In our recent 2025 China summer program, our teaching team, Dr Peter Adjei-Bamfo, Ms Leanne Gaul and Dr Helen Taylor, took the opportunity to welcome a group of undergraduate students and their academic supervisor from Tianjin University of Commerce (TUC) to Port Macquarie campus. The two-week summer program is part of strategic activities for strengthening CSU’s international reputation and collaboration with partner institutions of our China Joint Cooperative Program (JCP). We brought together a range of expertise across economics, finance, accounting, management and entrepreneurship to deliver rich and engaging sessions. These topics were scaffolded throughout the two weeks and were delivered using various engagement activities to enhance the learning experience of our summer students. The experience of team-teaching in this way exposed us all to new approaches and ways of conceptualising a stand-alone two-week program, depending on each other’s insights as well as our own experiences delivering education to international cohorts. We were excited about the program and have lots to share!
Helen shares her experience….
My focus for the summer school was entrepreneurship. I taught on the entrepreneurial mindset and opportunity identification, including developing a business plan. I also wanted students to consider the role of sustainable entrepreneurship. I was able to incorporate key elements of MGT307 Applied Entrepreneurial Projects into my two lectures, but quickly realised that the session-long scaffolding of this subject wasn’t quite the right fit. I further refined content to choose a smaller amount of clear and understandable key concepts to ensure my students could learn as much as possible.
It became important to understand the group’s knowledge of entrepreneurship, and to ensure I could work with the examples provided by students. We zoomed out to think globally about entrepreneurs – unsurprisingly, we found ourselves in the same place my MGT307 students often do, which is talking about American billionaires. I pushed the students a little more to learn about entrepreneurs from their home, and was pleased to come away with more knowledge of my own!
The real through line was A2 Milk – Leanne’s brilliant suggestion for a case study company, with entrepreneurial origins the students could unpack in a reflective activity. We analysed the company’s entrepreneurship story to recognise opportunity identification, as well as other qualities of entrepreneurs. While we concluded that not all entrepreneurs are in tech, invention and innovation was central to our discussion. In our second day together, students were challenged to develop brief business plans and present a two-minute pitch. They considered how A2 milk might think entrepreneurially about new avenues for research, as well as expanding markets into China. The pitch activity was a great note to end on, with even the quieter students challenging themselves to deliver convincing ideas to the class.
Explore the insights from our CSU teaching team
