Teaching International Students

Improving Learning for All

Jude Carroll, Janette Ryan, Jude Carroll, Janette Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134267781
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching International Students explores the challenges presented to lecturer and student alike by increased cultural diversity within universities.

Packed with practical advice from experienced practitioners and underpinned by reference to pedagogic theory throughout, topics covered include:

• the issues arising from international students studying alongside 'home' students
• the nature of learning and teacher-student relationships
• curriculum and development of teaching skills
• multicultural group work
• postgraduate supervision
• the experience of the international student

Teaching International Students is essential reading. It demonstrates how improved training for teachers and a better understanding of the international student can enhance the experience of both and, ultimately, provide more positive learning environments for international students in the higher education system.

Part I

Cultural migration and learning

2
Maximising international students’ ‘cultural capital’

Dr Janette Ryan, Monash University
Dr Susan Hellmundt

This chapter examines the ways that lecturers can create learning contexts to assist international students to adjust to new learning environments. In order to create these contexts, we need to understand some of the underlying reasons for the difficulties that international students can face in unfamiliar academic environments. Insights gained can, in turn, guide adjustments to teaching and learning practices to better meet students’ needs. Using sociocultural theories of learning, this chapter explains how students’ perceptions of what is expected in higher education environments are influenced by existing understandings and epistemologies, then argues for ways of teaching that do not disadvantage and/or marginalise students coming from different social and cultural backgrounds. These strategies are described in more detail in later chapters; here, the focus is on teachers as cultural mediators, opening up a dialogue between themselves and their students.

How learning occurs: construction of knowledge

Constructivist theories of learning place the individual at the centre of the learning process. Learning is not passively received through the ‘telling’ of information by others, but is actively built, or constructed, by the learner (Piaget, 1959). The basis for constructivism is ‘schema’ theory which describes how learners’ mental structures, the ‘schemas’ (or schemata), are used to organise knowledge. Schemas mediate experiences and channel thinking by structuring the selection, retention and use of information (Cole, 1996), summing up what we already know from previous experiences, interactions, and beliefs. New experiences can trigger modifications and over time, our schemas become both increasingly complex and sophisticated and more rooted in the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. For example, our mental schema of ‘football’ will depend on the particular type of football with which we are familiar, and the social and cultural forms of these experiences of football. Our schema of ‘football’ will change as we experience different situations in relation to the phenomenon and will be influenced by cultural factors such as the geographical area in which we reside and by social factors such as our personal, shared or vicarious experiences of football. Language, too, becomes more and more contextual. For example, the phrase ‘Anne broke a bottle on the ship’ will conjure up a very different schema from ‘Princess Anne broke a bottle on the ship’ in those familiar with conventions about royalty and the launching of ships. Those with no such background information and experiences may not conjure up two very different scenarios.

In order for new information to be understood, it has to ‘hook’ into existing categories of knowledge. In a constructivist view of learning, lecturers create the contexts and provide relevant information; learners, in turn, activate their existing schemas and connect them to new knowledge, thereby developing further understandings. Because learning is individually constructed, socially supported, and culturally mediated, learners in unfamiliar social and cultural environments may have difficulty in activating, or ‘hooking’ into, their existing schemas in order to build new knowledge, especially where new information is incongruent. The result can be ‘cognitive dissonance’ or psychological confusion.

Significant dissonance helps to explain the academic shock experienced by many international students, many of whom will have seen themselves as academically very successful. Often, it is more about the cultural ‘distance’ between the learners’ previous and current contexts rather than learners’ previous geographical location per se (Ninnes, Aitchison and Kalos, 1999). Whilst such reactions can be common for a whole range of learners new to higher education, they can be overwhelming for international students as they struggle with a new culture in general and an academic culture in particular. Whatever the cause, the result can be feelings of exclusion and alienation, perhaps damaging self-esteem and further hindering the learning process.

Inclusion or exclusion?

Much of the earlier literature on dealing effectively with international students stressed the need for the student to adapt as quickly as possible to ‘our’ academic tradition (Ballard and Clanchy, 1997) and often saw the differences between students as a deficit (Fox, 1996) with the stress on remediating the skills that international students appeared to be lacking, such as critical thinking. Other scholarship has moved away from a focus on difference and stresses instead the need for creating contexts where students can understand their new situation (Biggs, 1997) and where teachers and all students can value different ways of thinking and learning. Fox (1996) argues that intercultural dialogue provides ‘the critical process of making meaning, of shared meanings, and of building bridges across those multiple realities and multiple truths’ (Fox, 1996: 298). By providing the connections required by learners, by recognising potential gaps in knowledge and understanding and by attempting to explicitly fill these gaps, it is possible to see ‘cognitive dissonance’ as an opportunity for new learning. Bourdieu (1984) describes the social and cultural knowledge students bring as their ‘cultural capital’ and advocates using it to drive learning. Interactions between teachers and learners, and between learners and other learners such as those in tutorials or seminars, can allow learners to activate their ‘schemas’ and adjust them to the new information and insights to which they are being exposed. This adjustment can be just as significant a learning opportunity for home students and for lecturers as it is for international students. These interactions facilitate a higher level of engagement in learning and the development of more complex understandings for all learners. International students therefore need to be afforded full rights to participation and success in the classroom, in order for them to learn effectively and for others to learn effectively from them.

This view fits well with a student-centred approach where space is negotiated for all voices to be heard and listened to. The different ways of thinking and knowing are included rather than the voice of the dominant group favoured to the marginalisation of the ‘Other’. The dichotomy of us and the ‘Other’ is not accepted. Such an agenda creates spaces for personal and professional transformation where there is a shift from student as subject to student as co-researcher with an awareness of who is speaking and who is listening. Knowing that someone is listening seriously is just as important as telling the story.

Such an approach indicates that the role of lecturers is to create a context of inclusion where interaction among international and local students is encouraged and seen in terms of promoting critical and intercultural learning opportunities (Volet and Ang, 1998). The learning context is one where student-centred activities and discussion are considered to be appropriate and assignments are structured so that all students develop critical and analytical skills. By contrast, students often take a surface approach to their learning when teaching is conceptualised as being about what the lecturers do and where their role is to transmit knowledge that has to be memorised and reproduced in exams. A context of inclusion, on the other hand, conceptualises teaching and learning as being about interaction and changing one’s conceptions, and encourages a deeper approach to learning and personal transformation.

Lecturers’ own assumptions about teaching and learning

For lecturers, this means that it is important not to make assumptions about the way students learn because of their cultural background or even the way they look, though this is often easier said than done. We all take short cuts when we teach or interact with students. Perhaps we refer to students ‘from South East Asia’ rather than recognising the variety of their social, political, linguistic, or cultural backgrounds. Perhaps we assume that all students will understand the meaning of a story or metaphor rather than explaining the meaning. But by understanding the nexus between what teachers do and how students learn, we can think about how contexts can change to better support students’ learning. It is not possible for lecturers to understand the previous cultural experiences or expectations of all of their international students, although it is important to have an empathetic and sensitive approach. Lecturers need to create the contexts for students to see that it is appropriate to be included and participate in class discussion and activities (Wallace and Hellmundt, 2003).

Culturally diverse classrooms can provide a host of opportunities to promote critical thinking and intercultural communication skills for both international and local students. Strategies that promote intercultural interaction can provide students with a rich learning environment where students develop the skills to communicate in multicultural environments as well as broaden their appreciation of global understandings of knowledge. The promotion of intercultural interaction requires a range of teaching and learning strategies involving curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment techniques. These are described in more detail in later chapters in this book.

References

Ballard, B. and Clanchy, J. (1997). Teaching Students from Overseas. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

Biggs, J. (1997). ‘Teaching across and within cultures’. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Advancing International Perspectives, Proceedings of the HERDSA conference, Adelaide, South Australia, 8–11 July 1997.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Fox, C. (1996). ‘Listening to the other. Mapping intercultural communication in postcolonial educational consultancies’. In R. Paulston (ed.) Social Cartography. Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change (pp. 291–306). New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc.

Ninnes, P., Aitchison, C. and Kalos, S. (1999). ‘Challenges to stereotypes of international students’ prior educational experience: Undergraduate education in India’. Higher Education Research and Development, 18 (3), 323–342.

Piaget, J. (1959). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Volet, S. and Ang, G. (1998). ‘Culturally mixed groups on international campuses: an opportunity for intercultural learning’. Higher Education Research and Development, 17 (1), 5–24.

Wallace, M. and Hellmundt, S. (2003). Strategies for collaboration and internationalisation in the classroom. Nurse Education in Practice 3, 1–6.

3
Gathering cultural knowledge

Useful or use with care?

Professor Kam Louie, University of Hong Kong

Many teachers of international students seek brief, straightforward information about the students they are asked to teach. How do Korean students interact with their teachers and fellow students? How do students from the Middle East regard their sporting heroes? What topics of conversation are considered impolite for Scandinavians? Teachers who ask such questions are gathering knowledge about their students’ cultures, in the hope that this cultural knowledge will make them better instructors. Before I discuss the merits and methods of gathering cultural knowledge, I should state that teachers who show genuine curiosity about their students’ backgrounds are already well on the way to being better mentors. Far too often, the flow of cultural knowledge in teacher–learner relationships is seen as a one-way business. Teachers who gather cultural knowledge at the same time as they are imparting it are aware of the processes of learning about another culture, and that awareness deepens their rapport with the students.

Yet, the individual ‘facts’ gathered from students’ cultures may not necessarily represent a true picture of the students’ home environments. On the contrary, they could reflect stereotypes that are blatantly untrue, even though these stereotypes may function as a common vocabulary that bonds the teacher and student. While this function is useful in terms of the promotion of solidarity in the classroom, I aim in this chapter to show that gathering cultural knowledge in a piecemeal fashion is inefficient and the understanding created could be based on falsehoods. I propose a more general approach: while it is helpful to gather bits and pieces of cultural knowledge, in the end, it is one’s attitude and empathy towards the whole idea of cultural difference that matters. Using teachers’ interaction with students from Confucian-heritage cultures (CHC) as an example, this chapter will address the complex issues involved in gathering and using ‘facts’ about other cultures and the dangers of oversimplification and stereotyping. I argue that the best method to successful culture work is in developing a meta-cultural sensitivity and awareness.

CHC is used here to refer to cultures in East Asia such as those found in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. Interactions with CHC students are used as a case study because these students constitute one of the largest groups of international students from a non-Western culture who study in anglophone countries such as the UK and Australia. Also, Confucianism has undergone some of the most drastic transformations in recent decades, so that while many people continue to eulogise its virtues, these virtues are often no more than values and beliefs that have lost all currency in their host countries. Educational pronouncements based on such doubtful premises should clearly be used with care. Confucian virtues are ideal for our purposes precisely because of the bitter controversies about their utility and very existence in both their host countries and foreign lands.

Because so many East Asians have in quick succession denounced or embraced Confucianism in recent years (the most tumultuous examples being the 1973–74 anti-Confucius Movement in China and the ‘New Confucian’ revival in East Asia in the 1980s), it provides us a perfect case for exploring the ‘how’ aspects of gathering cultural knowledge. The interpretations and evaluations of the contents and values attached to a culture could change beyond recognition in a very short time. In order to attain the skills for coping with cultural changes, teachers must engage in reflecting about the whole notion of ‘culture’ in general, and about their own cultures in particular. As well as recognising that most cultures are in flux and that what people tell us about their own cultures is often contradicted by other informants from the same culture, teachers should also be aware that what they teach about their own cultures can often be superficial and downright misleading. Just as the most insightful and telling ideas of cultures that we try to understand are often told by ‘insiders’who are most critical of their own cultures, so dynamic exchanges with students are possibly best attained when the teacher is also engaged in critically examining his/her own culture.

One of the best ways of doing this is to stand back and look at one’s culture from the ‘outside’. That is, to live in another culture for an extended period of time (like the students). By joining the ranks of the ‘cross-cultural travellers’, the teacher should be in a much better position to develop an intercultural or metacultural awareness that is so essential to an empathetic understanding of different cultures. Of course, not all teachers have the luxury to live in a foreign country for a year or two at will. Fortunately, an alternative to ‘cross-cultural travel’ is possible for teachers in a classroom with international students. This chapter targets teachers in this environment. I will explore the issues of changes in cultural norms, dynamic interactions between teachers and students, and meta-cultural sensitivity. I will then indicate how these changes affect methods used by teachers to gather cultural knowledge.

What is culture?

Before we examine methods of gathering cultural knowledge, we should be clear exactly what it is that we are attempting to gather. That is, we must ask: what is culture? When I taught a course called ‘Introduction to Western Culture’ in Hong Kong in the 1970s, the content of the course was based on the Great Tradition: Greek and Roman philosophies, mythologies, art and architecture, etc. and their alleged renaissance in early modern Europe. Yet it was clear that the students themselves were interested in the more mundane forms of Western culture such as dating etiquette, dress codes, and rock and roll. And their knowledge and appreciation of Western youth culture was in many ways superior to mine despite the fact that I had lived in Australia for the previous twenty years. With the rapid Westernisation of East Asia since the 1970s, I am sure that the grasp of Western (American) popular culture by the young in Hong Kong, indeed by their peers the world over, is even firmer now.

Prior to the 1970s, academic discourse generally understood ‘culture’ as that encapsulated in the course contents of university classes. Such highbrow approaches have changed dramatically in the last three decades. These changes are manifested with the advent of Cultural Studies as a respectable and popular academic discipline. ‘Culture’ has been ‘democratised’ so that popular culture such as pulp fiction, rap and pop art are seen as cultural artifacts to be taken seriously. When it comes to us gathering different aspects of the ‘culture’ of the international students, it is even more important to be clear exactly which parts of the culture we are targeting. Is learning to dance like Zorba the Greek as useful a culture-gathering exercise as reading Plato? Being a brilliant Classics professor may not necessarily help the teacher understand why Greek or Italian students like particular kinds of music or humour. This seems obvious, yet as I will show in the next section, when less familiar cultures (for Europeans) such as East Asian ones are considered, the distinctions of elite and popular, old and new, etc. are often not taken into consideration when dealing with students.

While abstract values generated by different societies are often taken as cultural values espoused and followed by these societies (for example, the controversies surrounding ‘Asian values’ in the 1980s and 1990s), these values need to be closely examined in order to reveal the extent to which they are still relevant. The trouble with traditional elite values is that they are often ones the younger generations (students) no longer accept or recognise. Instead of trying to find unique features of different societies, it is better to approach the task by seeing all human beings as having varying degrees of particular personality traits. This approach may not yield exotic cultural products that one could gather, but it may provide an understanding of ‘culture’ with which to look at people from different backgrounds.

Geert Hofstede’s analysis (1980) of a survey of over 100,000 employees of IBM in forty different countries is one of the most significant studies using this approach. In this influential study, Hofstede found that the cultural dimensions of ‘power distance’, ‘individualism-collectivism’, ‘masculinity-femininity’, and ‘uncertainty avoidance’ form a generalised framework that could be used to chart the general characteristics of societies, though not necess...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Cultural Migration and Learning
• Part II: Methodologies and Pedagogies
• Part III: Internationalising the Curriculum