发布时间：2026-10-28
Recently, the World Conference on the Development of Vocational and Technical Education, hosted by the Ministry of Education of China, convened in Tianjin. During the conference, the World Vocational Education Alliance held a thematic seminar titled Building a Global Community for Vocational Education Development: Directions and Pathways. Holland College of Canada, a long-term partner of SLARK, attended the event as a new member of the Alliance. Dr. Patricia Shields, Vice-President of Holland College, served as a panel guest. Together with vocational education experts and scholars from China, Australia, the United Kingdom, Southeast Asia and other regions, she discussed international cooperation models for vocational education and explored pathways for global vocational education governance.
The thematic seminar was chaired by Yang Jin, Vice-Chair of the World Vocational Education Alliance and Director of the Vocational Education Development Center of the Ministry of Education. Patricia Shields joined fellow panelists including Dr.Timothy Gilbert, Vice-President of Melbourne Polytechnic (Australia); Cen Yong, Vice-President of Ningbo Polytechnic University; James Llewellyn, Deputy Principal of NPTC Group of Colleges (UK); Songheang Ai, Director of the Regional Centre for Technical Education Development, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization; and Wang Yan, Special Commentator of CGTN. They conducted in-depth exchanges on key topics such as priority project development of the Alliance, two-way empowerment between the Alliance and its member institutions, and advancing the Alliance into a leading international organization for global vocational education governance.
At the seminar, drawing on Holland College’s 26-year track record of joint education programs with Chinese partner institutions, Patricia Shields shared the college’s insights and measures for delivering high-quality international education cooperation. She stated that the value of international educational cooperation lies not merely in talent cultivation and project delivery, but also in continuously empowering partners, generating long-term value, and jointly building sustainable institutional capacity for educational operations.
Shields pointed out that high-quality international cooperation is grounded in mutual trust, symbiosis, collaborative growth and continuous improvement. Over its more than two decades of joint education work in China, Holland College has always regarded quality assurance as a core prerequisite for cooperation. In collaborative initiatives, the college prioritizes student training outcomes while co-developing quality-assurance frameworks alongside Chinese partners. Through regular project evaluation, teaching supervision, curriculum standard review, faculty professional development support and continuous improvement mechanisms, the quality of joint programs has been steadily enhanced.
She highlighted the college’s “Train-the-Trainer” cooperation philosophy. From Holland College’s perspective, international educational cooperation entails not only the exchange of knowledge and resources, but also the transfer of quality-management expertise, faculty-development models and instructional practices. By sharing expertise, the college supports partner institutions in establishing context-appropriate quality-assurance systems and continuous improvement mechanisms, driving project-level collaboration to evolve toward capacity building cooperation.
Panel participants reached consensus that amid global shifts in vocational education, the World Vocational Education Alliance should leverage its platform strengths to facilitate resource sharing, peer learning and collaborative innovation among members, so as to collectively advance high-quality global vocational education development.
As a long standing international partner of SLARK, Holland College of Canada’s invitation to present its joint-education experience at the side event of the World Conference on the Development of Vocational and Technical Education testifies to official recognition of its international cooperation practices by national education authorities and the industry. The practical insights accumulated through the two parties’ long-term partnership also serve as a referable model for Chinese institutions pursuing high-quality Sino-foreign vocational education cooperation.
