as they occupy this field. One of the claims made for the rise of the creative subject – and we can see this in Lash and Urry’s work – is that the increased importance of symbolic knowledge within various production processes and across the economy as a whole would require a more situated kind of learning and working able to accommodate such tacit knowledge (Lash and Urry, 1994). Indeed, Landry and Bianchini’s creative city thesis itself suggests that what was previously left tacit, undisclosed or unreflected in urban life should now become codified for creative governance (Landry and Bianchini, 1995). Universities with a proactive research agenda in these areas became the first to offer such codified knowledge about CCIs. They target niche audience (with connections to the local cultural field already) who are capable of plugging the programme in the local ecosystem through their own tacit knowledge of the field. The accumulation of tacit knowledge via students, as we will see later in the case study, is difficult to find its place within Australian universities which view coursework masters as lacking intellectual credentials thus is nothing more than cash-cows in the highly competitive global educational market.

But universities have not always been neo-liberal institutions confined by free market rules. Universities, like other forms of life, have their tacit knowledges, which as many ‘first in family’ students have discovered, can be just as important to eventual success as knowing your differential equations or French philosophers (Devlin, 2013). However, it is only recently, as a consequence of ‘digital disruption’ that university managers have begun to focus on these lived aspects of a university education. What do students get from ‘being there’ as opposed to staying at home seeking content from Google or Wikipedia? Universities, it is frequently claimed, no longer deliver content but ‘experience’ (Davis, 2017). There is little theorisation of this outside of claims for ‘active learning’, ‘flipped classrooms’ and other techniques which try to get the content bit out of the way first and use the classroom for project work and discussion. That is, experience as a kind of simulation of ‘real world’ problem-solving – the ‘real world’ usually meaning the real world of future employment. In this experiential learning, tacit knowledge becomes ‘learning by doing’. However, we suggest there is a danger of an unreflective, practice-oriented education, in which the tacit is more about unexamined practice norms than it is about an experiential immersion into a set of embodied skills, understandings and values.

For us, this means not only to expose students to the reality of the creative industries, to allow them some (mostly simulated) experience of ‘real world’ situations, but also to get them to understand the importance of tacit knowledge within the urban milieu, to give them a sense of how they must deploy this later should they move into the field. The problem for us is, first, how to conceptualise this tacit knowledge in a way that can inform our practical pedagogy and second, how to confront the rootedness of tacit knowledge in particular places when dealing with mixed international and domestic cohorts.

In this paper, we trace back to different ways of understanding ‘localness' in CCIs. This lays foundational claims to pedagogical approaches in the two field trip units in MCCIs – ‘Creative Cities' unit in Melbourne and Shanghai City Lab. We argue, via these examples, that being local does not mean simply understanding different urban spaces and places but the inter-connectivity of socio-cultural and politico-economic contexts across these physical spaces – in this case between Australia (Melbourne) and China (Shanghai). Here, we look at the importance of an ‘unfamiliar' Melbourne in facilitating tacit learning amongst Chinese students. Tacit knowledge learnt from the ‘unknown' allows these students to become active participants in local cultural scene in their home country as demonstrated through Shanghai city lab unit.

This paper also ‘provincialises’ Western cultural/creative industry knowledge (academic and tacit) in relation to a Chinese context that positions itself as always behind the (Western) curve. Bringing tacit knowledge to light is then as much critically reflective as it is a practically oriented process, and point to an embeddedness of tacit knowledge in a wider political/cultural economy.

Cluster, localisation and tacit knowledge

A key problem with teaching tacit knowledge is its transferability. One thing has become clear to us teaching MCCI: the transferability of such tacit knowledge is just as likely to generate conflict amongst students as it is to uncover commonalities. Attempting to teach tacit knowledge (of creative cluster practice, for example) increases awareness of differences, and demands active reflection on these rather than passing this on in the form of practice-focused skills.

This issue of transferability also relates to a second concern for universities. In a world of ubiquitous knowledge sharing, and the common perception that institutionalised knowledge distributed via a hierarchical structure is losing traction, the ability of universities to codify, control and credentialise forms of tacit knowledge becomes ever more important. Coursework masters around the world promise to deliver the tacit knowledge for their graduates in modules such as internship, industry projects and fieldtrips. In this paper, we will focus on the fieldtrip model with regards to designing curriculum around a key concept of CCIs – creative clusters.

The (Western) notion of creative cluster – as a key element of the ‘creativity bundle’ – is strongly predicated on tacit as opposed to formal knowledge transfer. O'Connor argued ‘tacit knowledge is embedded locally – you have to be inside it to know it' (2004: 134). CCI literature also stresses the importance of localness. From theories of sociality of creative networks (cf. Wittel, 2001) to ‘sticky' nodes within the global circuit of cultural consumption (Markusen, 1996), the consensus is that local tacit knowledge is at the core of successful CCIs.

A style, a look, a sound' … this is the crucible where innovation consumption meets ear-to-the-ground production; where the ideas, skills, rivalry, part-time jobs, support networks and distribution outlets of the ‘innovation milieu', the ‘art world', the ‘creative field', come together. (O'Connor, 2004: 134)

If our curriculum emphasises tacit, local embedded knowledge, we may risk ignoring the importance of global exogenous factors as Simmie (2004) observed. Instead of designing content to match particular knowledges, i.e. tacit and experiential learning, or formal knowledge with traditional teaching approach, we thus need to focus on the mixing of the two and how students' learning can be structured accordingly. As Amin and Cohendet (2004) argued, formal learning based on incremental adaptation should be combined with non-formal learning through ‘strategic and goal monitoring' in order to achieve the best results for innovation. Applying this understanding in our teaching, it would be a mistake to focus on tacit local learning only whilst ignoring the very different external environment that our students come from. Denying the possibility of these students to learn without pre-requisite local knowledge would also be an error.

It is through introducing the idea of a ‘special kind of city knowledge' to these students that we attempt to combine the formal with the non-formal, tacit with codified, rational with the irrational or affective. In MCCI, the special kind of city knowledge is as much about ‘how to' operationalise such knowledge as about understanding why they are the way they are. It recognises that the cultural industries are highly risky and volatile, with the value of their product dependent on fluidities and fickleness of ‘taste’. Aesthetic reflexivity – an embedded awareness of the circuits of symbolic value – is thus essential for local small producers to sustain themselves in this volatile market. Local SMEs operating at the fringe of the global cultural industries are central to the evolution of taste and value. At the same time, these local circuits of value are linked to global flows of signs structured by global cultural industry infrastructures. Understanding local urban cultural fields require embedded, tacit knowledge and students need to be aware of how this works. At the same time, we have to allow our students to see the global dimensions – something already (in part) apparent to non-local students. There is an estrangement effect at work, where locals have to make their tacit knowledge explicit in order to engage with international students who see this local as ‘foreign’. That is, we use this local-international friction to teach the intertwined local and global dimensions of the cultural industries.

In this way, we try to build both codified/analytical knowledge and embedded aesthetic reflexivity into the formal and experiential learning process of the programme. Collingwood Arts Precinct (CAP) ⁷ was chosen as one of the field studies because it was established to address the complaints of local independents about the lack of space, grants and market opportunities at the local level. At CAP, we are able to show the students how small companies managed themselves within a local creative milieu. As a public-sector initiative CAP justified itself in terms of authenticity and creative autonomy, innovation and risk-taking, and its design, management structure and ethos reflect this. CAP is embedded in a long-standing (though rapidly gentrifying) ‘creative’ district of the city, and the management themselves share a similar habitus to those they seek to support. CAP aims to be ‘one of them’, and choses its tenants in a curatorial manner – making judgements that involve high levels of shared tacit knowledge and creative ethics.

The ‘Shanghai City Lab' unit, our international field study site, points to a very different narrative. Here we look at more formal learning in clusters where skills and knowledge have been codified, operationalised and monitored against returns. Creative clusters in Shanghai involve a mix of political, economic and reputational/image returns to various stakeholders, few of which involve the creatives themselves. Here local tacit knowledge – at least of the creative field – is less relevant because other external factors are driving the phenomenon. For local creative businesses in Shanghai, authenticity and creativity do not grant entry to these clusters. They need a very different kind of business skills and political capital. The management, seeking profit, either look directly to real estate gains – building what in the West would be unintended gentrification directly into their business model – or to identify high growth creative businesses. These clusters are set within Shanghai’s global city strategic vision which emphases export, foreign direct investment and partnerships. During the field trip, students are exposed to a complex range of cluster strategies based almost entirely on formal, instrumental knowledge. However, to non-Chinese students, this ‘instrumental’ codified knowledge is almost completely opaque. They experience the head scratching moments their international classmates regularly experience in Melbourne. Seeing Chinese students trying to explain the complex, and entirely tacit context of guanxi, and the fluid lines between economic and political actors, is highly instructive.

What is considered local and tacit via these two different field trip studies reflect different dimensions of the CCIs field. This presents a challenge to our teaching as the codified knowledge – theories around ‘creative cities', ‘creative class' and creative clusters – remains to be Euro-centric. As both sets of students quickly grasp, the ‘creative city’ though taken up outside Europe, involves all sorts of practical hybridisation, exclusions, elisions and semi-forced localisations.

Tacit knowledge and experiential learning

Michael Polanyi (1966) talking of tacit knowledge – ‘we know more than we can tell' – suggested that there are two dimensions involved (p.4). Tacit knowledge is mostly unconscious when being performed or applied. However, unless the performers of that knowledge have a self-awareness when teaching, the communication of tacit knowledge will be unsuccessful. The second dimension is to do with the difficulty in codifying tacit knowledge. Symbols in the form of words or images may not express fully and accurately the tacit knowledge. Learning through close observation and copying are some of the most effective methods in tacit learning. However, this prioritisation of embedded, situated knowledge of the local in Polanyi's position poses challenge when it comes to teach those who have not learnt the cultural habitus. The solution to this problem entail very individualised approach to teaching and learning at two levels: firstly, those who teach must identify what are these embedded knowledges that can be mobilised for teaching purposes. The codification of knowledge is one thing, but in the end students will have to adopt an active reflexive approach to their learning styles, which should incorporate their own individual take on these concepts, based in turn on very different personal histories.

We should note also that this is not a problem exclusive for internationals. Many local students also struggle with gaining entrance to local creative field for reasons such as class, ethnicity and gender. For those working in the cultural sector in the West, specific skills are less important in gaining employment than manifesting an independent, or critical way of making sense of the world. To be ‘creative' is an incremental process of building the self (McRobbie, 2001). At the same time, such individualistic self-fulfilment project is embedded in shared cultural and social norms that are exclusive to outsiders, which is why the ‘creative milieu’ is not just a trading network but a way of building a creative habitus, a value system exemplified in places like Chicago’s Wicker Park (Lloyd, 2002), Manchester’s Northern Quarter (O’Connor and Gu, 2010) and others. Concentrations of tacit knowledge in urban centres – Marshall’s famous ‘something in the air’ – include a strong sense of place identity, which can give a certain ‘feel’ to local products (cf. Drake, 2003) as well as provide a series of entry nodes (record shops, alternative retail), scenes (pubs, cafes, clubs) and occasions (openings, concerts, talks) where newcomers can only access by showing ability to de-code and adopt the codified. Indeed, gaining acquaintance with the local cultural field, their ethos and habitus, through case studies, research for projects or essays, field trips or just generally ‘hanging out’ is often as important a route to post-study employment as is the formal job search process (CVs and interview, etc.). Here Chinese students face a challenge, as they often find it very difficult to ‘read’ these areas and the habitus which they seem to manifest and require. Even if we formally introduce scenes (such as festivals), venues and practitioners in our field studies, the tacit knowledge which it embodies is often closed to them.

Another issue of teaching tacit knowledge in our programme is how we measure success: how do we know if it is the right kind of knowledge for these Chinese students in terms of their career aspirations? Although freelance work and entrepreneurship are becoming common in CCIs in China, these are still not considered ideal jobs for middle class families. Many still consider regular hours in a permanent position as the ideal work. The habitus of free, occasional or menial work (in hospitality, for example) in pursuit of a career is not a legitimate route in China. Bohemians are losers not artistic heroes. How can we encourage and enable Chinese students to reflect critically those types of ‘uncertain' cultural work in a landscape regarded in such a negative way?

This leads us to think about a more complex model of ‘experiential learning' based on Polanyi's tacit knowledge concept but addressing issues beyond its initial inception of ‘localness'. The initial model of experiential learning came from Kolb (1984) who proposes a learning cycle incorporating four stages in the designing of experiential learning and they are:

Stage 1: designing concrete experiences which give the learner a taste of their experience by doing;

This model works well with Polanyi's conceptualisation of tacit knowledge, involving those that have the local ‘know-how' acquired via an informal process of local embeddedness (Howells, 2002). It is also applicable from the teaching perspective because of its emphasis on the practical nature of such knowledge – students can only learn by experience (Maskell and Malmberg, 1999) and it is a natural process because such tacit knowledge is intricately linked to its original context (Lundvall and Johnson, 1994). The question we are trying to address is whether experiential learning can be applied in teaching those who are lifted out of their local embeddedness or are lacking cultural comprehension to effectively interact with experiential learning.

Without relevant prior knowledge of Melbourne and the discipline, international students often feel under-appreciated and not belonging in the programme. According to report such as ‘international students' experience in Australian higher education: Can we do better' (Arkoudis et al., 2019), it is common for Chinese students to be labelled as problematic group boxed by negative labels such as ‘passive learner', ‘poor communicators' and ‘lacking critical thinking abilities'. As a result, these students suffer both in class and in developing their social life in Melbourne. Kolb's experiential learning has been a popular theory to justify the field trip model in coursework masters' programmes as a fix to all international students’ problems. But we know very little how receptive these students are to learning in very different urban and institutional contexts.

Starting from a critical perspective, we think a complex model of experiential learning has to address the following: how can we best prepare these Chinese students for their experiences in Melbourne based on the understanding of cultural habitus? What is the value of their prior knowledge and how can we accommodate that? And if we can tackle the above, will it contribute to the learners' sense of belonging in the programme by making conscious connection to the theories of the course.

The most valuable use of Kolb's theory in designing our field trip units is the sense that learners' understanding of their experiences is associated with their ability to act on and transform them. Students can develop very different learning styles in different environments and the link between one's learning history and his/her learning environment is of particular interests. In order to understand the learning styles of Chinese students, we conducted a survey of Chinese students who enrolled in 2016, aimed at understanding the type of learners these students are. The aggregation of responses suggests that Chinese students in MCCIs are very good at recognising practical problems; they are always comparing their knowledge and experiences learnt in Melbourne with those in China; they are more interested in establishing criteria and are looking for their application in real problem solving.

The survey result in some ways does not surprise us. Chinese students are what Kolb would define as ‘assimilators' which according to Nulty and Barrett (1996) are commonly found in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines such as ‘astronomy, chemistry, economics, mathematics and physics'. This is very different to the disciplinary setup in MCCI. The pedagogy of MCCI deriving from cultural studies mainly encourages ‘divergers' and ‘accommodators' who share such learning habits as imaginative, creative problem solving, openness to experience, recognise problems, investigates problems and an ability to sense opportunities. According to Nulty and Barrett (1996), learning style is reflective of a combination of matters including students' individual learning abilities, teaching environment and past learning experiences. In addition, the mismatch between students' learning style and teaching approaches may be beneficial in bringing out the better effects as it encourages students to self-transform and self-direct (Kolb, 1984).

When we did a longitudinal survey of students experience in MCCIs between S1 2016 and S2 2017 following an entire cohort of students in the duration of the course, we found that Chinese students do not seem to mind the different learning styles in the beginning in classroom taught courses. However, the learning styles tend to be in much conflicts between international and domestic students in fieldtrip units that emphasise on tacit learning. And towards the end of the course, such conflicts are naturalised and converted into a renewed sense of themselves – in particular a new view about the city they come from and about China their home country. It might be expected that within a similar teaching environment, Chinese students' learning styles were not challenged despite being taught in different languages and in a different country. In fieldtrips though, where they are required to focus on self-directed tasks, these Chinese students' lack of understanding of the local urban context generates tension and conflicts. Following Kolb's theory, we might be able to argue that because of these tensions, both domestic students and internationals have been made more aware of their learning. And from that, they began to creatively experiment on testing the creative cluster model and theory in their home country.

In the following section, we will show the design of two fieldtrip units based on this concept of experiential learning. Our focus is very much on testing the viability and boundaries of teaching tacit knowledge to international students. Each of the two units employs the cycle of experiential learning. But what is more important for us is the combination of the two in achieving the learning outcomes for international students in the programme. Melbourne based ‘creative cities' unit focusing on conflicting experience (what they do not know) and aims at increasing the awareness of ‘differences'. Whereas Shanghai City Lab, following on from the creative cities unit in Melbourne, asking them to critically reflect on what they know and reflect upon their ‘insider' experience as process of self-direct.

During this process, staffs recognise that the knowledge of Chinese students learnt in Melbourne is more than a matter of simply identifying, cataloguing and providing readily accessible knowledge of western CCIs. Our findings support the idea of ‘cultural intermediaries' or ‘knowledge enabler' – these students are shaping our knowledge of the field through their input in the process.

‘Creative cities' – Conflicts in introducing international students to local context

In the Melbourne field trip, students are required to read about models of creative cities in different urban context around the world including Paris, London, Manchester and Tokyo. To allow the students to consciously reflect on these different models of creative cities, they are asked to work in groups of 5–6 to consider how successful these cities have achieved the creative cities targets. Students are required to reflect on their readings of the three approaches in creative cities. These critical reflections prepare the students with a defined set of research enquires, with which they can plan interview questions.

During the field trip, students are met with local creative practitioners. We have three Melbourne local facilitators: CAP, Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC) and the Renew Australian Initiative in Docklands. Key informants from the three organisations host master classes at their facilities as well as organise tour of their facilities. These projects are chosen for understanding the evolving role of SMEs in contributing to Melbourne as the creative city. As such, students are presented with real world opportunities to intervene.

Students are asked to work in groups to identify different approaches and challenges of the three organisations as part of Melbourne's creative cities development. It encourages students to reflect further on the concept through a combination of explicit and implicit learning. Explicit learning involves structured discussion around key questions/theories of creative cities and assignment design. Implicit involves close observation of ‘work in action' and real workplaces, the need to make rapid response in a fleeting and foreign context; and the ability to transfer existing knowledge from the controlled environment (in classroom) to the un-controllable (in another organisational environment).

Testing the validity of creative cities theories by applying them to the three Melbourne-based case studies. In groups, students are required to develop questions for further in-depth field research involving repeated site visits, interviewing other key informants in connection to the three organisations. This could include policy makers, urban planners, local residents and so on.

Developing an individualised case study of a creative city to further test the models in students' known urban context. Students are asked to do a case study based on the city where they are most familiar with. As such, students are expected to experiment with learnt knowledge.

Post-fieldtrip survey suggests that Chinese students find the following elements particularly conflicting:

How is non-for-profit possible? In one of the case studies – CAP, students found out that it is not run by property developers but a community arts person, Marcus Westbury, who was appointed by Creative Victoria (a government body). The non-for-profit model meant that CAP is highly conscious of contributing to the local creative industries, the vibrancy of urban life in that area and its connection to local communities. At the group consultation session, Chinese students were curious about the fact that a cluster can become ‘public good' and were able to comprehend the different values a cluster like CAP has beyond that of real estate.

Why are SMEs important? Melbourne's creative clusters emphasise on local SMEs more than global corporations. To these students, the emphasis on ‘creativity' as a key factor of developing sustainable and competitive creative cluster is just a westernised value that does not reflect reality in China where clusters are all about attracting global corporations, accessing to global markets and real estate.

What is ‘community' exactly? This is the question that has been asked most often by Chinese students. The factor that community is not a passive status of physically being in a local context but an active engagement process has challenged their thinking about the broad sense of culture as ‘a way of life'. When visiting FCAC, Chinese students began to understand the various linkages between culture and everyday life through an active preservation of ethnic minority community for a preservation of a valuable urban identity of Melbourne as a multicultural city.

Beyond culture and economics? A third case study in this unit, Renew Australia, tried to introduce the concept of ‘culture led urban renewal' beyond the simple dichotomy of culture and economics. Renew focuses on solving the problem of a lack of affordable studio spaces for local cultural producers in Melbourne by releasing empty/under-used commercial spaces to these producers for free. The role of culture in reviving inner city space has been a core focus of this unit. However, instead of focusing on critiques of ‘urban gentrification', we show students through the renew model that the push and pull relationship between cultural industries and market pressure for growth is much more complex than in theory.

‘Shanghai city lab' – Introducing international students to their home context

Shanghai City Lab is an international field trip unit also based on the concept of ‘creative cluster'. It places students in Shanghai, China for two weeks for an immersive learning experience. The importance of embedded knowledge – the ability to understand perceptions and norms in local context plays a much bigger role in students' learning. This provides an advantage to Chinese students who are able to construct knowledge from the readily available memory, events, personal contacts and so on. However, to achieve active experimentation students in this context are required to break away from taken for granted perceptions, our teaching design focuses on testing this.

In this unit, our pedagogical design focuses on how international students will be able to employ their memory of China to critically reflect back on the course and use active experimentation to transfer the ‘Western' knowledge learnt from Melbourne to Shanghai, a very different urban context. When they arrive in Shanghai, a city in their home country, students might discuss their experiences and memory of China with other students in the programme and will be able to use creative cluster theory to develop a view of China that is different to the one they had previously.

During pre-departure sessions, students are asked to review movies about the urban context of Shanghai at critical historical points: e.g. 1930s Shanghai as the first modern city, 1949 the new urban China, 1990s urban renewal and 2000s the creative cities. This acts as a concrete experience of Shanghai without being there. Here we also prepare Chinese students to re-connect with memories of their home country. Students are asked to reflect on the question of ‘to what extent these different urban experiences are shaped by culture'? Here, students are required to reflect back on their readings of creative cities theories and are prompt for being reflexive of their perception of Shanghai.

Whilst in Shanghai, students will attend 2 hours of lecture everyday which set out key ideas of how Shanghai has embraced the concept of creative cities. Different modellings of cultural urban landscapes are presented to the students including creative clusters, art districts and music venues. This abstract conceptualisation of creative cities attempts to make explicit the non-formal and intensive learning experience that the unit is organised around.

These are followed by visiting key sites in connection to concepts introduced earlier. Students are thus required to switch their learning from explicit to implicit mode. The interchangeability between the explicit and implicit we argue has enabled the intuitive response to the question. Students are asked to select an image that represents Shanghai's approach to creative cities which illustrate the theories in a creative manner. During this process, students are actively experimenting with concepts introduced in class.

Towards the end of the two weeks, students work in groups to identify a project of interest and initiate repeated site visits and interview key informants in connection with a particular creative cities approach.

Groups discuss their proposal with their teachers. The discussion aims at directing them to identify different approaches of creative city and their challenges in real world, hence building links between theories and practice. What should be noted is that this process also allows staff to reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching.

At the last day of this unit in Shanghai, teacher-led group presentation session draws out the different approaches of creative clusters in Shanghai illustrated by student projects.

Upon returning to Melbourne, students write individual essay and make a short video based on one approach of creative clusters impresses them the most through their fieldtrip in Shanghai.

It should be noted that our choice of Shanghai is based on careful consideration of teaching context comparable to that of Melbourne. Shanghai has taken a lead in China's attempt to diversify its revenue basis from manufacturing to creative economy. The city has over hundred creative clusters supplemented by critical infrastructures in building local cultural industries including cafes, restaurants and libraries. The consensus around creative clusters for those in China has been about real estate properties and other cultural consumption opportunities attach to them. This has been a primary research engagement opportunity for staffs (cf. O'Connor and Gu, 2006).

Our students became very critical of the transformation of Shanghai during the two weeks' exploration. Those questions they had in Melbourne which were source of conflicts now became their source of criticism on Shanghai: ‘why aren't there any small cultural producers? What is the justification for heavy real estate investment in creative clusters? What's the value of creative clusters to the public and the city as a whole? And what might be the impact of this new wave of cultural developments on everyday life in the city?' What is interesting to us about these questions is the ability of these students to critically reflect on their ‘structure of feeling' (Williams, 1977) pre- and post their study. They demonstrated to us that this tacit knowledge can be learnt and experienced by those who were not local.

In addition, the images chosen by students during the trip show a strong appreciation of the aesthetics of Shanghai's industrial urban past as a textile manufacturing centre. These shared memories of Shanghai carried throughout everyday life have been actively compared to what they have learnt about Melbourne. During the group discussion, a strong consensus was that Melbourne's past has been actively preserved and formed a ‘shared social memory' deeply immersed in everyday practice and the feeling in the city. Whereas Shanghai has failed to see the value of this everyday culture beyond that of properties. Some students think that creative clusters are just government investments that lacked real businesses models to make them part of the creative ecosystems as did those in Melbourne. We also asked them to analyse how Shanghai's revitalisation of its symbolic urban landscape – warehouses, factories and docks, supplies is linked to a particular urban imaginaries of a new globalised Shanghai. Throughout the process, the notion of culture and its practices as a tacit concept was beyond a restrictive sense of practical skills. It is a knowledge about the much broad cultural practices, their contexts and the processes in engaging with it.

Conclusion

This case illustrates the extent to which a course like MCCIs can teach tacit knowledge to international students who do not necessarily share the same local cultural values and references. We argue that such knowledge transfer is contextualised in the careful arrangement of the ‘structure of feeling' with the cultural geographies. We analysed to what extent is local creative clusters capable of contextualising learning with reflexive possibilities. It is conceivable that the success of these teaching experiments situated within localised cultural ecosystems depend to a large extent on those who teach them. We also suggested that a mismatch between the local ‘structure of feeling' and that acquired by international students will result in conflicts and tensions which might be beneficial in challenging the taken for granted norms and social formations in the whole class.

The ambiguity in translating terms such as cultural economy in teaching can be useful in allowing tacit learning to take place in non-formal learning practices such as field trips. These units call on students' ability to be reflexive. The core concept of creative clusters or creative cities aligned with these field trips present real problems to students of a neo-liberal cultural sphere which cities are now part of. As O'Connor (2004) argued, for those involved in the development of creative cities, a real challenge is to address ‘reflexive involvement'.

In our case, the reflexive involvement also includes reflections that are not just about developing vocational skills in how to run events, developing business plans or applying for government grants but also to make them reflect on what are the values of culture in cities. Questions of creativity, urbanity, innovation, infrastructure, history, tradition as well as the local ‘structure of feelings' are all part of the remix – ‘the atmosphere is in the air'. Rather than representing creative clusters as a practical cultural economics project, we present them as a cultural politics of ‘commodified cultural production' which looks to ‘the life of cities as a thing of value for itself – ultimately – not simply to become factors of production'. By following this line, our course opens a space for critique that contributes to the learning of tacit knowledge around ‘how cultural products are produced and consumed'.