Dissertation Example-Learning journeys with international Masters students in UK higher education

Keywords: Affective; self-efficacy; transition; Academic Literacies and Socialisation; educational discourse; reflexive.

 

Abstract:

International Masters students face daunting challenges in adjusting to a startlingly different UK academic discourse within a short time. Little research has been conducted into these challenges and successful transition strategies. A review of learning development literature identified a set of three models, which has not been related theoretically to international Masters students. The latest, critical model, Academic Literacies, especially offers important insights into these students’ difficulties and potential for integration.

This research design explored these learning journeys in depth through interviews in a longitudinal study of MBA and MSc students during the 2009-10 academic year. The rich data were investigated through the qualitative methodology of narrative analysis, with twin aims of recognising similarities but also important differences across the students’ learning experiences.

A majority experienced strongly emotional learning journeys. These followed an affective pattern with a downturn early in the academic year influenced by the degree of unfamiliarity in the new culture and academic discourse, mirrored by a corresponding improvement in emotional state during Semester 2 or 3 as these external issues became more familiar and comfortable. Self-efficacy emerged as an especially important factor in achieving academic success, and students’ progression was mapped against this variable using an established, U-shaped transition curve model.

The study identifies practical learning development interventions, but also highlights the importance of educational practitioners becoming pedagogically self-reflective to empathise more genuinely with international students’ struggles, and to learn from their diverse experiences in ways that can enrich the process of internationalising western education.

 

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction – International Masters students in UK higher education: What seems to be the problem ? 

Research design
Research aim and objectives
A learning journey of my own
International Masters students’ needs
International students in UK HE
Global trends
Internationalisation drivers
Initial research gaps
The problem domain – potential frameworks
– learning and teaching
– socio-cultural adjustment
– second language barriers to participation
Introduction to secondary research – further gaps

Chapter 2: Literature Review – Learning journeys of international Masters students in UK HE: How might                         we help ? 

A cultural collision with UK HE
The need for support
A typology of learning development models
– Study Skills
– Academic Socialisation
– Academic Literacies
A nested hierarchy of learning development models
Learning development related to the problem domain
– Learning and teaching strategies
– Embedded curriculum
– Formative feedback
– Assignment exemplars
– Socio-cultural factors
Summary – emerging research gaps and questions

Chapter 3: Methodology – How can I usefully explore these learning journeys ? 

Ontology
Epistemology
Narrative analysis – exploring similarities and differences
Data collection
Data management
Data analysis
The narrative analytical approach
The value (and limitations) of narrative analysis
Co-created narratives
Theoretical influences
Reflexive analysis
– Inter-subjectivity
– The Inquiry model
– Introspection
– More-to-Life model
Summary – a three-stage methodological approach

Chapter 4: Analytical Conceptualization – What kind of generic model may usefully represent the data ? 

The proposition for a U-shaped curve model
Self-efficacy as a variable to explore affective learning journeys
The U-shaped curve in the educational context
Stages of the proposed model
Purpose and limitations of the model

Chapter 5: Thematic Analysis (Part 1) – What similar challenges did I find across this sample ? 

Self-confidence
Unfamiliarity with the academic discourse
Academic pressure
Reading difficulties
National culture differences
UK culture and language challenges
Local culture disappointments
Critical analysis
Group-working
Intercultural complications to effective group-work
Assessment grades – disappointment and confusion
A disempowering discourse
Key challenges for effective learning development
Conceptualizing an affective process of learning development

Chapter 6: Thematic Analysis (Part 2) – What similar coping strategies did I find across this sample ? 

Newly acquired subject knowledge
Personal successes
Acceptance of others and peer support
Self-belief
Life beyond the Masters programme
Personal growth
On-going self-motivation

Chapter 7: Individual Analyses – What differences did I find across this sample ? 

Comparative analyses: Three female African students (B, D and L)
In-depth narrative analyses: Two Indian students
– Student P
– Student N
Summary – the paradox of sameness and difference

Chapter 8: Reflexive Analysis and Discussion – How have I applied the research findings to my practice, and what are the implications for other educators in this field ?

Reflexive analysis: My learning journey
Challenges and implications for learning development practice
One-to-one support for affective learning journeys
Improvements in teaching
Developing more effective reading strategies
Engendering a sense of belonging: The socio-cultural context of UK HE
Challenges and strategies for effective intercultural group-work
Fostering peer support
Major contributions of the thesis
– Contribution to knowledge
– Contribution to research methodology
– Contribution to practice
– Directions for future research
Key recommendations
Potential value and limitations of the U-shaped curve model

References 

Appendix 1: Initial informed consent information and form
Appendix 2: Original data categories from first coding process
Appendix 3: Codes emerging for the second, affective analysis

 

Tables and Figures

Tables

1. Students actually arriving in the UK and given leave to enter.
2. Numbers of international students attending the School of Management taught post-graduate programmes.
3. A suggested typology of key challenges for international students’ transition into UK HE.
4. A chronological typology of models of academic writing in learning development.
5. Stage 1 Interview questions.
6. Prompts for participants’ self-reflection between interviews.
7. Identified categories selected for affective thematic analysis.
8. Top 9 coded issues within the affective dimension of thematic analysis.
9. Respondents’ original aspirations for their Masters programme, identified at Stage 1 interviews.

 

Figures

1. A nested hierarchy of models of learning development.
2. The affective change curve.
3. Proposed model of international Masters students’ affective learning journeys in UK HE.
4. An affective process of learning development.
5. A nested model of approaches for facilitating students’ learning development.
6. Postgraduate interventions implemented by ELS since 2010 across the spectrum of Socialisation and Academic Literacies approaches.

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my first supervisors, Dr Myfanwy Trueman and Dr Judi Sture for engaging me in the PhD process, and giving me important directions early on. I really appreciate their help at those key moments.

Professor Jackie Ford, who became my lead supervisor, has been brilliant throughout this long journey. I cannot imagine having a better supervisor. She somehow enabled me to find my own way without getting totally lost in the process. Jackie has always been wonderfully affirmative and yet skilfully incisive – a quite marvellous balance. She has my deepest respect and gratitude.

I cannot express how much I owe to my wife, Kathie. She has sacrificed so much of our time together while I complete this doctorate, and has still supported me unconditionally, and with such deep understanding. We are always on a journey together, and she is the only companion I would have.

And to all the international Masters students who have been my teachers too …

 

The world sits in my office.
A Chinese daughter’s tremulous
determination,
her father’s night of tears
both learning unspoken love
now so far apart.
The first time
I strode through four stone gateposts
my heart knew the world
would come to me here.
I only need to sit and learn.

 

Chapter 1
Introduction

International Masters students in UK higher education:
What seems to be the problem ?

 

Research design

I started my PhD in September 2007 when I was appointed as the Effective Learning Advisor at the University of Bradford School of Management. For the previous four years, I had been teaching Business English at the University and with language agencies for students from all around the world. My new full-time job brought me into contact with much larger numbers of these international students, with opportunities for building longer-term relationships, particularly at postgraduate level where around 95% of our cohorts are typically from abroad.

The first eighteen months of the PhD process were spent exploring various aims for my research design, involving considerable self-reflection, exploration of related literature, and discussion with my supervisors. An insistent curiosity to learn more about others from different cultures, combined with my daily interactions with students from those backgrounds, convinced me by June 2009 that the research focus that would best integrate my passion and my experience would be an open exploration of international Masters students’ experience of the intensive, one-year programme at the School of Management.

It became clear to me that I must explore individual students’ engagement in UK higher education (HE) in depth to somehow follow the shifting, intricate patterns of these experiences over the full, but short and intense, period of time they are here. This called for a qualitative methodology that could generate the richness of data required to provide more insight into the meanings that students ascribe to their individual, yet perhaps somehow shared, experiences (Alvesson and Ashcraft 2012, Elliott and Robinson 2012, Maitliss 2012).

So the learning journeys of a cohort of international Masters students over the one year of their postgraduate degree at the School of Management became my focus for a single case study. As Stake (2005, p.443) observes, ‘this is not a methodological choice but a choice of what is to be studied’ (my italics). This should concentrate on ‘experiential knowledge of the case’ with further regard for the context in which the case occurs. My interest became centred in the difficulties and coping strategies of international Masters students as they strive for success in their study here. This fits with Stake’s concept of an instrumental case study – to ‘provide insight into an issue’, and Elliott and Robinson (2012) use that same categorisation to describe their study exploring the internationalisation of MBA education at four UK business schools.

To achieve the depth required, I intended to also become involved in the stories of a relatively small group of international Masters students’ learning journeys, and recount these as faithfully as possible in their particularities – the criterion that Stake determines for an intrinsic case study. In this respect, I would not be actively seeking generalisability to other similar institutional situations, but rather to learn much more about the difficulties and opportunities for such students at the School of Management to inform my own professional practice in the first instance. As Flyvbjerg (2006) argues, one becomes more expert within any discipline through in-depth exploration of exemplars rather than a set of contextualised principles, and a case provides such an exemplar. He explains that expert knowledge accumulates through intimate knowledge of large numbers of cases. In the context of internationalisation, Ryan and Hellmundt (2005, p.13) assert that any understanding that we can develop about the challenges faced by international students can then ‘guide adjustments to teaching and learning practices to better meet students’ needs’.

Whilst my research could be expected to generate some common themes of learning challenges and coping strategies, I also hoped that it would highlight distinctive characteristics of individual students’ approaches to learning in a new education culture. My challenge was therefore to explore how to develop a thesis around the paradox of these two different approaches – exploring both the similarities and the differences among international Masters students’ experiences of transition into UK HE.

Whatever the approach, a case study is inevitably concerned with complexities, and offers the opportunity to explore tacit, obscure and even paradoxical aspects of the case (Creswell 2007). The many, interrelated factors involved in any international student’s experience of a whole new educational culture in a strange country certainly entails a labyrinthine journey (Montgomery 2010, Ryan 2011, Turner 2006). This particular case study set in a management school must start with the recognition that our mission to prepare graduates for success in an increasingly globalised world is delivered within the UK HE system, which in itself presents international students with a range of sociocultural, linguistic and academic barriers (BizEd 2013). This presents an ideal opportunity to explore the cognitive and emotional challenges of progressing from peripheral involvement into (hopefully) deeper engagement with such a new, significantly different discourse.

McLean and Ransom (2005, p.45) suggest that ‘to successfully navigate a new culture is a prerequisite of university success’, and my research study seeks to increase awareness of the transitional challenges that clearly are important not only for the students themselves but also for the future of Western universities. The overall aim and specific objectives are given below:

 

Research aim:

To explore learning journeys with international Masters students in UK HE.

 

Research objectives:

Specifically, this case study seeks to explore:

1. What are the cognitive and emotional challenges experienced by these students on a one-year Masters programme at a UK business school ?

2. How do the students themselves cope more or less successfully with these challenges ?

3. How can the institution – notably, learning developers, academic tutors and programme managers – effectively enable a successful learning journey for the students ?

4. What are important areas for further, refined research into international Masters students’ experience and their learning development ?

 

My learning journey

I recognise that many international Masters students’ learning journeys can be as problematic as they may be developmental. My work as Effective Learning Advisor at the School of Management has involved me in supporting management students through academic and pastoral difficulties since 2007. In this respect, I also draw on my earlier professional experience over the previous 20 years of supporting people on a 1-1 and group basis, including corporate training, FE and HE tutoring, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), counselling and psychotherapy, Tai Chi and meditation teaching. Through those various experiences, I had become increasingly aware that empathy for others emerges out of compassion derived from one’s own encounters with adversity (Germer 2009, Mitchell 2002, Moore 2002). This highlighted, early in my research study, the need for a strongly reflexive element in my research, both in the collection and interpretation of my data. I needed to acknowledge that whilst my natural interest in international students would be a positive asset, my epistemological position is that whatever I am seeing in others’ worlds is always somehow reflecting how I perceive my own world (Gangaji 2005, Mitchell 2002, Ruiz 1997). So although my research is about trying to capture students’ experience of academic life at the School of Management, the significant learning may really be about my own, parallel learning journey. I therefore start this exploration of what it means to be a new student in an alien environment with a story of my own about struggling to ‘master’ mountaineering.

My academic career began around 25 years ago at an FE college in Scotland, where I soon realised that teaching was my true vocation. When I moved up from London, this professional life change also triggered a parallel, personal passion for the outdoors, especially the Highlands. I joined the hill-walking club run by teachers in my college. I was completely new to this activity, but they said, ‘Come along on the next trip, we’ll take you up a real mountain and you’ll love it’.

In February 1987, within an hour into my first expedition with the club, I found myself wading through thigh-deep snow up a seemingly never-ending mountainside. Two other novices and myself were stumbling further and further behind the group of experienced ‘teacher-guides’. By the time we staggered onto the summit at just over 3000 feet, cold and hungry, they were already packing up, ready to set off again. As the three of us huddled down, unresponsive fingers trying to unwrap half-frozen sandwiches, the others were then disappearing into the distance. Not a word had been spoken between these two groups. We just caught the tail end of a brief conversation among the leaders describing the two other tops they were now setting out to conquer along the ridge. A target of three mountains had not been discussed during the long road journey to the foot of the first.

So I was only too glad when one of my companions had the courage to say, ‘I can’t carry on anymore, I want to go down’. We quickly decided that despite the lack of a compass or a map between us (no advice had been given before we left), we would try to make our own way off the mountain. Fortunately, although it could easily have turned out otherwise, we made it down without any mishap, albeit necessitating a long, cold wait outside a locked mini-bus.

This was my introduction to being guided by professional teachers in the first steps of supposedly learning how to become a mountaineer. I believe that many students – and notably those from foreign countries – could relate to most of the above barriers to learning: a lack of advance information; fear of the unknown; misplaced trust in the level of care by the professionals; profound ignorance of the risks and appropriate responses; and disappointment in one’s own, apparent inadequacy, regardless of previous successes in other endeavours.

Fortunately, not all teachers are like those above, of course. I was lucky that one who did care about others’ personal development, but who had not been there that first day, heard about the situation and set about persuading me to try one more trip. That Easter, we travelled to the Isle of Skye, now probably my favourite UK mountaineering destination, and the place where my wife and I were married 17 years later. That second hill-walking expedition turned out to be a transformative experience. As a small group of four, we had a fantastic trip – scaling two major peaks over the week-end, at my pace, with plenty of quiet encouragement, and shared enjoyment. This time, in stark contrast to the previous occasion, I experienced the real joy of an inspiring, truly educational journey.

On reflection, I realise that one of the reasons the Skye trip was so memorable was the camaraderie that I had felt. My more experienced companions had shown a sensitivity that intimated I was bringing enough to the trip to be welcomed as an equal participant, in my own right. I can now understand this reflected the importance for me of a sense of belonging within a group of likeminded people. And on my current learning journey at the School of Management, I am happy that this is something I am also continuing to experience as a valued member of the learning community. I feel that others here, to an appreciable degree, understand and accept me, so that in turn I then gradually find opportunities to share more of myself with them.

 

International Masters students’ needs

This sense of belonging is important to most people (Christie et al 2008, Fung 2006, Russell et al 2010), and certainly seems to be the case for international Masters students in the alien UK HE environment (Bamford 2006, Guo and Chase 2011, Wu and Hammond 2011). My research study’s aim of exploring their learning journeys is partly driven by a fascination with their multicultural experiences of the one-year academic study. What part does a sense of belonging and active participation in the learning community play in their enjoyment and achievement during that time ?

Ryan and Viete (2009) identify some requirements for international students’ effective learning, including those key factors identified above: feeling a sense of belonging; and being recognised as someone with valuable, extant knowledge. International students often report how much they appreciate staff endeavouring to learn individual names, for example, as one small, but heartwarming step towards welcoming them into a university family (Bamford 2006, Thom 2005). Some of the greatest moments in my working life have been when I welcome those strangers with an open-heartedness that seems to look beyond, perhaps even ignore, immediately apparent cultural distinctions. There can be a profound, reciprocal benefit for those of us, who, as privileged Western educators, choose to actively value the inclusion of non-traditional students into our system. We are all living the realities of an increasingly internationalised world, and Carroll and Ryan (2005, p.9) assert that we should not view international students as,

                                      part of an unwelcome, commercially driven change to our working
environment, adding to the demands of our already stressful and
pressurised lives, … [but] as bearers of alternative knowledge,
perspectives and life experiences.

This has become an increasingly important issue for UK HE as class sizes have been continuing to rise, particularly with students from diverse backgrounds. Whilst much of this expansion has been driven by a focus on increasing student entry from non-traditional UK backgrounds, the proportion of international students has also increased correspondingly. Clearly, mass education has to somehow adapt to this greater diversity (Biggs and Tang 2011, Elliott and Robinson 2012).

 

International students in UK HE

The University of Bradford is a prime example of the cultural and economic significance of international students for UK educational institutions. At the time of my data collection in 2009-10, around 22% of the University’s students overall were international, and on taught postgraduate programmes at the School of Management that proportion was over 95%. These percentages still apply at the time of completing this thesis in 2013-14. The top three sending countries to the UK are China, India and Nigeria (UKCISA 2011), and this is closely mirrored at the School of Management Masters level.

Brown et al (2007) recognise that there are different parameters that can be adopted for defining what we mean by ‘international students’. They note this can often reflect fee status, resulting in EU students being excluded from the international student category for the UK HE context. However, for the purposes of this research study, I am adopting a categorisation of international students as defined by Carroll and Ryan (2005, p.4):

students who have chosen to travel to another country for tertiary study
… most of their previous experience will have been of other educational
systems, in cultural contexts and sometimes in a language that is
different (or very different) from the one in which they will now study.

This is therefore taken to include those students coming from EU countries, three of whom were included in my research sample. Most importantly though, I agree with these authors that the use of a convenient label can tempt us to view international students as some kind of homogenous group, which Brown et al (2007) note can then be used in a pejorative way. Rather, whilst my data analysis does acknowledge a pragmatic utility in identifying some common factors among learning journeys in UK HE, this also foregrounds the fundamental importance of recognising the extensive diversity present in any international students’ grouping (Turner 2007).

In the context of internationalisation in UK HE, it is difficult to ascertain an accurate estimate of international student numbers, as there are no central statistics on all levels of programmes at all types of educational institutions. Any data are also always at least 12 months out of date and further confused by different categories of immigration statistics. My research data collection covers the academic year 2009-10, and UKCISA (2010) states that, at that time, 43% of UK taught postgraduate students were international, and this figure rose to 68% on full-time programmes. Yearly trends seem to be quite variable as indicated in Table 1 below.

 

UKCISA (2010)

The data most relevant to a study of the School of Management international Masters students are those excluding ‘student visitors’ as these come for less than six months (prior to 2008, designated ‘ordinary visitors’). In Table 1, this figure for 2009 is 19% higher than 2008, but lower than the previous two years. However, the strongest growth is at taught, full-time postgraduate level, and these high fee paying students are estimated to generate £2.5 billion for universities, and to spend a similar amount each year on local goods and services (UKCISA 2010). It is clear that this represents a critical source of income for most UK universities, enabling not only significant elements of teaching and research, but also subsequent investment in facilities and resources. The fact that international student numbers are not capped in the way of home students also adds to their economic importance. This situation has changed somewhat in more recent years with higher performing undergraduate entrants no longer included in university student number controls. At the time of completion of this thesis during the 2013-14 academic year, the current exemption level stands at ABB entry grades (HEFCE 2013).

As noted above, international students’ cultural and economic contribution is particularly important for the School of Management at postgraduate level. With just over 100,000 international students, Business and Administration programmes were the primary UK destination in 2008-09 – more than double those for any other discipline (UKCISA 2011). Corresponding recruitment trends at the School of Management are shown in Table 2 below.

 

Global trends

Educational institutions need to also adapt quickly to meet other international challenges of a changing marketplace. Guo and Chase (2011, p.308) note that from a range of important aspects of internationalisation studied by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (2006), student mobility is often regarded as the most significant. As can be seen from the above statistics, UK HE institutions face the twinned challenges of a heavy reliance on international student recruitment in an era of somewhat unpredictable demand. Canada, Australia and the US continue to perform strongly, although UK universities have competed well on average in 2012-13 (QS 2013). Adults attaining HE qualifications between 1975 and 2000 in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) increased significantly from 22% to 41% (Woolridge 2005). However, competition is now increasing dramatically from developing economies – identified by (IMF 2012) as those mainly outside OECD – which have a strong commitment to education and training that can produce people with high-level skills. QS (2013) states that, ‘The top ten universities in China achieved a 38% increase in international recruitment in 2012-13. Many of the international students in China come from within the immediate region (eg. South Korea, Japan and Russia)’.

In other developing countries, fewer than 10% of post-school students may be in HE, but participation rates have generally increased significantly (Altbach et al 2009, summarised in MacGregor 2009). These authors believe that global student participation will continue to increase, becoming even more varied, including the involvement of more international students. De Wit (2011) observed increasingly global competition for international students, citing several developing countries including Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, China and India – all currently prominent senders of international students to institutions such as the School of Management – with these sending countries increasingly becoming receiving countries too. Brown et al (2007) cite examples of UK universities developing foreign campuses as a relevant indicator of an adaptive response in this respect. However, they also note that collaborative partnerships are becoming increasingly common between major Asian universities, e.g. Bejing Normal University and Hong Kong Baptist University, in the drive to encourage their national students to study at home. In addition to inward recruitment, some UK institutions are also now focussing on outward developments, such as satellite facilities in other countries, e.g. Nottingham and Liverpool Universities’ campuses in China. More UK universities are at least developing international, collaborative partnerships, such as the School of Management’s own Global Campus with collaborative HE delivery through universities in countries such as India, Singapore and Oman.

In a UK-focussed counterpoint to some of the above statistics, Arunachalam (2008) had noted that 123,000 Indian students attended overseas institutions due to the intensely competitive situation for high-quality university places in India. However, postgraduate recruitment is expected to be negatively affected by current entry visa and employment opportunity policies (QS 2013). Recent changes to UKBA working visa regulations have certainly already reduced our appeal as a postgraduate study destination for Indian students, as evidenced by a dramatic shortfall in recruitment to the School of Management MBA by 2012- 13, when we had a total cohort of only 36 students, in contrast to the earlier figures noted above.

 

Internationalization drivers

Research into increasing understanding of international students’ motivations and challenges in Western education can therefore be seen to be vital in developing UK HE institutional capacity for supporting those students’ success most effectively. It is also no less important in terms of harnessing the rich potential such students offer for intercultural learning as a two-way process (Brown et al 2007). Carroll and Ryan (2005, p.10) utilise the rather brutal metaphor of ‘canaries in a coalmine’ to indicate the wider value that international students have in highlighting why and how Western educators need to respond to the changing demands of students more generally. Yet in her summary of the recent, UK-wide Teaching International Students (TIS) project, Ryan (2011, p.3) contended that this study has shown that international students are still generally perceived as ‘bearers of problems, rather than bearers of culture’, with teaching and learning practices remaining relatively unchanged. This project was jointly funded by the Prime Minister’s Initiative 2 (PMI2), Higher Education Academy (HEA) and UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA), and gathered the experiences of staff and students in the form of case studies from many different UK universities and other institutions.

As early as 1999, Asmar was one of the academics to have considered the dynamics of internationalisation in HE. Her conference paper reviewed others’ findings and also reported on anecdotal feedback from her students at the University of Sydney. She concluded that learning barriers arising from the increasing internationalisation of HE campuses affect all students i.e. both home and foreign. But any discussion about the implications of internationalisation is hampered by the confusion that still remains around its actual meaning (Guo and Chase 2011). Robson and Turner (2007) observe that this lack of a clear consensus among Western educators often manifests in a restricted conceptualisation of internationalisation, at Masters level especially, as simply a lucrative rise in student numbers. The danger is that this can then lead to declining educational standards as demands on existing resources rise disproportionately (LearnHigher 2013).

Many authors therefore argue that the competitive impetus of globalisation has simply been the catalyst for a shift in the internationalisation agenda to narrower economic imperatives derived from a neoliberal, market-driven approach (Carroll and Ryan 2005, Elliott and Robinson 2012, Jiang 2008, Ramachandran 2011, Robson 2011, Robson and Turner 2007). They note that despite the rhetoric of internationalisation in HE, many universities are failing to value the cultural capital that international students bring with them. Institutions are instead being driven by commercial recruitment targets, rather than qualitative changes in teaching and learning policy. Caruana (2010) suggests this can often happen due to a lack of overarching institutional policy, leaving departments to forge their internationalised initiatives. These localised approaches can easily then result in international students being seen as problematical – needing to be fixed by acculturation to our existing educational system – rather than as potential co-contributors to new pedagogic advances in internationalisation development (Montgomery 2010, Ryan 2010).

Globally, research has indicated there is often limited institutional strategic support to match the rhetoric of internationalisation, again supporting the proposition that this has often been much more about marketing rather than teaching and learning (Brown et al 2007, Trahar 2010). There have been some signs of encouragement, such as the discovery in the TIS project that the proportion of international students expressing satisfaction with levels of advice and support had increased by almost 10% between 2005 and 2009 (Ryan 2011, p.9). However, Guo and Chase (2011) still observe a significant disjuncture between the claims from universities in developed countries that encourage international student recruitment and a lack of support to then integrate those students into our academic discourse. They also report problems identified from other international student studies around the world, including, ‘isolation, alienation, marginalisation and low self-esteem’ (p.310). In this respect, De Vita (2005, p.76) identifies the need for ‘emotional as well as intellectual participation’ in his call for authentic institutional initiatives that engage students in cross-cultural interactions.

Guo and Chase (2011) emphasise the importance of internationalisation, which they differentiate from globalisation in its capacity for a positive exchange of ideas and people. And Altbach and Knight (2007) explain that capacity as choices from among a range of academic policies and practices that can address the socio-economic realities of globalisation. There is a pressing demand for institutions to carefully examine which of those policies and practices will deliver the educational and social goals of internationalisation, and so develop their distinctive capabilities for achieving those aims (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Summers and Volet 2008). Leask (2010, p.14) asserts that

it is the extent and depth of the level of engagement with other cultural
perspectives as a normal part of life at university which defines the
student experience of internationalisation.

And, in this respect, Knight’s (2003, p.2) definition of internationalisation, whilst still rather generic, is also helpful to the context of my research study:

the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global
dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary
education.

Caruana (2010) explains the elusive nature of internationalisation as depending so much on context. For some institutions, or perhaps even just certain departments within those, the interest may lie more with the internationalisation of the faculty, the student cohorts, or the programmes on which they work together. Robson and Turner (2007) explored the internationalisation of a humanities and social sciences department, finding a mixed, rather ad hoc set of staff responses. They assert that many of their staff participants were open to the potential benefits of internationalisation and how to best harness those for both students and staff, but lacked the knowledge or a coherent institutional policy to do so effectively. Others also recognise that internationalisation actually presents difficulties for many well intentioned staff, as much as students (Caruana 2010, Pendle Education Group 1999, Shaw 2005). Robson and Turner (2007, p.51) argue that this therefore highlights the pressing need for further research to ‘explore students’ understandings, expectations and experiences of postgraduate learning and teaching’.

Ippolito (2007) emphasises that internationalisation has a far greater potential to develop acceptance and understanding among people from different cultural backgrounds, and valuable effort can be devoted to exploring how international students could inform curricular enhancements, for example. Sensitivity to the need for cultural intelligence among staff is a valuable perspective in the debate over effective teaching and learning strategies (Asmar 2005). This last author argues for the need to globalise institutions by developing pedagogic approaches that enable understanding of difference among all students and staff. Increasing student diversity is a key, positive factor in that respect – a position supported by international students themselves (Harrison and Peacock 2010, Leask 2010).

Carroll (2002, p.2) certainly concurs on the importance of recognising the positive values that international students can bring to the UK HE context. She reports that:

When asked, experienced academics almost always say the most
important way to improve your teaching of international students is to get
to know them as people and to get to know something about their life
before …

Montgomery (2010) agrees that internationalisation highlights the need for Western educators to seek to learn from our foreign students as much as they do from us. And Ryan (2010) observes that these students now constitute a substantial group in Western HE, so this presents an important opportunity to develop a more pluralistic understanding of truly internationalised education. However, it is argued that, unfortunately, this currently remains only an idealistic aim (De Vita 2005, Harrison and Peacock 2010, Leask 2010). This is a major, contemporary issue for Western business schools, which are prime destinations for many international Masters students.

Institutions such as the School of Management are striving to attract as many international Masters students as possible from all around the world to experience a quality business education. Yet, the rhetoric of how well they are enabled to attain that often is not matched by the support they receive once they are here studying in such large classes, and driven by so many summative assessments. This requires educators here to seek to understand more about the richness of the previous learning experiences such students already bring with them, as well as the nature of challenges they face in trying to penetrate our academic discourse – especially those on short-term, intense Masters programmes (Turner 2007).

 

Initial research gaps

So how can we welcome international Masters students’ voices and stories in ways that enrich our learning community ? Little is understood yet about international Masters students’ personal experiences of coping with an intensive ‘cultural collision’ in their transition into an intense, one-year, Western postgraduate programme (Guo and Chase 2011, Zhang 2011). This constitutes a primary research gap that this case study seeks to address.

In her own study of international Masters students in a UK business school, Turner (2006) emphasised that learning support is extremely important for these students who have such a short-term, pressurised study experience. Yet, there is even less guidance on what institutional learning interventions may be most helpful in supplementing these foreign students’ own strategies for coping with the intensity and condensed time scale of UK Masters programmes. This thesis directly addresses that second research gap in the final chapter, which sets out some strategic recommendations arising from a combination of the data analysis and my concurrent learning development practice at the School of Management over the last three years of the case study.

In an era of widening participation in UK HE, much of the empirical research into student transition has concentrated on the changing composition of the undergraduate student body, particularly at first year level (Hockings et al 2007, Robinson et al 2013). Zhang (2011), in his study of Chinese Masters and PhD students’ academic literacy, which contrasts Western and Eastern pedagogic epistemologies, commented that international, postgraduate education is a significantly under-researched field. A large-scale, longitudinal study conducted by Kelly and Moogan (2009) of MBA academic performance is a rare exception of such research with international Masters students. They studied MBA student data collected over eight years across 95 modules at five HE institutions, and identified average assessment grades for international students at 10 points below UK peers. This differential continued from Semester 1 into Semester 2, and to a lesser degree later in the academic year.

The fact that this last study identifies international Masters students’ assessment grades as significantly lower than those of home counterparts reveals, I believe, a need for rich, deeper data on the particular difficulties faced in international postgraduate study, where numbers have increased so dramatically in a relatively short time. In a smaller scale study at one UK business school, Turner (2007) also finds relatively lower levels of academic performance causing great anxiety among the international students on the Masters programme, especially in Semester 1. This corresponds to findings from a recent study by Quan et al (2013) which highlights similar challenges for those international students who enter directly into UK undergraduate programmes at a later stage, often for the final year only.

Until the advent of the Teaching International Students (TIS) project in 2009, which my research study has chronologically paralleled, much of the research that had been undertaken with international students was conducted in the form of large-scale quantitative surveys. These had sought commonalities so that we could learn how to respond more effectively to cultural issues that students are generally perceived to bring with them. There is a value to that broad picture, but there is an associated risk of conveniently categorising students on a national or regional basis and thereby failing to recognise the complexity and heterogeneity within cultures as well as across them. By way of illustration, Bamford (2006, p.13) conducted a survey, which highlighted that a majority of international students wanted academics to relate their teaching to different international backgrounds, yet she still warns against cultural stereotyping.

There seems a significant tension in this field of study between raising awareness of what can be learned from incoming international students, and at the same time being aware of the dangers of categorising cultural characteristics. This highlights a fundamental need to explore individual students’ engagement in UK HE in depth through a qualitative methodology that could generate the depth of data required (Kelly and Moogan 2012). This will provide more insight into the meanings that students ascribe to their individual and unique, yet somehow shared, experiences.

Qualitative research into international students’ challenges has been mostly conducted through practitioners’ case study evaluations of their own local initiatives (Shahabudin 2009). TIS has provided a valuable resource in collating many of these case studies for wider dissemination. These practitioner examples of action research, along with the meta-analysis provided by the TIS project overall, can elicit effective learning development strategies for international students, which will be of practical value for future pedagogic good practice throughout HE (Ryan 2011).

 

The problem domain – potential frameworks

My case study aims to focus firstly on the early challenges faced by international Masters students. As a starting point for possible categorisations of these, I consider a framework from Bamford (2006, p.3), who proposes three problem areas for international students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level who are attempting to achieve adaptive understanding of a new educational culture. She categorises these as: learning and teaching problems due to culture; social-cultural adjustments; language issues.

This model was based on a research study using a triangulation approach involving semi-structured interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. She does report a low return of 13 out of 60 questionnaires and does not specify the number of interviews conducted. However, her suggested categorisation corresponds with my own experience of typical difficulties reported by many international students in my own 1-1 consultations as Effective Learning Advisor at the School of Management, and such a typology is endorsed by others’ studies. Ryan (2005b, p.149) categorises three levels of shock: cultural; language; and academic, and in a subsequent meta-analysis of further studies, she identifies a typology of international students’ transitional concerns: unclear teaching and learning expectations; lack of subject knowledge; barriers to engagement and friendships with home students; language problems (Carroll and Ryan 2005, Jones 2009, Montgomery 2010, summarised in Ryan 2010, p.15).

Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) examined the cross-cultural adjustment process of international postgraduates. In addition to identifying similar dimensions to the above models, they also recognised a range of material issues of serious concern, including: employment, spouse’s employment, childcare and medical treatment. However, their study of Iranian students focussed mainly on research students, who were studying for several years in the UK, and who would therefore differ in those material respects from the one-year, taught postgraduate students researched in my own study. It is pertinent to note though, in relation to the common themes of the above typologies, that these authors also refer to the factors that can affect students’ adjustment as: academic; psycho-social; cultural (including language). In a later study of east Asian students’ adjustment to UK HE, Wu and Hammond (2011) also review a trend in the literature on international students over the last twenty-five years which identifies common challenges of: academic expectations; social integration; language.

So an amalgamation of these various models of international students’ struggles with adaption to the Western HE system is proposed for the focus of this case study as follows in Table 3:

Table 3: A suggested typology of key challenges for international
students’ transition into UK HE

• Learning and teaching – academic expectations
•  Socio-cultural factors – academic and personal relationships
•  Language – academic expression in a second language

These commonly recognised dimensions are discussed in more detail below:

Learning and teaching

International students’ previous educational cultures, in many parts of Asia for example, may have been predominantly didactic, with high expectations of memorised lecture and textbook learning to satisfy examination criteria.

Carroll (2005a, p.31) asserts that such prior experience, which particularly differs from UK HE will have mainly involved:

•  Teachers telling and students listening.
•  Students co-operating in homework to the extent of copying each other.
• Tasks being very structured according to teacher direction.
• A high value on knowing information, but a low value on evaluating that.

International Masters students report that there has been little, if any, requirement for independent learning and critical thinking in their previous education systems, and it may have even been deemed disrespectful for them to be questioning the ideas of ‘experts’ (Turner 2006). The idea that meaning is contested at all – a philosophical cornerstone of the social sciences in the West – is new to many international students, requiring a sudden tolerance of ambiguity that can be quite disorientating (Lillis and Turner 2001, Northedge 2003, Shahabudin 2009). Postgraduate students on one-year UK programmes in particular can find it stressful struggling to quickly adjust to baffling teaching and assessment practices that fundamentally challenge their past ways of learning. Ryan (2010, p.15) observes that a range of qualitative research has highlighted concerns among international Masters students of ‘unclear expectations about the requirements of teaching and learning in the UK, a lack of background knowledge generally and in the discipline areas’.

Whilst we may have high expectations of our students’ abilities for independent learning, many have not had the opportunities to build that capacity before they arrive. Lillis (2001) maintains that this new and dramatically different discourse excludes such marginalized students by not explicitly teaching required writing conventions. Murphy (2009) notes the emerging perception of a need for a shared understanding between teachers and students that acknowledges and addresses their difficulties, which in turn require considerable support for the students to attain their goals. It is the contention of this research study that such support needs to be both academic and pastoral – the latter acknowledging the affective nature of international Masters students’ learning journeys (Turner 2006).

In terms of the graded assessments with which teachers and students can be so pre-occupied, much of the UK HE academic discourse involves producing a certain kind of academic writing through a combination of essays, reports and exams. In the social sciences, this prescribes a particular way of making meaning in texts, which Lillis (2001, p.20) terms, ‘essayist literacy’. Potential academic success is then dependent on the tutors’ judgements of the students’ writing, and how this can often be perceived as not meeting purportedly explicit assessment criteria. For example, Western lecturers can become frustrated with international students’ attempts to draw the reader into their essay by providing unnecessary background to the topic (Carroll 2005, McLean and Ransom 2005). These tutors are seeking a deductive approach in students’ writing in this case, yet such fundamental principles of the Western HE discourse are by no means as transparent as has sometimes been assumed by institutional staff (Bamford 2012). In a broader sense, students are often making assumptions about effective study strategies that do not correspond with tutors’ notions of deep learning (Bloxham and West 2007, Lillis and Turner 2001, Norton et al 1996). It is quite possible that east Asian students, for example, may construe repetitive memorisation of the same ideas to be a means to deep understanding, as evidenced by many approaches to martial arts training (Louie 2005, Turner 2006, Wang et al 2011).

Another important divergence in assessment expectations is highlighted by Lea and Street (1998) reporting on students generally experiencing confusion around how they have not satisfied tutors’ requirements in coursework submissions, even after receiving feedback on these. This is no doubt compounded by the differences in benchmarking between the previous and current assessment systems. Ottewill (2007) reports that one clear difference identified in UK HE was the likelihood of achieving marks in the 40% – 70% range. Many of our international students will have been used to reaching marks in the top quartile in their previous educational cultures. Although at the time of my data collection at the School of Management we awarded broader, alphabetical grades, with only C to A constituting a pass, the latter grade is still the exception rather than the rule. Yet, in my experience, a C grade commonly triggers critical self-doubts among international Masters student recipients. So although grade outcomes can herald self-satisfaction for a few students, I observe that they are far more often a catalyst for emotional lows. Ottewill also confirms an affective impact on international students attempting to adjust to these assessment differences.

For international Masters students, there is a steep Semester 1 learning curve before they quickly hit the wall of summative assessments. An intensive diet of six modules per semester at the School of Management, for example, presents significant time management difficulties to these students who are already struggling with this new type of learning, usually in a second language. The time, space and guidance needed for critical thinking skills to flourish, for example, can be especially limited, especially when tutor guidance can be perceived to be ambiguous.

However, as newly independent learners, students have to feel their way into the host discourse by trial and error, determining levels of self-belief through the consequences of these experimental actions (Bandura 1997, Carroll 2005). This seems particularly true of assignment writing, which Winter (2003) describes as presenting students with great difficulty in terms of comprehending the required conventions. Tutors’ expectations are often tacit in nature, and difficult to explain to those on the periphery of the learning community, not yet versed in the language of that discourse (O’Donovan et al 2008, Price 2005). Carroll (2005) also notes that there may be reluctance on the part of some tutors to be more explicit, for fear of appearing patronising. Yet, students experience confusing disparities between their existing, ‘everyday’ understandings of business management, for example, and the new rigour of studying this as an academic subject (Lea and Stierer 2000). Turner (2007) stresses that much of this confusion is culturally derived as a result of the diversity among our international students, so that starting points of understanding around apparently simple or common business concepts can vary considerably.

Critical thinking can be one of the key ‘threshold concepts’ (see Meyer and Land 2003, p.1), requiring something of a quantum jump in students’ understanding, in order for their learning to progress. Mezirow (2000 in Cranton 2006, p.2) suggests that as habitual expectations are formed from past experiences, such transformative learning can be characterised as:

A process by which previously uncritically assimilated assumptions,
beliefs, values and perspectives are questioned and thereby become
more open, permeable, and better validated and the transformative
process challenges those previously unquestioned assumptions.

However, as this suggests, a major shift in deeply-held beliefs will be required, which is not easily achieved. Turner (2006) illustrates the difficulty that critical thinking poses for Chinese students, for example, as this faculty is traditionally seen as one reached by the end of the learning journey rather than during the process. Academic writing generally, and critical analysis in particular, therefore form a significant element of the Literature Review following in Chapter 2.

Wu and Hammond (2011) note the prevailing view that Confucian education stresses the fundamental importance of hard work particularly in relation to unquestioning, rote learning from established authorities, which contrasts with the more dialogic approach of critical thinking and discussion espoused in the west. Brown et al (2007, p.12) explain how this Socratic questioning, privileged in the UK academic discourse, is problematical for Eastern students for whom the concept of finding truth from within oneself is such an alien concept. This seems to relate to Scudamore’s (2013) recognition of a greater complexity to other educational cultures where the issue may not be so much about critical thinking per se, but rather about the Western principle of reaching and justifying one’s own position through critical argument. So, although this may be an overly simplistic picture of differences in undergraduate education across a developing country as large as China, for example, there does seem to be a general agreement that after the excited anticipation of entering the Western Shangri-La of HE just a few weeks earlier, many international Masters students now feel themselves sliding down a cultural chasm, nonplussed as to where they are going wrong (Lea and Street 2000, Mehdizadeh and Scott 2005). This is emphasised by Christie et al (2008), who report students regarding their first semester ‘as a total write off’ (p.570).

In view of the apparent scale and affective impact of these major adjustment challenges for most international students, it seems incumbent on this research study to explore how this all may affect their academic performance. However critically one views the acculturation process, this is at least where international Masters students’ interests and those of the host institution do quite obviously converge. The question then arises of what link, if any, exists between transitional emotive states and academic performance. Storrs (2012) maintains that emotional states directly affect learning, and this case study aims to explore that possibility further. My primary research may identify which circumstances seem to trigger negatively expressed states, or, even more specifically, diminishing self-belief among international Masters students at the School of Management. This could then provide useful insights into how extrinsic factors of a UK Masters programme, as well as intrinsic characteristics of international Masters students themselves, may affect their evolving learner identities and potential academic success.

 

Socio-cultural adjustment

When people from different socio-cultural backgrounds meet in an environment new to them all, there is a collision of narratives with many different meanings. McAdams (2001, p.112) observes that the modern, socially mobile world exercises particular pressures on people to adapt themselves to ‘culturally intelligible stories’. He suggests that people have to select from among the many stories they find in any new, local culture to formulate their own narrative identity, and Bruner (1986, p.122) asserts ‘when we are puzzled about what we encounter, we renegotiate its meaning in a manner that is concordant with what those around us believe’.

This reflects a social constructionist approach to learning where the self both creates the meaning of the experience and is also constructed by it (Lea and Street 2006). So learning becomes an active rather than passive process, with an on-going personal negotiation of meaning, notably mediated by social context. What kind of new discourse is constructed out of this unique interaction ? This is one question at the heart of my School of Management case study, which seeks to explore the emerging narratives from a small, but diverse group of international Masters students.

For such new entrants to discern any kind of consensus on a desired identity can be fraught with difficulty – certainly in the multicultural student body found at the School of Management. Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) describe the difficulties of adjustment as being proportional to the dissimilarity between home and host cultures. They note how this can have a dramatic emotional impact, which in turn inhibits positive action such as developing social relationships. Guo and Chase (2011) observe, for example, a culture clash for many international students from collectivist backgrounds newly encountering the predominantly individualistic focus of the Western academic environment. The resultant culture shock includes feelings of ‘isolation, frustration, homesickness and despair’ (p.313). And commentators argue that it is these difficult confrontations with the new culture that can severely compromise a successful learning journey (Christie et al 2008, Griffiths et al 2005, Turner 2007).

Murphy (2009) suggests such cultural dislocation can then lead to a rejection of home values, for example. Klak and Martin (2003) emphasise the requirement for long-term immersion to really adapt congruently to a new culture. This could then produce not only a respect for the different culture, but also concurrently a respect for one’s own cultural values and views. Thom (2010) does report on some undergraduate international students recognising the potential for opening up to new beliefs without losing existing cultural identity, yet for many international Masters students, this may lie beyond the capacity of a one-year, postgraduate experience. Turner (2006) agrees that this is difficult for these students so that they may spend much of their time trying to learn how to learn in Western education, rather than actively and deeply participating in that process.

It seems reasonable to expect that this will be an emotional, as much as cognitive, process, and one that therefore needs pastoral and academic support from recognised staff. Ryan (2010) affirms that international Masters students often describe positive student experiences in terms of the understanding that has been shown to them by academic staff. Conversely, she also reports that feelings of isolation can easily develop from a perceived lack of guidance, often stemming from divergent expectations around the tutor-student relationship. As noted earlier, some tutors easily fall back to perceiving international students as the problem rather than the opportunity arising from globalised education and increased student mobility (De Vita 2005, Harrison and Peacock 2010).

It is a concern then to discover in the 2009 HEA Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey that contact time is the lowest scoring item in the Teaching and Learning dimension with:

… only 67% agreeing that they have sufficient face-to-face and/or
virtual/online contact time … and only 71% agreeing that they receive
adequate support from staff on their course (Park and Wells 2010, p.19).

This raises the question of how much intercultural sensitivity is demonstrated by the staff involved in students’ transition into UK HE. Bucher (2008, p.3) warns against the dangers of, ‘potential misunderstandings, bias, conflict and missed opportunities’, yet the onus for adaptation to our educational system is still commonly viewed as resting on the international students, not the host institution (Kelly and Moogan 2012).

For international Masters students, there is, of course, another way to experience the benefits of intercultural development: through their own peer group. Murphy (2009) reports on a number of studies highlighting the dependence of academic engagement on students’ ability to integrate emotionally and socially into their new environment, with friendships being one of the key bridges on this convoluted path to academic success. Bamford (2006) notes that the establishment of friendships and social networks enable students to begin to identify with their university. Yet her international students report difficulties in making friends, and this is supported by Ryan’s (2010) review of qualitative research studies that recurrently highlight difficulties for international students in making friends with home students. Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) observe students in their study experiencing this as one of the most significant barriers to cultural adjustment. Thom (2010) also cites a majority of students reporting a dissatisfying experience in this respect, again highlighting adjustment problems related to social activities in particular, but also involving language development difficulties too. This latter point – the third issue identified in the international Masters students’ problem domain above – is now considered further in the following section.

 

Second language barriers to participation

International students do commonly report in ELS consultations a significant concern about their English language. In a single university case study, Bamford (2006) established that half of the international student respondents shared the belief on arrival that their English was not good enough for postgraduate academic success. Ryan (2005b) too, identifies language as central to learner identity, emphasising that perceived inadequacies in this respect can often leave students somehow feeling they have lost a part of themselves. Khan (2013), reflecting on her own experience as an international student, feels that second language difficulties can easily be equated with being less civilised or knowledgeable generally. And whilst Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) do report that some of their study’s Iranian students seemed confident about their English ability, others expressed concern about not having attended bespoke English for Academic Purposes courses, prior to engaging in UK Masters study.

Bamford highlights a focus group of mainly Far Eastern students who reported that everything was ‘too fast in the first few weeks’ in this respect (2006, p.8). They agreed they would have really needed, ‘double the time in class to discuss the theory’. So they were questioning how well staff maintained awareness of their language difficulties. And certainly my own experience is that international Masters students often report a high degree of inconsistency between individual tutors in this respect. Although some of these students at the School of Management do report barriers to learning diminishing into Semester 2, there nevertheless seems to be a perception that some lecturers fail to empathise with language difficulties generally, instead focussing on rapid delivery of high volumes of information. This is quite a common issue of concern expressed even by those who already have a relatively high level of competence. This can have significant implications for international Masters students’ affective learning journeys, and Osmond and Roed (2010, p.121) recognise the tendency for second-language international students to default to monocultural groupings as an ‘emotional safety blanket’.

Despite apparently positive feedback from international Masters students about teaching and learning at UK institutions (Park and Wells 2010), they do complain about the large volume of the reading and related language difficulties (Ryan 2010, Strauss and Mooney 2011). In terms of a further research gap for this case study, the issue of reading difficulties is of particular interest. Despite the major prominence of this factor in my emergent data – highlighted in the later Thematic Analysis chapters – Ryan (2005b) is one of few authors to specify this as an important factor in students’ transition into independent learning in UK HE. Although passing reference is sometimes made to this in above authors’ exploration of learning development, much of their critique does concentrate on academic production, i.e. writing and assessment. Yet international students clearly face very different reading tasks to those presented in earlier education, where they typically refer to one course textbook that provides the major source of necessary information for academic success within a subject. Ottewill (2007) does raise the interesting point that international students even perceive library staff in a very different way, initially unaware of the concept of an information specialist who could help them to find their way along baffling, but vital, research trails. The complexity of research that is necessary at postgraduate level seems to be especially taxing and timeconsuming, and yet this has received relatively little coverage in the theoretical debates around learning development.

However, despite the perceived seriousness of the language difficulties, Carroll (2005a) confirms my own view that international students can easily over-estimate how seriously this may affect their actual assessments. The study of tutors’ expectations by Norton et al (1996) is one example where English language proficiency was ranked lowest out of eight academic marking criteria, and this corresponds to my experience at the School of Management where tutors will often make allowances for international students’ English inaccuracies, providing their intended meaning is immediately apparent. It can be argued that a focus on language leads to an oversimplification of the problems facing new international students. This can easily assume a deficit model with students supposedly presenting weaknesses that can be resolved through remedial measures.

I began my own career at the University of Bradford as a teacher of English for Academic Purposes on pre-sessional programmes, and later followed the progress of many of those students onto their Masters degrees. My experience has been that English language abilities across all four skills have still varied considerably among those students throughout their Masters study. Carroll and Ryan (2005) observe that even international students with advanced English skills still meet problems with tutors’ accents or discipline-specific vocabulary, for example. Many home students, too, face academic difficulties with reading and writing. Language acquisition alone does not guarantee integration into a new learning environment (Ryan and Viete 2009).

Wu and Hammond (2011) conducted a 15-month study of Masters students, who recognised that their initial aspirations of language development had been over-ambitious. They found that students’ perceived lack of progress was particularly concerned with the practice of academic reading and writing, and I believe this is more pertinent to the real problem that many of our international Masters students are experiencing in transition. Many have been highly successful in their previous educational cultures, yet are now faced with an alien academic discourse resulting, initially at least, in an understandable fear of failure. They may well have never written an essay before, and the challenges of a substantial shift to independent learning, explored in detail earlier, often outweigh any language considerations for international students new to UK HE (Mehdizadeh and Scott 2005).

It is the academic skills dimension, along with that of socio-cultural influences, which therefore form the twin themes for the Literature Review chapter. The immediate question for this secondary research, following the above discussion of the transitional challenges experienced by international Masters students, must be: what could be most helpful in enabling a more successful transition for international Masters students into UK HE ?

 

Secondary research – further gaps

In the following chapter, I therefore undertake a review of relevant literature on learning development strategies to investigate how these may address the problems for international Masters students discussed so far. This concentrates on the progression over the last 15 years or so of three approaches within learning development generally, and academic writing in particular, as shown in Table 4 below:

Table 4: A chronological typology of models of academic writing in learning development

1. Study Skills
2. Academic Socialisation
3. Academic Literacies

Lea and Street (1998)

The literature review firstly relates these models to international students’ experience of UK HE in terms of teaching, learning and assessment. These constitute the first dimension of the problem domain identified earlier, and which is tabled again below for clarity. Notably, this first stage of the Literature Review highlights a dearth of studies relating models of learning development to international Masters students’ learning journeys. In other words, it seems that educational researchers have not utilised the above framework of learning development models as a means of addressing the problem domain for international Masters students (which is re-summarised below):

(Table 3: A suggested typology of key challenges for international students’ transition into UK HE)

1. Learning and teaching – academic expectations.
2. Socio-cultural factors – academic and personal relationships
3. Language – academic expression in a second language

The second part of the Literature Review provides a discussion of the second, socio-cultural dimension of the above problem domain, considering views emerging from a range of empirical studies into students’ interpersonal and intercultural challenges.

Whilst the following chapter does therefore provide some theoretical context to the research study, it is the international postgraduate participants themselves who will provide the rich data that can best address the objectives of this particular case study. Their learning journey narratives provide ‘both beginning and end-point for the main focus of the project’ (Turner 2006, p.35). And, as it indeed turned out, my data collection brought issues to the surface from the depths of international Masters students’ experience that were not readily apparent in my original review of the literature. These included challenges such as group-working and reading difficulties, and coping factors such as selfconfidence and time management, for example. These were therefore reviewed concurrently with the on-going data analysis in an extensive, iterative process that leads into a final Discussion chapter. This strongly inductive approach then draws in turn on further theoretical studies suggested by the data, in addition to those already considered in the earlier literature review.

 

 

Chapter 2
Literature Review

Learning journeys of international Masters students in UK HE:
How might we help ?

 

This chapter reviews literature covering theoretical developments and empirical research around best practice for UK universities to support their non-traditional students’ learning development. Firstly, this examines the evolution of three major models of academic writing development that has occurred in response to the first dimension of the problem domain identified in Chapter 1, i.e. learning and teaching issues. The researchers in this field are usually practitioners too, and this review of learning development strategies is illustrated throughout with examples from current practice in UK universities across the three models: Study Skills; Academic Socialisation; and Academic Literacies. The chapter then goes on to explore the complexity inherent in addressing the second, socio-cultural dimension of the problem domain, again through educational practitioners’ perspectives, which have usually been developed through localised studies or action research in their own areas of practice.

These three models of learning development do not seem to have been linked before in the literature to the two dimensions of the problem domain. Practitioner researchers in the field of internationalisation have not explicitly considered the theoretical models of learning development, covered in this chapter, as a framework for addressing the challenges facing international students. So, following the identification in Chapter 1 of research gaps around the cognitive and affective needs of postgraduate international students, this second chapter establishes an important focus for the case study in exploring the value of contemporary, theoretical learning development approaches in relation to those empirically established challenges.

 

A cultural collision with UK HE

As we have seen from the first chapter, any student, home or international, potentially faces huge challenges during transition into HE (Street 2004, Lea and Stierer 2000). When they first arrive, new students quickly experience a major ‘learning shock’ arising out of the physical, social and emotional upheaval of what is often their first major life transition (Griffiths et al 2005, Sedgley 2012b, Turner 2006). Murphy (2009) observes that the move to HE involves creating a new identity and way of life that, even for home students at undergraduate level, may well conflict with existing cultural identity. These challenges are compounded by the nature of contemporary UK HE, which is characterised by independent learning – requiring a shift from a dependent student identity to one of relative autonomy. Whilst students’ complex interactions with conducive learning contexts can encourage opportunities for self-direction, many international Masters students experience significant affective challenges during this transition into UK HE (Turner 2006).

Despite widespread research over the last twenty years into the cognitive processes of learning development (Biggs and Tang 2011, Entwhistle 2000, Gibbs 1992), the literature is more limited in respect to the affective dimensions of learning. Yet Storrs (2012, p.1) observes that new academic demands and group dynamics for international Masters students entering the Western education system provokes a ‘vicissitude of conflicting emotions correlated with achievement and productivity’. This turbulent learning journey can be a most anxious, confusing experience for many students, perhaps because it involves a new and strangely undisciplined freedom. That can be quite disorientating, often leading to unconscious work avoidance mechanisms, for example. Procrastination, at the very least, is a common outcome. For international Masters students in particular, who are often carrying the burden of heavy family investments onto such a short, intensive programme, this is a luxury they cannot afford (Carroll and Ryan 2005).

So, whilst the andragogy of independent learning has been sweepingly adopted by UK universities, it could be viewed as an ideal but remote vision for many incoming students, especially in their first few months. The first steps into university education will require international Masters students to move towards a much more self-sufficient form of learning – taking responsibility for finding the relevant study resources themselves, for example (Christie et al 2008). Yet their previous, teacher-dependent cultures mean that new students are often significantly challenged by UK university expectations of individual, critical thought. Storrs (2012) observes that new challenges of critical thinking and writing expectations provoke a range of emotions in students, and Christie et al (2008) emphasise the emotional impact resulting from a sense of loss on two counts in this process of confusing transition: students may feel they have suddenly lost their knowledge of how to learn effectively; and they also no longer seem to know what is expected of them in producing their work for assessment.

Educators, of course, have long considered such confrontations as potential opportunities for learning (Jarvis 1987). It is at these points of confusing transition, where different ideas challenge existing knowledge, that possibilities for new understanding arise, although Jarvis does caution that too great or too small a disjuncture may well lead to meaninglessness rather than newly constructed meanings. Towards the end of each year at the School of Management, students have certainly reported in my consultations that they appreciate how much they have grown personally through the process of having to adapt to more critical, evaluative forms of thinking, for example. They often recognise that this personal development has been achieved because of how far the new ways of thinking had forced them beyond previous intellectual and emotional ‘comfort zones’. Leask (2010, p.8) confirms similar findings from her study of international students’ university experience, suggesting that the students’ own foregrounding of the educational value of ‘knowledge of self’ indicates an affective as well as cognitive level of engagement on their learning journeys. This recognition therefore informs part of my approach to interviews – to explore the extent to which such a transformative process may be typical of international students’ successful adaptation during the intense, one-year, postgraduate learning journey.

However, students at the School of Management also often report, initially at least, that they ‘don’t get’ skills such as critical analysis because they are so unfamiliar (Sedgley 2010a). Lillis (1999, p.127) asserts that such confusion is not about the individual, but is symptomatic of how those least familiar with UK universities’ academic conventions are confounded by ‘an institutional practice of mystery [that] is ideologically inscribed’. Catt and Gregory (2006, p.26) emphasise that there is ‘an important distinction between productive struggle and hopeless floundering’, and to expect students to move to the UK autonomous learning model, underpinned by critical thinking, without some form of acculturation process seems a potential recipe for bewilderment.

 

The need for support

Tennant and Pogson (1995) suggest that learning is therefore dependent on some form of mediated experience – that the learners’ experience alone is not necessarily sufficient. Students need to quickly grasp an understanding of the new academic expectations, and develop appropriate learning strategies for matching them accurately (Sedgley 2012b). Catt and Gregory (2006, p.29) agree that there certainly seems a need for ‘a more explicit awareness of students’ writing practices in higher education and the importance of tutorial intervention’.

There has actually been considerable agreement for some time on this need for supported and graduated acculturation into the new discourse. Even in 1986, Bruner was already proposing that this can be achieved if the students are helped to explore a subject in ways that excite new ideas but also still fit broadly with existing ways of thinking. Bloxham and West (2007, p.85) suggest the need for tutors to ‘reframe the specialist discourse in language [the students] find familiar’, whilst Northedge (2003, p.31) comments that because students are working their way in from outside, they need help focussing on what constitutes, ‘intelligent, creative use of the discourse’. Any new student – at postgraduate or undergraduate level – would therefore seem to need what Shahabudin (2009, p.20) calls the ‘scaffolding frameworks’ that can help them move from directed to independent study in ways that inspire interest in new forms of learning.

These concepts of learning support have developed within the political context of the massification phenomenon of the last two decades, which in itself has led to widespread fears among many university tutors of declining academic standards (Biggs and Tang 2011, Robson and Turner 2007). These concerns derived from negative perceptions of rapidly expanding student diversity, especially relating to poorer written and spoken communication abilities of nontraditional students (both international and home). Between 1987 and 1992, for example, student numbers in UK HE doubled, driven by twin, political agendas of widening participation and recruitment overseas, but without necessarily corresponding increases in educational resources (LearnHigher 2013). The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1997) report, commonly referred to as the Dearing Report, called for dramatic pedagogic responses, based on the need for students to have appropriate support and guidance in their academic work to make the most effective use of their investment in HE. This was a major catalyst for the emergence of a distinct learning development discipline, and all UK universities now have some form of centralised learning support unit and / or departmental versions of that provision (Shahabudin 2009).

It is this emergent discipline, post-Dearing, of what originally tended to be termed learning support, and which has latterly become more widely understood as learning development, that forms the major theoretical focus of this chapter (Hilsdon 2013). It was against the massification backdrop of perceived falling educational standards that two researchers, Lea and Street (1998), received funding from ESRC to investigate that phenomenon. Their study at two major UK universities established a typology of three approaches to learning development that has since been adopted by many researchers into academic writing (see Bloxham and West 2007, Ivanic et al 2000, Lillis 2006, Wingate 2006). This framework is used as a focus for this chapter review of the subsequent literature in the field of learning development.

 

A typology of learning development

As noted above in Table 4, the three models identified by Lea and Street (1998) are:

1. Study Skills
2. Academic Socialisation
3. Academic Literacies

Whilst the chronological development of these models over the last twenty years or so has broadly followed that sequence, it must first be noted that Lea and Street (1998, p.158) do not see these in a strict linear time dimension or as mutually exclusive, but rather, they observe ‘that each model successively encapsulates the other’. In later research (2006), they have since recognised that the proposition to consider the three models together provides a usefully holistic framework for research designed to enable better understanding of academic writing, and to encourage more reflection on pedagogic practice. Again, this resonates with my research objectives and encouraged me to adopt their typology for this study.

This literature review argues that Study Skills and Academic Socialisation have generally evolved organically within university learning development departments as practical responses to the twin, political agendas of widening participation and internationalisation. These are therefore notably undertheorised as distinct models in their own right – most academic research studies into the effectiveness of these models of academic writing support have been subsequent, small, localised, empirical evaluations (LearnHigher 2013). Whilst these two skills models remain generally well-established as the prevailing form of learning development within institutions (Lea and Street 2006, Zhang 2011), they have been significantly critiqued by researchers from an Academic Literacies perspective.

However, this latter theoretical view has proved more difficult to apply in practice. Consequently, much of the current learning development practice in UK HE, including the School of Management, involves a rather uncertainmixture of these models’ delivery. Much of the remainder of this chapter is therefore devoted to a review of the Academic Literacies critique of the two earlier skills approaches, considering: the relative merits of all three models; what sets them apart from each other; and yet how they may actually be harnessed together (LearnHigher 2013). This explores a potential synergy among the three models related directly to the objectives of this research study, namely: how to enable the diverse cohorts of international Masters students to develop learning strategies to contend effectively with the academic challenges they meet on their postgraduate journeys in UK HE.

There are significant distinctions between the three models in their conceptualisation of the academic challenges to be addressed and how to best address those in practice (LearnHigher 2013). So each model will now be considered in more detail:

The Study Skills model

The changing composition of the student body in the 1990s led to an emergence of Study Skills programmes in UK HE (Ryan and Carroll 2005). This ‘deficit’ model provision, as it is sometimes known, seemed to evolve as a pragmatic response by university learning support departments to the perceived learning difficulties presented among the widening student participation from non-traditional backgrounds. Christie et al (2008) observe that a discourse of educational management policy developed around this approach, based on the belief that the reasons for lower academic performance rested with the attributes of individual students. This follows a prevailing view at that time of writing literacy as an individual, cognitive skill, irrespective of context, that could be readily transferred across different disciplines (Lea and Street 2006).

This practitioner driven model concerned with a transmission of knowledge seemed to derive from existing behavioural and experimental psychology approaches in education – viewing students’ learning difficulties as pathological. Commentators have observed that UK HE had previously been typified by exclusivity, with tutors teaching within an elitist paradigm that revolves around the concept of a typically ideal university student, who already possessed welltrained academic capabilities, and against whom all others are measured. Any student who then seemed unable to match the stringent academic expectations in UK HE was regarded as deficient, and, in this prevailing pedagogic culture characterised by psychological conceptualisations of failure, needed to somehow be ‘fixed’ (Lea and Street 2006, Zhang 2011). McLean and Ransom (2005) argue that this is a kind of hangover from pre-massification times of Western education, before the growth of significant diversity among both home and international students.

The emphasis in Study Skills approaches seeks to atomise writing skills necessary for successful academic performance into distinct categories, such as grammar (Zhang 2011). These ‘surface’ language issues are seen as deficits pertaining to individual students, which can then be fixed through instruction based on generic strategies for good practice (Lea and Street 1998). Biggs and Tang (2011) confirm a link between the deficit model and surface learning, and note the prevalence of this approach still pertaining to much of global HE. Yet, Kennell (2010) questions the relevance of any Study Skills programme, as there are limitations to how far such generic guidance can be followed to reliably improve academic performance. Writing from her perspective as a student, she reports feeling more inclined to trust her own, existing techniques and resources, although she is writing from the perspective of a mature, British, postgraduate learner. Perhaps if anything, this highlights the contrast with international students, many of whom are inclined to grasp any type of inductive support they can find at the early stages of a bewildering transition into UK HE.

In practical terms, Study Skills approaches have tended to utilise remedial, generic workshops and 1-1 support for students seen as lacking in abilities needed to succeed in the Western academic discourse. For learning developers, directive support targeting the new learners’ apparent deficiencies, rather than the implicit assumptions of our own academic culture, can easily seem to provide a necessary understanding of generic reading and writing requirements (Sedgley 2011). Students themselves can inadvertently collude with this deficit model – Zhang (2011) notes for example, that most of the Chinese postgraduates interviewed in his study highlighted a personal deficiency in technical writing skills themselves as a perceived problem and appreciated any kind of support for that.

Lea and Street (2006) recognise a place for Study Skills practice in the discipline of learning development for enabling students to grasp essential conventions within a new educational culture. This might be likened to a first level of a ‘hierarchy of learning needs’, perceived as necessary for students to grasp before being able to progress to higher levels of individual reflection, questioning and critical thinking. Zhang (2011, p.54) too, despite some clear reservations about the ultimate limitations of Study Skills, makes the observation about Chinese postgraduate students in his research study that:

Only when they overcome the constantly encountered surface language
problems will they be able to go beyond the surface features of language
form and delve into the deeper levels of epistemology in their writing.

It is not surprising then that most UK universities still offer some version of Study Skills support, often quite extensively, based on historical precedents set ‘in-house’ over the last ten or fifteen years (LearnHigher 2013). However, from a more objective perspective, Gibbs (1992) confirms that an overt focus on Study Skills can encourage a surface approach to learning, which in itself leaves the student rooted in previous limitations of passive learning from previous educational cultures. This may well inhibit progression from a memorising approach to higher levels of critical thinking required in UK HE (Marton et al 1997). So students can readily ‘buy into’ that approach, based on habitual dependency.

Kelly and Moogan (2009) reason that international Masters students’ difficulties with adaptation to the UK HE system can take the full duration of a Masters degree programme to overcome, and are compounded by this institutional deficit model of learning development. The perception that the problem rests with the student, and not with barriers pertaining to the academic discourse itself, does not deal with root causes of learning difficulties. They propose that there is a need for a review of curricula, teaching and support so that international students gain a much fuller educational experience from their short time in the UK. This coincides with others’ calls for tutors to become more reflective practitioners around unchallenged pedagogic issues that are culturally embedded within the discourse, including the personal and institutional assumptions that drive these (Brown et al 2007, Ryan 2005a).

Zhang (2011) also notes that support for surface writing issues will not address discipline- and culture-specific barriers to academic engagement. A further explanation for international Masters students’ learning problems could be the gaps between academic staff’s expectations and students’ interpretations of what is required (Lea and Street 1998). In a study of undergraduate psychology students, for example, Norton et al (1996) established a mismatch between tutors’ stated expectations and the students’ perceptions of the assessment criteria. Whilst tutors were affirming the value of a deep approach to building an argument, students believed that good marks were given for other tactics related to more surface issues of knowledge description.

The Academic Socialisation model

It is argued that staff should aim to bridge that gap in understanding with an approach that goes beyond remedying apparent writing deficiencies. In this second model, Academic Socialisation, students are seen as novices, ignorant of discourse practices, who must be acculturated into the academic conventions of the learning community (Bamford 2006, Bloxham and West 2007, Gibbs 1994). Consequently, this model of HE academic writing attributes a role to tutors of orientating students to a new learning culture and enabling them to interpret the requirements of academic tasks (Lea and Street 2006, O’Donovan et al 2008, Sedgley 2012b). Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) suggest that universities could facilitate more realistic expectations of university life generally among new international arrivals, and so enable easier adjustment. As Western educators, many of us are engaged in some kind of socialisation process based on the idea that there is an objectified discourse into which we can bring students.

Deriving more from social psychology and constructionism, Academic Socialisation primarily aims to induct students into the new educational culture more quickly and effectively by helping them to accurately interpret the set academic tasks of that discourse (Vygotsky 1978). Ryan and Hellmundt (2005, p.14) affirm social constructionism as a student-centred approach to learning based on an understanding that students will assimilate new ideas in relation to their own existing ‘schemata’, derived from formative socio-cultural influences. The greater the cognitive dissonance between those schemata and new ideas, the greater the resulting confusion. These authors argue that this explains the ‘academic shock’ that they observe many international students experiencing, which involves significant emotional impacts, including a sense of alienation.

This connects, more broadly, with the idea covered in Chapter 1 of students in transition experiencing what is commonly referred to as ‘culture shock’. Van Maanen (1988, p.3), in his meta-analysis of cultural studies, summarised culture as intangible, yet nonetheless referring to,

The knowledge members of a given group are thought to more or less
share; knowledge of the sort that is said to inform, embed, shape, and
account for the routine activities of the members of the culture.

For international Masters students new to UK HE, their ignorance of this discourse – knowledge of the appropriate educational activities – can often feel like the main barrier to acculturation. Their understanding of academic standards is likely to be seriously inhibited, and this has emotional repercussions. Students’ academic self-confidence can be significantly undermined, for example, by uncertainty around how much reading is expected and what type of written work to submit (Christie et al 2008, Sedgley 2011, Turner 2006). This is reinforced by Kennell (2010), citing her anxiety as an MBA student when submitting early courseworks, particularly around the potential damage to self-esteem from dreaded poor grades. Academic Socialisation can therefore seem to offer a more sensitive appreciation of the students as learners within a socio-cultural context, thereby providing a key to unlock the door into meaningful participation (Lea and Street 1998).

In the practical context of supporting international students’ learning journeys in UK HE, commentators observe that simple exposure to different cultural values does not lead to authentic internationalisation (Carroll 2005, Thom 2010). In many institutions, an explicit approach to socialisation is therefore taken through teaching of appropriate conventions, especially those in academic writing. Stand-alone workshops focussing on academic skills such as critical analysis, referencing or argument coherence therefore now constitute a significant element of learning support at most UK universities (Sedgley 2012b, Shahabudin 2009, Wingate 2006). Thom (2011), for example, reports enthusiastic levels of attendance and positive feedback from her programme of Semester 1 ‘Master Classes’ workshops at Sheffield University. At the School of Management, ELS runs a similar series of workshops, ‘Assignment Success’, and we receive feedback from students that their academic understanding is improving accordingly, and with it, greater self-belief (Sedgley 2010). I also receive considerable feedback about how 1-1 support has really made a difference to students, at least partly in terms of higher grades that they achieve.

Some UK university departments have developed credit-bearing, study skills units for inclusion into undergraduate programmes, often at foundation or first year level (Leeds University 2013, Oxford Brookes University 2013, Sheffield University 2012). This has also been the case at the School of Management, where there is still a first-year compulsory module, Student Self-Development, which includes academic skills, and, until recently, a second-year elective, Writing for Academic and Professional Purposes. However, as at many other universities, these are not replicated at postgraduate level.

Lea and Street (1998) report that the Academic Socialisation approach to skills development is the one recognised most by the students, who value its investment in tutor-student interaction. This is based around significant learning processes within the UK HE discourse, such as matching tutors’ expectations around assignment questions, and feedback on written submissions (Sedgley 2010b). It is suggested that students also believe this approach offers more acknowledgement of the importance of their own voice, yet the explicit Academic Socialisation model has been criticised, to some extent at least, as another version of the skills deficit approach. It is argued that this seems to broadly ignore any contestability of institutional practices, notably issues of power, and so still places the main responsibility for the ‘literacy problem’ firmly with the individual (Lea and Street 2006, 1998, Lillis 2001).

In my experience of working with academic tutors, successful academic strategies are often perceived to be competencies largely within students’ internal locus of control. Tutors sometimes therefore argue that a primary reliance on skills-based approaches can be justified by the belief that the problems of academic performance derive from the mass recruitment of nontraditional students, including those from abroad, and their lack of inherent, relevant skills (LearnHigher 2013). Yet critics of these first two models of learning development argue that this position seems to ignore the institutional context, and limits the extent of reflection on learning development that seems to be demanded by the Dearing Report, which was instrumental in prompting the formalisation of these approaches (Lea and Street 2006). The UK educational environment presented by institutions such as the School of Management purports to empower students to optimise their own positive outcomes through adopting effective self-management, interpersonal and academic strategies. Yet, within the field of internationalisation specifically, commentators challenge this ‘rosy’ view of independent learning, and it has been suggested that universities should now be examining how the dominant discourse may actually disempower international Masters students in particular (Brown et al 2007, Trahar 2010).

This is an uncomfortable proposition for many of us in Western academia, especially when, in my experience, the students themselves arrive with such a learned reverence for the institution of British education. In the case of academic writing development at the School of Management, for example, there seems to be a widespread belief among academic staff that there are explicit rules, which can be readily transmitted from teacher to learner. These are, however, often then expressed in feedback on written work in such general terms as ‘insufficient depth’, ‘more analysis needed’, ‘lack of clarity’. Such terms are unclear to students who are not already experienced practitioners of this discourse, and when asked, tutors are sometimes unable to specify how these writing problems occurred or how they could be redressed (Lea and Street 2006).

It is argued that such tutors do not realise that their own ‘good practice writing’ representations actually stem from subtle epistemological positions established over many years, making meaning through reading and writing in their disciplinary knowledge history, rather than from incontestable, universal standards (Robson and Turner 2007). Lea and Street quote one tutor in their study as saying, ‘I know a good essay when I see it, but I cannot describe how to write it’ (1998, p.163). In a recent lecture, to which I was contributing some student guidance, one of my colleagues commented, ‘We are all still learning through our writing practice’ (Glaister 2012).

This recognition of an opaque discourse with multivariate, elusive shades of meaning has led contemporary commentators on internationalised education to argue the need for tutors to become more knowledgeable about their own academic ‘rules’ and practices as a prerequisite for realising the disadvantage at which these place international Masters students (Carroll 2005, Louie 2005, Turner 2006). They confirm the idea that tutors have subtly developed a set of mainly unconscious pedagogic beliefs over time as they became gradually absorbed into a system of disciplinary norms concerning teaching, learning and assessment. The latter factor in particular is one that Slee (2010) emphasises universities need to address because traditional assessment practices do not embrace growing cultural diversity, and have so far generally failed to address the related needs of genuine internationalisation (Elliott 2008).

Such cultural norms remained relatively unchallenged within many tertiary institutions, yet the arrival of international Masters students heralds the opportunity for tutors to step back and evaluate more critically exactly what these academic assumptions are, and whether they may need to be readdressed now that the composition of their student body has changed. Carroll (2005) asserts that a process of deliberately making this discourse increasingly transparent dispels the myth that international Masters students can easily adopt Western academic practices. Instead, this allows tutors to understand what can and cannot be assimilated, particularly within the short time frame of a UK postgraduate programme. Turner (2006) cautions that we can otherwise be setting up some international Masters students for failure in social sciences such as management.

Commentators highlight the risks of pedagogic imperialism that are implicit within skills-based perspectives of international students’ homogeneity (McLean and Ransom 2005, Ottewill 2007, Turner 2006). These critics present a different reality of a highly variegated student population. They suggest that these first two approaches ignore the legitimate needs of a much more diverse group of students for extra teaching and support that takes account of their existing learner identities and seeks to enable their participation in the new learning community (Northedge 2003).

So it is argued that there is still a prevailing assumption in the widespread usage of the skills approaches to learning development that our students constitute a homogenous, deficient group, to whom a ‘solution’ can be applied by teaching academic production as a set of universal skills. It can be seen to be sufficient to provide a range of support mechanisms, such as voluntary workshops, in parallel to the subject curriculum. However, in addition to ignoring the clearly heterogeneous nature of not only students but also teachers, this then creates an additional burden on hard-pressed international Masters students in particular for language and study skills support (Lillis 2001, Peelo and Luxon 2007, Thom 2010). In doing so, both the skills models have been criticised for separating the act of writing from the process of learning. There is a danger, it is suggested, of students then divorcing the idea of successful study from subject knowledge, identifying a discrete ‘toolkit’ for passing assignments without the need for deep engagement in the actual course of study (Cottrell 2001, Wingate 2006). This is a particular concern for international postgraduate students, who may also be struggling with subject knowledge understanding. Significant numbers of Masters students at the School of Management, for example, have studied non-management subjects such as engineering or IT at undergraduate level, and many of them are already facing second language difficulties generally, compounded by the challenge of a new disciplinary vocabulary.

Writing, among other aspects of learning, is understood to be situated in a particular context: on entering UK HE, international students must learn to write in a certain way, and it is argued that they can only be integrated into this new culture by participation and practice, rather than simply through induction programmes, for example (Street 2004, Wenger 1998). In other words, international Masters students need what Northedge (2003, p.21) would describe as the movement from ‘vicarious’ to ‘generative’ participation. This acknowledges the effectiveness of learning by doing, rather than simply observing and modelling concepts symbolically (Bandura 1977a, Pajares 2008). This active approach to learning resonates with the principle of constructive alignment espoused by Biggs (1996), which recognises that students already have important capabilities to bring to the new learning situation. These theoretical views establish an essential role for tutors in offering opportunities for participation that enable students to move from the periphery towards the centre of that community – a prerequisite for effective learning (O’Donovan et al 2008).

Cook (2009) argues that institutions are really in control of most issues concerning why students fail, and so it is our responsibility to somehow remedy a misalignment between HE and students’ previous educational cultures. Biggs and Tang (2011) agree that institutional improvements in teaching and learning represent the main opportunity for managing the academic diversity that is now the reality of Western HE. It can be argued that this should include understanding more about the ways in which international Masters students have successfully adapted to their earlier environments, so we can explore ways of ‘up-skilling’ them, rather than implementing remedial or perhaps even socialisation programmes.

Academic writing, for example, has been recognised as a production derived from the interaction of social context and previous life experiences. Students bring with them certain understandings of learning already constructed through contextual reading and writing practices in their previous educational cultures (Lea and Street 1998, Strauss and Mooney 2011). Our School of Management students will already think and act from an existing, structured narrative of themselves, which is then confronted by the UK HE discourse within this particular university department. Robson and Turner (2007) note that the onus for adaptation currently rests with international students, rather than on any corresponding effort by the institution. Students need to adapt their existing, socio-culturally determined selves to another set of externally imposed academic expectations, yet existing competencies learned in one educational context will not automatically lead to success in another (Lave and Wenger 1991). For some international students this may, for example, require a shift from the assurance of an apparently fact-based, solution-focussed learning discipline to one based much more on tentative exploration of paradoxes presented in abstracted theory (Lea and Street 1998, McLean and Ransom 2005).

This growing recognition of writing as a social practice, involving a particular set of cultural values and practices within disciplines, is now discussed in relation to the third model within the suggested typology of academic writing:

The Academic Literacies model

Academic Literacies has focussed on the challenges to students’ identities as they try to find their own voices through academic writing in a new institutional context. This urges exploration of the complex process in which not only student writing but also tutor feedback are both actually determined by implicit ideas about how knowledge should be represented in a particular subject discipline (Lea and Street 1998, Ragavan 2004). In contrast to the previous two skills models’ contention that knowledge is simply transferred from a competent tutor to a currently incompetent student, the Academic Literacies model proposes that there is an epistemological context to all academic writing that produces varying, contestable interpretations. So learning can only really take place through participation in that social practice, and new entrants’ absorption into that discourse needs to be proactively mediated by established practitioners (Carroll 2005, Northedge 2003).

Christie et al (2008) also argue that this should be an empathically facilitative process because challenges to students’ integration into a learning community arise directly out of their emotional dimensions. It is important that educators understand that new students bring learner identities with them already formed out of what has become familiar and mastered in past educational cultures. Any alien expectations that they meet in a new academic environment will, temporarily at least, disable that successful self-identity (Wenger 1998). It is interesting to note that each of the eight international postgraduate students, in their first interviews during a study by Wu and Hammond, asserted an existing identity as a successful learner, and felt capable of meeting the demands of the new academic system (2011, p.428). Carroll and Ryan (2005) claim that this is true of many international students, who will enter UK HE with existing identities as successful learners in previous environments.

Proponents of an Academic Literacies approach therefore argue that Western educators could be proactive in recognising the positive attributes of new students more overtly, and should not fall into easy traps of equating written or spoken language production with intelligence or hard work (Bloxham and West 2007, Lillis 2006, Wingate 2006). Students’ reading and writing practices, for example, are seen by some as a complex expression of identity and beliefs, rather than a technical skill or even as a socialisation process (Street 2004, Wingate 2006). The ways in which students make meaning out of their writing are interwoven with on-going identity development in their wider lives, and it is argued that writing cannot simply be viewed as a transparent means of representation (Lea and Street 1998). Christie et al (2008, p.567) observe that students new to HE experience ‘feelings of loss and dislocation’ as a result of their existing learner identities being alienated by the new academic environment and its initially indecipherable rules and conventions. Turner (2007) points out that this disconnection from the UK HE discourse is exacerbated for pre-experience Masters students – such as those on School of Management MSc programmes – as a significant proportion will not have previously studied or worked in the business and management field. She therefore likens this situation to a conversion degree, with consequent, major transitional challenges over the short, one-year programme.

It is further argued that the first two models – Study Skills and Academic Socialisation – reinforce that prevailing discourse without any attempt to relate to students’ existing identities. Having to switch between different disciplinary writing requirements may exclude rather than assimilate the student’s existing forms of learning through activities such as writing (Lea and Street 2000, Northedge 2003). This may produce emotional conflicts when the student identity is threatened by such conventions as the use of passive, impersonal voice forms, for example, which do not seem to offer the opportunity for selfexpression that may have characterised earlier writing practice (Lea and Street 1998). It is clear that Western HE privileges the external world and other authorities, whereas many Eastern educational cultures will have imbued a much greater valuing of subjectivity in written expression (Zhang 2011).

Socialisation programmes, it is argued, do little to empower students to challenge an institution’s established academic practices, and they may spend much of their time struggling to fit their approach to studying and writing into acceptable UK HE conventions, rather than really exploring what they might wish to express as excited, curious learners in this new academic environment (Lillis 2001). Zhang (2011) argues that this is symptomatic of a globalising tendency toward standardisation of the essayist literacy to which Lillis (2001) refers. This therefore demotes the principle of diversifying academic literacy, which actually holds such rich potential for deepening understanding amongst us all of different cultural and linguistic traditions that international Masters students can bring with them.

It seems appropriate then that Christie et al (2008) represent such transitional struggles for international Masters students as an intrinsically affective process. If they encounter a discourse with significantly different, or obscure, academic requirements, then previously established, high-achieving identities and aspirations can be seriously undermined. Inevitably, this has an emotional impact. When universities are recruiting students so much more widely from non-traditional UK backgrounds and foreign countries, they should seek new, creative ways to respond to, and even celebrate, the existing learner identities such students bring with them (Turner 2007, Zhang 2011).

Lea and Street (1998) propose the Academic Literacies model very much in this context of power relations, and emphasise the need for a two-way process of adaptation between universities and their new students. In other words, they encourage practitioners in UK HE to reflect on their own literacy practices as well as those of their students. This challenges the notion of a neutral academic discourse with given, transparent writing conventions (Zhang 2011). A willingness to delve beyond that assumption could then enable more genuine exploration among Western educators of how to more proactively support new students’ participation in the community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). We could choose to recognise and value the richness of what they can already contribute, as much as what we expect them to learn (Lea and Street 1998, Turner 2007).

If we reach out to recognise and demonstrably validate students’ previous learning experiences, strengths and successes, we show an understanding that these will have involved significant affective, as well as cognitive, investment. Ottewill (2007) argues for the importance of providing early opportunities for students to assert their previous experiences of learning with genuinely interested members of staff before they are plunged into a very different discourse that may otherwise seem to invalidate that prior learning. In the current context of UK HE, international Masters students have to unlearn much of this previous learning, and this process will in itself then involve further emotional upheaval (Christie et al 2008, Ryan 2005b). If they see that their new tutors at least recognise past achievements, and can empathise with the struggles engendered by different academic expectations, the negative impact on students’ self-belief may be lessened. And this can then have a positive knock-on effect for subsequent academic performance.

Proponents of Academic Literacies have also argued that explicit socialisation approaches to teaching academic writing represent the academy as one culture (Lea and Street 1998, Wingate 2006, Zhang 2011). There is an institutional convenience in assuming that generic writing workshops, for example, will induct students into a seemingly unified discourse. Yet, different academic writing approaches may be demanded by different tutors (Sedgley 2012b). This certainly seems to be the case across the subjects typically taught at a UK business school, ranging from quite positivist disciplines of Accounting and Finance to the more interpretivist perspectives adopted in Organisational Behaviour, for example (Crème and Lea 2008, Lea and Stierer 2000, Sedgley 2010). Academic Literacies, as a field of enquiry, questions the notion of a unified academy in which reading and writing academic skills can be taught in a way that students can then transfer readily across subjects. It is argued, rather, that it is only through engagement with each specialist discourse that students learn about academic expectations and assessment criteria as much as subject content (Rust et al 2005, Strauss and Mooney 2011).

Feedback from some students on the School of Management Semester 1 skills workshops reflects this difficulty with transferability of academic skills across modules. Disciplinary epistemologies vary in reality, requiring different forms of writing (Bloxham and West 2007, Sedgley 2012b, Zhang 2011). As students often need to change language practices from one academic setting to another, the institution’s conventions cannot be learned generically at one point and simply transferred to other disciplinary settings (Lea and Street 2000, Norton et al 2007). This difficulty is compounded by the semester-based, modular system itself which results in students not receiving feedback from summative assessments in one set of modules until they are already several weeks into another (Lea and Street 1998, Slee 2010, Strauss and Mooney 2011). This issue was highlighted as the one of greatest concern in the 2009 HEA Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (Park and Wells 2010, p.20).

As a practical example of this epistemological variability at the heart of UK HE social sciences, different tutors can, and do, conceptualise ‘critical analysis’ differently, certainly in terms of how it could best be imparted as a skill to students (Neville 2009, Sedgley 2010a). Academic Literacies contends that what really constitutes ‘good’ writing depends as much on the individualised expectations of tutors as it does on students’ deficits (Lea and Street 2000, Lillis and Turner 2001). So as much as there is an increasing challenge from student diversity, this is mirrored by tutor diversity (Lea and Street 2006, Ryan 2005a). Carroll and Ryan (2005) argue that without a clear, curriculum internationalisation strategy at an institutional level, individual staff can easily resort to ad hoc, pedagogic decision-making, which leads to varying intermodular experiences for international students. The ‘epistemological complexity of academic essay writing’ is one example of how such variations can translate into barriers to students’ engagement in deep learning (Winter 2003, p.117). This suggests a further, institutional responsibility for enabling students’ understanding of how they best meet the requirements of academic writing within discrete management disciplines (Creme and Lea 2008, Street 2004).

This complexity reflects the paradox of both the opportunities and the difficulties of learning development programmes that attempt to embrace the theoretical principles explored in these last two models. On the one hand, from an Academic Socialisation perspective, well-intentioned learning developers and tutors are conscious of the need to pragmatically address students’ ignorance of the academic discourse. This is particularly important for international Masters students who realistically have less than six months to become sufficiently adept in postgraduate UK HE. On the other hand, the Academic Literacies approach is advocating the need to create time and space for students to validate their own meaning-making through distinct learning approaches across a range of management subjects, perhaps even challenging existing academic expectations in the process. And correspondingly, this also requires time and space for tutors to read between the lines of students’ submissions to proactively search for important subject understanding perhaps partially obscured within clumsy language or confused structural presentation (Carroll and Ryan 2005).

 

A nested hierarchy of learning development models

It is not surprising then that Shahabudin (2009), in her learning development mapping study, describes a complex mix of contemporary student support provision throughout UK universities, and herself decries the notion of ‘one size fits all’, arguing this is quite inappropriate among such diverse student bodies. O’Donovan et al (2008, p.211) refer instead to the value of a ‘nested hierarchy of models’, which persuasively proposes a multifaceted approach to learning development through a complementary blend of skills and literacies practices. As we have seen, Lea and Street (1998) were the first to suggest a typology of three perspectives on student writing, yet they too recognised immediately that these were not mutually exclusive. Whilst they argued that Academic Literacies encompasses a broader understanding of academic writing as a social practice within the institutional context, they emphasised that this should not be seen as superseding the usefulness of the other skills approaches in a simple, linear way. Chronologically, Academic Socialisation can be seen to encapsulate the insights and effective practices of Study Skills, whilst in itself then being incorporated into a more critical Academic Literacies approach (Strauss and Mooney 2011, Zhang 2011). The latter author very much endorses the value of a nested approach from his own experience as an international Masters student in UK HE, and subsequently from his research with Chinese compatriots undertaking a similar adjustment process.

Zhang (2011, p.55) identifies key contributions of each model in this overlapping framework as follows:

Study Skills – enhanced language skills can better represent the nuances of international Masters students’ deeper, disciplinary understanding. In more direct relation to Academic Literacies, technical language proficiency is important for the more sophisticated requirements of negotiating participation in meaning-making expounded by the third model.

Academic Socialisation – being equipped with knowledge and skills pertaining to the prevailing culture’s academic norms will enable international Masters students to again engage with a more critical Academic Literacies perspective.

Academic Literacies – this third model is then presented as hierarchically encompassing the other two, as indicated in the above points, with the purpose of enabling greater inclusion of student diversity, and transforming the pedagogic practice within an institution to reflect that diversity more constructively.

My own conceptualisation of this framework is represented in Figure 1 below:

 

A nested approach to learning development has certainly been adopted by ELS at the School of Management. A well-established programme of weekly socialisation workshops has been later enhanced by delivering these together with academic tutors around assignment-related presentations and exercises that attempt to explore expectations of subject-specific, knowledge representation.

Tutors have been responsive to helping provide this more student-centred learning development approach, which has generated more resources for reading and writing development allied to a particular discipline without pressurising the time for module content delivery itself. Debate is also then stimulated among academics about their own, distinct literacy practice, and their precise expectations of students’ academic work (Sedgley 2012b). This seems to encompass important elements of Academic Socialisation which the students immediately and overtly appreciate, but also moves further into Academic Literacies considerations of the variable and contested meaning-making among the staff and students across the institution (Lea and Street 1998). This is an area offering rich potential for further research: in terms of the Academic Socialisation model through thematic analysis of academic discourse issues that are commonly perceived by students to be problematic; and also the Academic Literacies model through individual analyses of students’ perceived identity and how these can be personally challenged by the same discourse. This diversity of analytical methods – thematic and individual – has therefore been adopted by this case study, and is explained more fully in the Methodology chapter.

In summary then, it can be seen that Academic Literacies as a model acknowledges some important contributions by Academic Socialisation to the necessary acculturation of non-traditional students into the Western academic discourse, thus enabling greater likelihood of their academic success. At the same time, Academic Literacies recognises limitations to the Study Skills and Academic Socialisation models, notably:

•  A lack of critical engagement with the nature of power pertaining to the Western academic discourse, which disadvantages international Masters students in particular.
•  The deficit perspective inherent in both skills models that can reinforce passivity in students’ approaches to learning.
•  The lack of recognition of students’ learner identities and the existing qualities and capabilities attached to those.
•  The implicit assumption of a single academy in which discrete academic skills can be taught generically so that students can apply these across subject areas with the same degrees of success.

The Academic Literacies model therefore argues for a need for HE institutions to move beyond the Academic Socialisation approach in a number of ways, which may be briefly summarised as follows:

•  Acknowledge learning as a situated social practice by creating a range of opportunities for students to participate actively in the discourse, practising the reading and writing skills for academic success.
•  Appreciate overtly the learner identities involving extant academic skills and professional experience that international Masters students in particular already bring with them – to explore how these can be
  enhanced for more successful engagement with UK HE.
•  Recognise the epistemological basis of disciplinary knowledge and associated academic performance expectations, which means that learning development needs to be fostered to some extent differently
  within each subject area rather than generically across the whole institution.

These theoretical propositions of Academic Literacies have been strongly and widely supported, as emphasised above by the concerted views from a range of educational practitioners and researchers. However, it has been recognised that this model is not so easy to apply in practice as the skills models, which tended to evolve locally through pragmatic, resource-led, learning development initiatives within universities (Lea and Street 2006). The following section is therefore devoted to a literature review of potential learning development strategies emanating from the Academic Literacies perspective, but within the overall context of the nested hierarchy of models approach recommended above.

In order to consider the potential for Academic Literacies to directly address the problem domain identified for international Masters students in the preceding chapter, the following discussion will explore the implementation of effective learning development strategies within the first two dimensions of that domain, namely: learning and teaching issues; and socio-cultural factors. As recognised in the earlier discussion, the third problem dimension of Language, whilst important for many international Masters students, is understood to be subordinate to the first two, and an extensive investigation of second language development also lies beyond the scope of this case study.

 

Learning development related to the first dimension of the problem
domain: Learning and teaching strategies

 

Embedded curriculum

In the last decade or so, perhaps the most significant shift that has been occurring in learning development strategy and practice, and which can be linked to the Academic Literacies model, is that of embedding academic skills development within the curriculum. Lea and Street (1998) argued in their original report that generic guidance (Academic Socialisation) around academic writing conventions does not go far enough in enabling students to produce high-grade, modular assignments. In this same report, Lea and Street define Academic Literacies as ‘reading and writing within disciplines’ (p.158), and there does seem to be increasing support among educational researchers for this idea of integrating writing skills within subject teaching to enable students to understand the particular discourse of that discipline (Cottrell 2001, Lea and Stierer 2000, Wingate 2006).

This model of embedding learning development still presents challenges in pedagogic practice application, but specific initiatives are now being pursued in some universities. An example at Lancaster University is described by Blake (2009) as a step-by-step approach, involving a learning developer and an enthusiastic academic tutor working closely together on one module at a time, thus yielding evidence of good practice that may then be embraced more actively by other colleagues. Such examples are being seen elsewhere, albeit in pockets of UK HE – a recent learning development symposium specifically focussed on gathering a number of these cases for further exploration among participating university learning development departments (ALDinHE 2012).

Notably, some strategic progress has been made in this respect at Huddersfield University particularly, where Hill et al (2010) cite the achievement of a university wide policy on the embedded curriculum approach. Hill (2013) reports that actual implementation across departments is still on a rather patchwork basis, yet even so, this currently represents an exceptional development in the UK HE sector. Most practitioners are still operating on the basis described by Dunn and Carroll (2005) – relying on individual tutors and learning developers establishing localised initiatives that may gradually develop into wider, collaborative projects (LearnHigher 2013). Dunn and Carroll (2005) advocate the value of team-teaching and working within the curriculum to support international students’ learning development, noting the usefulness of such networks being set within disciplinary departments. This is already evident within the School of Management where, as the Effective Learning Advisor, I have the opportunity to work closely with interested, innovative tutors, either within their module teaching or in my parallel workshops, on developing students’ understanding of specific, modular assessments, for example.

Such initiatives are beginning to embrace the principles of an embedded learning development curriculum, and may well herald a most productive way to induct students into the particular interpretations of tutors’ own disciplines. This overtly acknowledges the theoretical perspective that teaching and learning is socially constructed and therefore particularly situated within each context (Peelo and Luxon 2007). But this does still remain a complex, resourceintensive issue in terms of practical implementation (Strauss and Mooney 2011), raising significant challenges for academic tutors, with the modular system exerting pressure to deliver depth and breadth of subject material within short time scales. The logistics of timetabling and syllabus management complicate this further.

These factors can all conspire to maintain a teaching and learning status quo, noted earlier, based around traditional expectations of the ‘ideal student’ which do not reflect the changing nature of recent student recruitment (Biggs and Tang 2011, Carroll and Ryan 2005). We experience the dilemma of a problem stemming from the massification of education, the pressures of which, in turn, inhibit the attempted solution (Shahabudin 2009, Strauss and Mooney 2011).

Commentators recognise the tensions that progressively-minded tutors can experience as they try to embrace the Academic Literacies principles in practice. Strauss and Mooney (2011) observe that some tutors may feel they lack the time or appropriate expertise to adapt course materials to increasingly diverse student cohorts in ways that could be more valuing of their experience. They can also fear a consequent dilution of the academic content, due to these resource constraints (Lea and Street 2006). Tutors will often feel torn between the apparently competing demands of student diversity and institutional pressures, such as academic programming and income generation (Carroll and Ryan 2005, Lea and Street 2006).

Bamford (2006) also highlights the feedback from students in her case study who appreciated time spent by tutors explaining assessment approaches, but who did not want this to compromise their subject content. Rather, they wanted that to be additional to existing provision. Yet she still concludes that ‘subject embedded language and study skills support’ may be a more useful means of improving international students’ learning experience (p.15).

In addition to prioritising an embedded curriculum approach, contemporary learning development research points to the value of two other, major teaching and learning strategies related to an Academic Literacies approach, namely: formative feedback; and exemplar models of academic writing (Biggs and Tang 2011, Lillis 2006, O’Doherty 2009). In practice, however, as with embedded learning development examples, such provision is still haphazard throughout UK HE.

Formative feedback

Although it is well recognised that tutor feedback is critical to learning development, students often deem this to be limited, late or confusing (Bloxham and West 2007, Neville 2009, Shahabudin 2009). Student respondents to the HEA Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey reported feedback as the least satisfactory element, with:

… only 58% agreeing that feedback on their work helped them to clarify
things they did not understand, 57% agreeing that feedback had been
prompt … (Park and Wells 2010, p.20).

Similar levels of dissatisfaction were reported by Ryan (2011) from the TIS project. Feedback, in particular, was the predominant factor resulting in the negative gap between international and home students’ experience widening between 2005 and 2009.

Biggs and Tang’s (2011) summary of meta-analyses into good teaching contexts highlights formative feedback as one of seven essential characteristics. They propose that this should highlight learning objectives, identify deficiencies and provide guidance for improvement. Pajares (2008) affirms that frequent and immediate feedback are two factors that are critical to academic motivation. However, it should also be noted that, having conducted a separate meta-analysis of research studies into support for academic performance, Gibbs (2012) observes that the real need is not necessarily for providing more feedback more quickly, but that this rather rests on better education for students around how to use existing levels of feedback more constructively for improved future learning.

Kennell (2010, p.44) articulates her own expectations of feedback as a returning MBA student:

I want to be sure that I understand what is expected of me, that I will get
timely feedback on assessed work that is transparently linked to grade
descriptors and, crucially, that will enable me to improve.

Formative feedback does appear to provide a key to unlocking at least some of the secrets of academic writing for new students. By the time they receive graded feedback in the modular system, they are usually already moving on to the next set of modules. They take with them little if any guidance that seems transferable to these subsequent learning challenges (Strauss and Mooney 2011). Rather, they need discursive, specific, personalised feedback around draft texts if they are really to develop effective writing practices that satisfy institutional expectations (Catt and Gregory 2006, McLean and Ransom 2005). Northedge (2003, p.30) explains this as the necessary means within the Western academic discourse, predicated as it is on textual participation, for students to move beyond vicarious to generative participation at which point they can experience a satisfying sense of sharing in the development of relevant knowledge. Reporting on the attempted implementation of an academic literacy course, Strauss and Mooney (2011) emphasise the importance, cited by the international Masters student participants, of interim, face-to-face feedback to enable that necessary learning progression through the academic year.

Lillis suggests that one way forward for both research and teaching is through ‘dialogues of participation’ between student and tutor, claiming that ‘detailed attention to specific instances of students’ writing helps to illuminate the nature of writing practices within the academy’ (2006, p.33). She advocates dialogic interaction around written texts as critical to involving students in the institutional practices. This is based on her research in a one-year study with 10 undergraduate students from non-traditional backgrounds, around a process of developing ‘long conversations’. Talking together over several meetings around draft work inducts the students into the ‘essayist literacy’ noted earlier. She reframes this process as ‘talkback’ rather than the more tutor-dominant concept of feedback, to emphasise the shared experience of negotiated meaning making (Lillis 2001, p.163). So even if this does not enable students to directly challenge the predominant forms of assessment, it can at least acknowledge their limitations, and affirm students’ existing ideas. Northedge (2003, p.31) asserts that assessment must be orientated to engaging the student in the discourse – assessment for learning, rather than of learning:

It means focusing very clearly on what constitutes intelligent, creative
use of the discourse for students who are working their way in from
outside. Students need a realistic and fair reward for their progress.

This proposition clearly addresses the barriers presented by traditional, summative feedback, which can easily reflect and reinforce the power imbalance between tutor and student (Lea and Street 1998). Learners do require a guiding hand and encouraging comments at transitional stages of their journeys. This seems to point to the significant value of constructive feedback, perhaps in response to short pieces of formative writing as suggested by Northedge (2003).

This affirmative approach is a key factor inherent in feedback: respecting the efforts expended by students in doing their best to produce valuable work. McLean and Ransom (2005) emphasise the affective value to students of tutors’ explicit respect for their efforts, especially when this is combined with constructive feedback for future improvements. If the tutor response does not seem to reflect that effort, especially if accompanied by a disappointing grade, then student motivation and even self-belief will drop (Pajares 2008, Rust et al 2005). This is not helped when staff feedback to students may be couched in non-specific criticisms, e.g. ‘deeper analysis required’, ‘poorly developed argument’. These can enforce a relationship of power between the experienced academic and the novice learner (Carroll 2005a, Lea and Street 2000, O’Donovan et al 2008).

One study of students’ experience of four tutors’ different feedback styles showed that explanatory, personalised feedback written on a separate sheet, for example, conveys a message of the tutor’s active participation with the student (Rust et al 2005). This view endorses Lea and Street’s study of students’ negative perceptions of tutors’ vague feedback: they argue for more constructive and interactive comments, such as, ‘you might like to consider …’, ‘in my opinion …’, ‘could this be interpreted differently ?’ (1998, p.169). Carroll (2005a) agrees that usefully explicit feedback should describe positive behaviour that the student can implement for improvement. If the student is then invited to discuss this further, the sense of a shared endeavour is enhanced (Ivanic et al 2000).

O’Doherty (2009, p.20) also reports on a reframing of the term feedback to a more constructive one of ‘feedforward’. Based on a study of FE students’ perceptions of what constitutes good practice, she recommends a three-stage cycle:

1. Preparatory Guidance, including an audit of students’ previous experience, and the use of exemplars.
2. In-task Guidance, based around practice and drafts feedback.
3. Performance Feedback, developing protocols for feeding learning outcomes forward to future assignments.

All of this does of course require considerable investment of tutor time and effort. And these are the resources already under pressure from factors of high class sizes and assessment deadlines. As noted earlier, many tutors are keen to guide students who are eager to learn – this is the profoundly rewarding opportunity offered by teaching, especially in the richly diverse, intercultural classroom – but they can be disabled from doing so by their modular teaching constraints (Ryan 2011, Trahar 2010).

Assignment exemplars

As a common thread of good practice, all three models of academic writing seem to agree on the value of utilising extracts from previous assignment exemplars to help students develop their capacity to participate more fully (Sedgley 2012b). These can include detailed, constructive commentaries from the tutors on the strengths and weaknesses of the past students’ work (Bloxham and West 2007, Rust et al 2005, Ryan 2005a). Speaking directly from her own MBA student experience, Kennell (2010) commends the usefulness of tutors having provided exemplars and developed dialogues with the students around the potential assessment of these. Price (2005) emphasises the importance of tutor amplification of exemplar assignments through detailed commentaries and analyses, demonstrating not only what good work looks like, but also why the academic authority considers it to be good.

There can be a resistance from some tutors to such a supportive use of formative guidance (Ryan and Carroll 2005). This is reflected in my own experience at the School of Management where it seems that academic staff may be located at different points along an epistemological learning development spectrum. There are those, with whom I have worked more extensively, who regard such strategies as draft assignment reviewing and exemplar-based workshops as constructive for all students. At the other end of the spectrum, others consider these interventions as either inappropriate ‘handholding’ or unfairly advantageous to those students that access these optional provisions, which may even tempt them towards plagiarism from model answers.

The prevailing theoretical view is that whilst there may be a perceived danger of students imitating other students’ ‘better’ work non-critically, the potential advantages for the majority of well-intentioned students far outweigh any such risks (Catt and Gregory 2006, McLean and Ransom 2005). When combined with interactive exercises such as students making their own evaluations, these provide opportunities for the participation that the Academic Literacies model advocates is key to students developing understanding of the criteria used in the assessment of their own writing (Ivanic et al 2000). From a meta-analysis of literature on formative peer assessment, and then their own empirical study of undergraduates, Li et al (2010) established that it was the process of actively reviewing peers’ projects that would be even more likely to facilitate student learning than receiving formative feedback on their own assignments.

Mills (2013) points out the value of past exemplars as an aspect of vicarious learning – proposing that learning development is most effectively achieved through several stages of successive approximation towards the desired model of academic writing, for example. This involves starting from initial models that are relatively similar to students’ existing ways of learning. A gradual progression from a position of familiarity increases the attractiveness of new models, which is important for learners’ attention to, and retention of, desired behaviours (Pajares 2008).

Learning development interventions of this kind have been linked to the process of keeping students motivated more generally, and so improving academic performance (Hsieh et al 2007, Pajares 2008). This seems to go some way towards answering the call by Ryan (2005a) urging tutors to prioritise more time for students to consider their existing knowledge, relate this to new ideas and regularly discuss the progress of that learning. Biggs and Tang (2011) emphasise the importance of enduring motivation for student engagement, attributing some of this to the nature of teaching interventions. They argue for tutors to set complex, challenging, but attainable goals for their students’ learning. Most importantly for this discussion though, they emphasise that students ‘need to be clearly aware of the goals and the criteria for success’ (p.77).

From a social constructionist perspective, students using exemplars to engage in marking practice against previously discussed criteria is seen as a very helpful process (Price et al 2007, Rust et al 2005). Those criteria can otherwise be represented implicitly by academic staff as ‘common-sense ways of knowing’, which does little to enable students’ mastery of their requirements (Lea and Street, p.168). Working with exemplars, it is suggested, facilitate their access into the discourse and, most importantly, the tacit subtleties of assessment (Vygotsky 1978). This could be construed as an ‘intermediate level of discourse’ (Northedge 2003, p.29). Exemplars can provide a means to unveiling the threshold concepts that Biggs and Tang (2011) explain need to be deliberately highlighted by teachers in their course delivery for students to recognise significant shifts that may be required in their learning approach at key points of the course. McLean and Ransom (2005) recommend that tutors consider the needs of international students in particular for repeated chances to grasp such elusive concepts. They suggest this could include paraphrasing or revisiting these ideas in different ways to give students the necessary time for critical understanding.

One threshold concept in Western HE – critical thinking – includes relating other authors’ abstract ideas to practical situations in order to analyse their applicability in different contexts (Cottrell 2005, Davies 2010). Students previously used to only thinking in real-life terms can struggle with these new theoretical perspectives, and McLean and Ransom (2005) recommend that tutors encourage international students to remember relevant examples with which they are already familiar from their own cultural contexts, perhaps inviting them to present these for a wider understanding in multicultural classes. I had a vivid experience of this during a class observation when visiting our collaborative partner institution, IILM, in India. Teachers there have to deliver our syllabi, which have been devised by UK-based module leaders, and can therefore rely rather heavily on Western corporate cases. I witnessed the Indian tutors working hard to elicit localised examples from their home students, which seemed very effective in engaging them in class discussion. They later explained to me that they felt this approach to be essential for enabling any willingness on the part of the students to consider the theoretical ideas that otherwise seemed so far away from their everyday, family business lives in India. In a related study, Bamford (2006) cites a Chinese student’s plea for lecturers to more directly encourage individual students’ participation in classroom discussions and peer group-work. This leads into the following discussion of the second dimension of a strategic framework for supporting international Masters students effectively.

 

Learning development related to the second dimension of the problem
domain: Socio-cultural factors

 

Black and Mendenhall (1991) propose that international students’ willingness to engage and build relationships with others should smooth their transition into a new cultural community. Biggs and Tang (2011) assert that students more readily enjoy learning in peer situations than in teacher-directed classes, and Kennell (2010) emphasises how contact with her colleagues substantially enriched the experience of her own MBA study, and that an enduring experience of peer support developed accordingly. This seems to be borne out by Christie et al (2008), who discovered that students in their study came to recognise a profound value to peer relationships in respect of developing ‘a more secure learning identity’ (p.575). These authors’ creation of informal study groups resulted in a range of emotional, as much as rational, benefits, including normalisation of fears and struggles, and encouragement of self-belief. They conclude that ‘social and collaborative aspects of students’ learning experiences … are also important determinants of graduate outcomes’ (p.579).

Christie et al believe their study confirms that students have a strong need for a sense of belonging. In this case, their research participants were nontraditional UK students, who often felt isolated from university social life because of other family responsibilities, or perceived class barriers. These latter factors do not generally apply to my research group of international Masters students, but it is apparent from my campus observations that they mainly stay together in monocultural or at least global region groupings for socialisation and emotional support. They gravitate to others who will instinctively understand and share these needs (Pritchard and Skinner 2002, Thom 2010, Volet and Ang 1998).

Some research suggests, however, that these instinctive divisions maintain and even strengthen negative perceptions of ‘the Other’, and that directed intercultural group learning can lead to positive benefits, which should be actively pursued by universities (Summers and Volet 2008, Thom 2010, Trahar 2010, Wang et al 2012). Powell (2009) highlights the particular importance of this for management educators, arguing for cultural intelligence to be taught alongside management knowledge. Harrison and Peacock (2010, p.126) summarise a set of desirable intercultural skills as potential outcomes from such an ‘international classroom’, including self-reflection, critical thinking, teamworking and communicating.

However, my general experience has been that, as Thom (2010) suggests, it is not easy to engender safe opportunities of this kind, and many international Masters students do struggle with this directed, intercultural study. So, they will retreat to the reassuring safety of their own ethnic group as much as possible (Bamford 2012, Kimmel and Volet 2012). In the case of students from east Asia, Wu and Hammond (2011) found that cultural barriers, including language, kept them away from more socially interactive leisure pursuits with students from other cultural backgrounds. This can easily become a vicious circle, and it is not surprising that these authors conclude that students in their study experienced ‘an international postgraduate student culture’ rather than local integration (p.423).

It seems reasonable then to expect that these students may, initially at least, experience feelings of marginalisation on the periphery of the learning community (Turner 2007). It may even be argued that the loss of a sense of belonging is a greater bereavement for international students as, unlike apparently disadvantaged UK learners, they are not able to return home each night to their families. Although, as Wu and Hammond (2011) observe, new technology such as Skype may alleviate some of the intensity of dislocation, homesickness can still be a significant additional burden for many (Guo and Chase 2011, Russell et al 2010).

Yet Montgomery and McDowell (2009) suggest that such an international learning community may represent more of an opportunity than a threat, and that this can be harnessed to students’ benefit rather than being perceived as an alienating factor. It is interesting to note that Black and Mendenhall (1991) advocate that international Masters students should build relationships with host nationals as an important means of accelerating transition and diminishing the learning inhibitions caused by excessive culture shock. Leask (2010, p.12) too, reports on a successful ‘Business Mates’ scheme involving experienced home students mentoring first-year, international undergraduates, in which improvements in the new students’ confidence constituted the paramount outcome. Yet at the School of Management, our international Masters students have very few such opportunities as home students usually represent less than 5% of that cohort.

Thom (2010) reports positive intercultural experiences of international students among themselves in spite of limited interaction with home students. Wu and Hammond (2011, p.435) even question the concept of marginalisation, and report that international students felt sufficient support, not only emotionally but also academically, from their peers without the need to seek that from mixing with home students. And so they define an ‘international student culture’ through a: ‘widespread use of English; participation of students from a range of national backgrounds; and a focus on achieving academic success’. They choose to recognise adjustment as being related to feelings of ‘well-being and satisfaction, and the ability to fit in’, rather than necessarily accepting the host culture.

However, when these authors consider further the limitations for experiencing a British way of life (often bemoaned by students living in Bradford, for example), this then leads them, after all, to a recognition of the potential for marginalisation, including feelings of tension or loneliness. International Masters students at the School of Management do register these kinds of disappointments, noting the limitations to improving English or academic discourse understanding through their peers, who share similar hindrances. This seems to return to the earlier discussion of Academic Literacies, and even the Academic Socialisation approach to supporting learning development, which advocate the critical importance of existing, active members of the learning community being available and willing to induct newcomers into that discourse (Lillis 2001, Northedge 2003). So this does seem to highlight the importance of the role played by institutional staff in modelling academic cultural norms and expected behaviours.

Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) argue for more proactive development of intercultural peer interaction by the Student Union, citing the dual benefits of language improvement for international students and intercultural awareness for home students. Fung (2006), too, affirms the importance for all students of a genuinely collective experience to engender a sense of belonging and allegiance, and alternatively suggests the provision of timetabled peer support groups. Bamford (2006) relates that her focus groups of international students felt that peer interaction could be more encouraged in the first semester especially through learning support programmes. She describes a successful peer-mentoring scheme introduced for the MBA programme at London Metropolitan University notably for international student issues, but also mentions difficulties with this, although it is not clear as to the nature of the problems concerned.

Trahar (2010) reports on the value of challenging international students to examine how their cultural values and beliefs encourage or impede acceptance of others’ behaviour. Ryan and Hellmundt (2005) recognise that the affective value of a genuinely student-centred approach advocated by many of the researchers cited above calls for everyone to be heard in a shared, respectful space where listening is valued as much as speaking. In the same emotional vein, Wu and Hammond (2011) agree that peer support has an important influence on student well-being. Guo and Chase (2011) report on a non-credit bearing Professional Development Programme running on a weekly basis across a first semester at the University of British Columbia (UBC) for new International Teaching Assistants. Aimed at integration of these students, particularly through fostering cross-cultural communication, the original 1987 pilot with one department has grown into a successful campus-wide programme. UBC facilitators have enabled the students themselves to create a supportive learning community, where they feel safe enough to share fears as well as hopes.

So despite all the challenges clearly experienced by international Masters students in Western HE, there are, of course, many successes. At the School of Management, the vast majority of students from more than forty countries go on to attain Masters degrees each year, many with higher classifications. Equally importantly perhaps, large numbers report high levels of satisfaction with their personal development, such as enhanced skills in intercultural awareness and communication, as well as improved self-confidence, independence and assertiveness. Wu and Hammond (2011) confirm high levels of expressed satisfaction among east Asian students from their overseas sojourn. They propose that such students are less dramatically affected by culture shock than some of the above views suggest, experiencing rather what they term, ‘culture bumps’ (p.423). They found that most of the international postgraduate students in their study in various departments of Warwick University did make close friends.

However, Louie (2005), reporting on his studies of east Asian students, confirms that whilst moving away from home cultures may well provide positive opportunities for international students, this can still result in tremendous insecurity. He argues that the fearful nature of this transition most importantly highlights the need for empathic support by host educators, who are urged to show a genuine, reciprocal curiosity towards international students. This should be overtly acknowledged as an important determinant of the deeper rapport necessary to an effective teaching and learning relationship (Louie 2005, McLean and Ransom 2005). Ryan (2010) notes, too, that those students who have reported positive learning experiences in the UK often cite the value of understanding and support from tutors, and that many are able to achieve high levels of academic performance with this kind of personal attention.

This confirms my own experience with international students – it is an empathic attitude that they will often perceive as even more important than any specific piece of practical advice. And my previous training and practice as a psychotherapist helped me to understand that the act of being listened to usually has an apparently disproportionate effect on the client’s positive sense of self, even without necessarily reaching explicit, immediate solutions. In the context of the above discussion around the learning difficulties of international Masters students specifically, this suggested the importance of perhaps enhancing existing levels of 1-1 consultations, as well as the encouragement of peer support, as already discussed above.

Ryan (2005a) does report an expressed willingness among tutors to adapt their practice to international students’ needs, much in the way that the student themselves hope for, but she regrets that this often fails to materialise in practice. It is important to move beyond a certain glibness in the critique of Western, pedagogic ethnocentricity to recognise that it is not easy for staff to find either the time, understanding or courage to implement meaningful, intercultural developments into their teaching (Brown et al 2007, Caruana 2010). Tutors can need intercultural skills support just as much as students. Without an institution-wide internationalisation policy, piece-meal initiatives may not really provide that, and so, some argue, little progress has been made in this respect during the first decade of this century (Leask 2010, Thom 2010).

Louie (2005, p.17) introduces a critical note of caution for Western researchers and educators who may simply seek ‘bits and pieces of cultural knowledge’ about students’ ethnic or educational backgrounds. Resulting perceptions of cultural characteristics can easily then develop into a set of assumptions among often well-intentioned university staff around common needs of students from a certain ethnic background. For example, Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) suggest that previous studies have found that international students’ adjustment depends on country of origin, even though they do not cite which studies these are. Instead, McLean and Ransom (2005, p.46) argue that we need to somehow move beyond the categories of race or ethnicity to learn more about how our international students’ identities have been shaped by other factors such as previous work or studies.

However, internationalisation seems to have brought with it an insistent search for prescriptive strategies to deal, supposedly effectively and sensitively, with ‘the Other’. This has produced a plethora of consultancies and texts providing guidance around cultural etiquette in the business and academic worlds. Books such as ‘Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands ?’ by Morrison et al (1995) clearly indicate their derivation from Hofstede’s seminal work on cultural dimensions based on an empirical study of over 100,000 IBM employees from forty countries, first published in 1980, and later updated in a similarly popular second edition in 2001. Whilst this approach of categorising cultural tendencies across a range of variables such as individualism-collectivism can seem to provide a useful ‘vocabulary’ of speech and behaviour for international business people, Louie (2005, p.17) argues persuasively instead for a ‘meta-cultural sensitivity’ that reflects a truer awareness of the personalised complexity involved in intercultural encounters. In a similarly critical and reflective approach to normative ideals in another research area – leadership development – Edwards et al (2013) observe the limitations of easy prescriptions for practical interventions.

In terms of the sensitivity required for more reflective intercultural communication, it is argued that travelling and living in other cultures is a particularly powerful way of developing such awareness (Carroll 2005, Louie 2005, Turner 2006). This is, of course, what our international students are doing, and so further emphasises their potential value as ‘reverse cultural educators’ for those of us who choose to stay living and working within our countries of origin. Slee (2010) argues that it is incumbent on a culturally pluralistic society to acknowledge, even proactively value, the existing attributes of ‘the Other’. This notably requires a humility that accepts their greater mastery of important skills that have not been embedded in our own cultural domain. Otherwise, Ippolito (2007, p.749) argues, well-intentioned attempts to develop intercultural communication within the Western academic discourse will encounter the barrier of ‘unchallenged conceptions of privileged knowledge’.

Turner (2006) finds that UK-based academics’ reported views of international students, in this case from China, contrast in a disappointingly negative way to her own direct experience of teaching in that country. However, Carroll does observe that, when they are pressed to consider what international Masters students may bring of value, university tutors do recognise their ‘wider experience … diligent work habits and respect for teachers and learning’ (2005a, p.28). These are clearly important attributes not only to themselves but potentially for the tutors and many home students too.

It certainly seems we could be doing more to develop an intercultural intelligence in ourselves as educators, as well as in our students, that operates from this intention of uncovering shared understandings. This calls for a willingness on the part of staff to understand not only the particular challenges facing new international students, but also the assumptions inherent in our prevailing Western academic culture that contribute to those challenges. In other words, we can best serve the cause of intercultural understanding by adopting a critical perspective on the tacit assumptions, values and norms within our own educational culture (Brown et al 2007, McLean and Ransom 2005). Attempting to then define oneself, for example, in those terms can soon show us how difficult it really is to pin down any individual within a cultural stereotype. In the classroom context, US and UK staff, as well as home students, can often be presented as assertive and communicatively confident in relation to Asian counterparts. Yet how many of us individually would actually choose to describe ourselves with such adjectives ?

It is this need to question ourselves before we judge others that lies at the heart of a key challenge raised earlier in the thesis, namely:

How to effectively implement the principle espoused by Academic Literacies theory that Western educators should genuinely respect the existing knowledge, experience and personal qualities of incoming students.

I believe reflexivity is necessary for my thesis to more adequately address the question of how to meet international Masters students halfway, as it were, and so welcome them into our learning communities more effectively. Ryan (2005a) cautions that this is not easy, with international students still feeling undervalued and misunderstood, despite the efforts from well-intentioned tutors to bridge a mutually recognised divide between them. Trahar (2010) issues an important reminder that each of us inevitably carries the values embedded within our own educational culture, which we can easily then perpetuate, often unknowingly. We need to hold those implicit beliefs and consequent, unquestioned practices up to scrutiny. Encounters with ‘the Other’ may often provide the catalyst for such a productively critical analysis if we can recognise that opportunity.

This raises the fundamental question of whether we are able to make value judgements about any cultural behaviour, i.e as being good or bad practice. It is important to note, for example, that silence in some cultures is regarded as a moral virtue, indicating active, respectful consideration of others’ views and group harmony, rather than as a lack of engagement (De Vita 2005, Scudamore 2013). It is often considered in the West that proactively and confidently expressing one’s opinions in group situations is an effective behaviour, demonstrating evidence of learning in a tutorial, for example. Yet to what extent does this overlook the value of listening to, reflecting on, and respecting others’ views ? Carroll (2005a, p.28) points out that tutors can easily resort to disparaging such characteristics of international Masters students that actually derive from previous cultural experiences, and in other words demonstrate that students are simply ‘using old rules for a new game’. Brown et al (2007) remind us that, typically, international Masters students are highly educated people, with some already possessing professional experience. Their learner behaviour, which may be confusing at first to Western teachers, will be expressing what can be quite subtle, profound, cultural values.

One example of such behaviour can be around the Asian cultural issue of either side not losing face in the tutor-student relationship – driven by not wanting to attract attention to the student’s imperfect knowledge, or even to a perceived inadequacy in the tutor’s explanation. The value of maintaining harmony can be paramount in some cultures (McLean and Ransom 2005, Scudamore 2013). Ryan (2005a) points out that it can demand great courage on the part of international students to change a learned practice such as not speaking out in class, with many taking up to six months to reach that threshold, so that any perceived negative response in the interim can have humiliating effects. This may also reflect one of the subtle cultural influences noted by Brown et al (2007) among students from Confucian countries, who will have acquired a belief from that philosophical tradition that knowledge is not gained through twoway discussion, but rather in silent listening.

Educational culture beliefs also shift over time. The preceding literature review of the on-going evolution of models of learning development illustrates the changing nature of UK HE, for example. From his experience in east Asian universities, Louie argues that a similarly dynamic picture can be portrayed in Confucian education. Often characterised with apparently enduring aspects such as didactic, rote learning and rewarding hard work, this:

… has undergone some of the most drastic transformations in recent
decades, so that … these virtues are often no more than values and
beliefs that have lost all currency in their host countries’ (2005, p.18).

Others also conclude that east Asian students are becoming more similar in their learning approaches to Western peers (Kingston and Forland 2004, Wang et al 2011). So it does seem important to recognise that knowledge of other cultures cannot be considered in a static way, but must be subject to on-going examination and revision.

Discussions with students can provide opportunities for staff to learn from them about other educational cultures’ approaches to teaching and learning, as much as vice versa (Ottewill 2007, Ryan and Hellmundt 2005). Hughes and Wisker (1998) observed that staff development sessions were useful in providing a forum to at least share concerns and then explore researched ideas for good practice. Mehdizadeh and Scott (2005) propose intercultural diversity workshops for all relevant staff, and Bamford (2006, p.13) advocates the need for staff training in ‘cultural patterns of expression and expectations of learning’. Her survey showed a majority of international students asking for staff to relate their teaching to different international backgrounds. Yet at the same time, like Louie (2005) above, she warns against cultural stereotyping. This seems a significant tension in my research then between raising awareness of what we can learn from incoming international students, and the dangers of categorising cultural characteristics.

There is a need in educational research to explore the complex interactions of learners’ past and current experiences (Hanson 1996). These are unique biographies, and in the case of international students should not be subject to cultural generalisations for the sake of simplifying educational provision for a perceived homogenous group, e.g. proposing that all Chinese students need extra language classes (Ryan 2005a). Contemporary commentators recognise the fundamental importance of placing the student at the heart of a genuinely internationalised education system, emphasising that it is only direct, openminded interaction with real people that can both broaden and deepen our understanding of ‘the Other’ (Carroll 2005, Caruna 2010, Montgomery 2010, Robson and Turner 2007, Ryan 2010, Thom 2010, Turner 2006).

Stier (2002) suggests that the key pedagogic resource of true internationalisation is intercultural interaction, and Ryan (2010, p.14) argues that the growing influence of international students, as part of the globalisation of education, has potentially positive benefits in developing, ‘a more pluralistic body of knowledge and new ways of working’. This diversity represents rich, often unexploited, resources that could therefore be embraced to the potential benefit of all, and affirms the role of students in contributing important knowledge to the debate around meaning-making within any subject (Carroll and Ryan 2005, Turner 2007). Kennell (2010) also agrees that students can be seriously regarded as co-producers in the creation of knowledge. Ottewill (2007, p.6) therefore argues for ‘adaptation rather than assimilation’ as the appropriate goal of internationalisation. Guo and Chase (2011) affirm that international students registering onto Canadian programmes, for example, bring with them an enriching mixture of different language, culture and education, from which everyone within that community – students and teachers – can learn and benefit.

However, as Caruana (2010) recognises, there is a spectrum of attitudes among Western educators towards the process of internationalisation that determines the direction and extent of constructive, intercultural interaction among staff and students. Some choose to rest on the principle of student mobility, i.e. the benefits lie in international students adapting to our educational system; there are others who champion the valuing of cultural differences so that we seek to understand how the other, apparently unified, culture works differently to our own singular culture; some believe in the more individualised concept of diversity, which requires an on-going flexibility on the part of the host educational culture to recognise and respond to unique learner identities; others choose to recognise the inexorable tide of merging cultures (globalisation) as a necessary force of modern civilisation that takes us beneath the surface of difference to deeper waters where we can find common values and shared understandings.

As Caruana (2010) emphasises, internationalisation does not prescribe a single best practice, but rather by its very nature is a subtle construct that shifts according to the values and beliefs of each host location. With respect to this complexity, I find an observation from Brown et al (2007, p.10) especially helpful:

It is not that either each person must be treated as unconnected to his or
her cultural group, or that assumptions should be made about individuals
based on knowledge of the characteristics of their cultural group. It is
that both can be used judiciously in order to effect greater understanding.

This captures a key paradox in this research study: On the one hand, I seek to understand more about how students from the same and different cultures share similar difficulties, coping strategies and successes as they try to quickly adapt to UK HE. Yet, as the above quotation aptly suggests, this must be complemented by careful consideration of significant individual variations in these factors that are found across my research sample.

 

Summary – emerging research gaps and questions to be addressed in the data collection and analysis

As stated in the Introduction chapter, my research objectives are concerned with understanding more about the challenges and coping strategies of international Masters students’ learning journeys into UK HE, and how Western educators can support these more constructively. This literature review has established that, at the time of commencing the primary research for this case study in October 2009, there had been few studies focussing on these transitional issues specifically for such students. This review has found limited research literature on the nature of that target group’s particular challenges or the learning development strategies that will therefore be most helpful for them.

The literature that is available on international students’ transition into UK HE more generally has shown the affective, as much as cognitive, nature of their challenges, and the potential impact of both these sets of factors on academic and personal success. So this seems an important focus to maintain in the development of an appropriate methodology for this study with international Masters students.

Then, in terms of the theoretical focus of this literature review, there is very little research at all on these issues for international Masters students in the context of Academic Literacies (Sedgley 2011, 2012b). The overall contention of this theoretical framework for more of a genuine, two-way participation between new students and existing members of the learning community seems to offer an important dimension for exploring both sets of learning journeys in UK HE – those of students and staff – in a way that has not previously been considered. In the following chapter, I therefore explain the methodology that seems to be demanded by research objectives that encompass not only the learning journeys of a group of international Masters students, but also my own as I interacted with them and their peers over the course of an academic year.

 

 

Chapter 3
Research Methodology

Learning journeys of international Masters students in UK HE:
How can I usefully explore these ?

 

Ontology

The aim of my research is to explore the learning journeys of a group of international Masters students during their year-long study for a Masters degree at the School of Management, with the objectives of understanding more about their learning challenges and coping strategies. This qualitative inquiry acknowledges that individuals’ experience of apparently shared situations such as postgraduate management study will differ from one another in the form of what are often described as multiple realities (Crotty 1998, Lincoln and Guba 2000, Schwandt 2001). The varying stories I have heard from past students about postgraduate study have indicated that there do seem to be many different versions of this ‘world’. So it seems to me that reality is different according to what we think and feel about it – signifying an idealistic, rather than materialistic, ontological position (Robson 2002). And it is these different mental creations of UK HE among our international Masters students that interest me and drive my research – what do they think, feel and act on that determines the nature of this individual experience ?

At the same time, I believe that the students and I are still discussing a shared reality to some degree in this research. The targets of our inquiry are often apparently external objects, such as timetables, assignments, lectures, which we could all potentially describe in the same way, based on their physical characteristics, e.g. 24 hours of taught classes in Business Accounting in Semester 1, requiring a 3,500 word essay submission by 18 December. This perspective suggests a certain realism, positioning my ontology within a continuum rather than on one side or the other of a materialistic / idealistic divide. This has been captured by a post-positivist perspective which explains that although such an ontologically idealistic view suggests that reality is discursively created this does not mean objects would not be there if we did not talk about them (Creswell 2012). Yet, there are innumerable ways of talking about those objects so it is still inevitable that individuals will construe these (and therefore an apparently shared world) as different realities (Anderson 2011). So my research approach is characterised by a belief that different worlds exist within the School of Management, even though all of us who work and study there are apparently situated within the same learning community. Our thoughts and feelings about that experience will vary between ourselves, and also within ourselves from one time to another. That reality will be constantly shifting, at least to some degree, so my attempts at capturing individuals’ experience by data collection, and then representing those data through analysis, will inevitably be partial at best (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009, Cunliffe 2008, Duberley et al 2012).

 

Epistemology

The ontological perspective defined above excludes an empirical epistemology, as that would accept the idea of a ‘real world’ quite independent of our ideas about that (Duberley et al 2012). Empiricism is based on the assumption that this objective reality could be measured through observation. An individualised reality within the mind could not exist because this could not be measured (Symon and Cassell 2012). My research is driven by a belief that the unique way that any student perceives her educational experience has an inherent ‘reality’ for her, and thus a value (to be worth studying) in itself. This situates me towards the interpretivist end of the epistemological knowledge continuum, entailing a qualitative research methodology (Cunliffe 2011, Duberley et al 2012). Lincoln and Guba (1994) value the hermeneutic impulse of such an approach in contrast to scientific research focussing on apparently objective facts.

However, this qualitative paradigm still encompasses a range of epistemological positions. I believe that Duberley et al (2012, p.21) may have captured the paradox of my seemingly fluid positioning in what they argue is an accepted commonly used methodological approach within the complex tradition of interpretivism. They describe some similarity with qualitative neo-positivism in a realist ontology that accepts the existence of real phenomena to research. However, this is then complemented by a relativist epistemology that seeks to explore participants’ individual understanding of that reality. It may be useful then to consider other authors’ consideration of movement between apparently contradictory positions along a realist / relativist spectrum. This may be depicted in the context of my UK HE research design as follows:

Relativists argue within this qualitative paradigm for ‘a true spirit of enquiry’ – to be able to question any claim to truth, as no one claim can hold sway over another (Willig 2001, p.124). This seems important in my research context where students often show markedly different understandings of the same tutor-student interactions. At one module lecture, for example, I presented 90 students with a detailed exposition of how to plan the structure of an assignment answer to engage with the question. In the subsequent scripts, around one third of the group presented a considerable degree of haphazard structure indicating lack of overall planning, whilst only one quarter demonstrated the requisite planning process explicitly enough to gain high marks for this assessment criterion.

How did they emerge with so many different ‘truths’ from the same event ? They seemed to leave what realists might describe as a shared world (of the lecture), only to enter their own unique (relativist) worlds, from which they then enact their individual student performance. This suggests a need for the researcher to attempt to enter, and make sense of, a multiplicity of worlds within the same, supposed ‘reality’. This led me to consider the method of narrative analysis to explore difference between individual students’ data in depth, and that approach is explained more fully later in this chapter (Cunliffe 2008, Czarniawksa 2010, Johnson et al 2006).

However, in its extreme form of no fixed truth for anyone at any time, this relativism could seem to render research pointless. In an apparent reference to a need for some sense of a shared reality, Burr (2003, p.98) notes Collier’s (1998) claim that relativism, or non-realism, can actually become a ‘licence for dogmatism’, i.e. ‘if there is no truth, then no one can be wrong – we can all be smugly confident in our own belief’.

The realists towards the other end of a spectrum of qualitative approaches might therefore argue in my research context that all students are still having to engage with an ‘objective reality’ of the School’s academic discourse. This is borne out by Chase (2005) in her assertion that commonalities emerge through the researcher’s use of a socio-cultural lens to spot patterns emerging in the realities that narrators create from the particular time and place that they share. A set of essay writing principles that could theoretically enable any student to enhance their academic performance cannot then just be dismissed as uselessly generic. Without such a conception of some useful, objective guidelines, any form of intra-institutional student support becomes potentially impossible (LearnHigher 2013, Shahabudin 2009).

This confirmed a dichotomy within my methodology, i.e. in addition to exploring differences in students’ learning journeys, a thematic analysis is needed to identify similarities in learning challenges and coping strategies across my sample group. The thematic approach to narrative analysis is one adopted by many qualitative researchers for the purposes of recognising some commonalities, or recurrences of similarly expressed ideas (Edwards et al 2013, Elliott and Robinson 2012, Maitliss 2012, Miles and Huberman 2004, Robson 2002). This need not necessarily be for the purposes of direct, wider generalisation but rather from the perspective of recognising a value to theorising from in-depth investigations of a relatively small sample to highlight ideas for possibly useful, further research elsewhere (Flyvbjerg 2006, Lincoln and Guba 2000, Stake 2005).

Within the realism / relativism spectrum we find constructionism (Cunliffe 2011). Social constructionism maintains that meaning cannot simply be ‘objective’, thus positioning this paradigm towards the interpretivist end of the knowledge continuum. A constructionist approach emphasises that data cannot be said to represent a single objective reality, but that there are multiple, socially- constructed realities (Potter and Wetherell 1987, Lincoln and Guba 2000). Knowledge is created and understood through discourses, which change through time and culture (Schneider 2008). Parker (1998, p.1) describes social constructionism as a critically reflexive movement toward a ‘socially mediated and historically situated study of action and experience’.

Mahoney (2005, p.748) comments on constructionism’s view of a complex, active and interactive self that acknowledges, ‘the mysteries of selfhood as emergent expressions of social consciousness’. Self takes on meaning only through linguistic, historical and social structures and so must be studied through these. Referring to the development of the social constructionist approach to psychology, Crossley (2000, p.9) proposes narrative psychology as a way of studying selfhood that she believes to be potentially transformational, quoting how Potter and Wetherell (1987) describe this as being to:

… displace attention from the self-as-entity and focus it on the methods
of constructing the self. That is, the question becomes not what is the
true nature of the self, but how is the self talked about ?”

Crotty (1998) therefore highlights a prominent premise of constructionism – that the world does not have a meaning until we engage with it and interpret our experience of that interaction. Crossley (2000, p.55) refers to this potentially chaotic, post-modern representation of human experience, exemplified by Gergen’s (1991) concept of the ‘saturated self’ as deriving from our exposure to multiple and mixed messages from so many different sources in the information-rich, modern world. Gergen argues that this fragments the coherent, personal unity suggested by narrative conceptualisations of the self, resulting rather in a continuously haphazard variability of experience. ‘We are not the same person across different times and spaces’, he concludes. Having considered this epistemological extreme, Crossley argues, however, that the daily routine of people’s lives actually demonstrates much more regularity and structure than such an extreme interpretivist position suggests.

Social constructionism can be seen then to encompass a range of epistemological positions in itself, and researchers operating within this paradigm may resist being fixed within a certain point on that continuum because of its inherent fluidity. Crotty (1998, p.63) affirms that social constructionism is ‘at once realist and relativist’. On the one hand, he asserts a realist view – that narratives reveal the voices of a prevailing culture, whilst, on the other hand, he urges the acceptance of a relativist viewpoint that reality is simply the meaning we make of it – we do inhabit different worlds. Qualitative researchers (see Crossley 2000, Holstein and Gubrium 2008, Lincoln and Guba 2000) have embraced this shifting nature of knowledge.

Crotty (1998, p.60) refers to social constructionist principles as already having begun to emerge even in Marx’s (1859) focus on social being determining consciousness, for example, and he also cites Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) development of a ‘sociology of knowledge’ as a further manifestation of these. This breadth of disciplinary orientations emerges strongly in Holstein and Gubrium’s (2008) anthology of social constructionism highlighting several studies from cultural and sociological perspectives, as well as those of psychology. With reference to some of these in the following sections of this chapter, I explore a corresponding fluidity in my own epistemology and therefore a dynamic methodological approach that I have adopted in the data collection and analysis of this case study.

Burr (2003, p.6) helpfully suggests there are certain assumptions that seem to bond all forms of social constructionism:

•  A critical stance toward taken-for-granted knowledge.
• Historical and cultural specificity.
• Knowledge being sustained by social processes and connecting with
  social action.

Burr (1998) actually goes so far as to suggest that social constructionism as a term is the almost exclusive province of psychologists, but this seems too narrow in view of the cross-disciplinary applications noted above. As my research objectives are concerned with exploring students’ ways of making meaning from their experiences of UK HE, there is a psychological context to this study. However, the research does also draw on a further variety of disciplines, e.g. sociological and cultural studies. In this regard, it is helpful that Crossley (2000) recognises her own analytical discipline of narrative psychology in the social constructionist paradigm by virtue of sharing all of Burr’s above assumptions. Crossley (2000, p.24) situates narrative psychology dynamically at the ‘centre’ of the realism / relativism continuum, which, as discussed, encompasses the varied epistemological stances of different forms of social constructionism.

She strives to clarify her own claim to truth amongst the ‘many confusions and contradictions’ of the social constructionism debate. On the one hand, she places narrative psychology towards the realist end of this spectrum i.e. that there is an inner self that exists independently of language. However, she also emphasises the over-reliance of such traditional psychological models of self on quantitative, experimental methods of research. She sees these as inadequate for a search to understand how our minds make meanings of our worlds. Crossley (2000, p.103) argues instead for a qualitative methodological approach to:

… produce detailed, ‘information rich’ data, which are impossible to
separate from context if their full meaning is to be appreciated and
understood.

Crossley (2000, p.88) therefore situates narrative psychological analysis in a ‘middle position’ within the realist / relativist continuum of social constructionism – a position also advocated by other qualitative researchers (see McAdams 2001, Smith 1995). Narrative psychology, she suggests, requires an analysis that is:

… interested in learning something about our own and others’ personal
narratives and, in turn, the light those narratives throw on psychological
and social realities.

 

Narrative analysis – exploring similarities and differences.

So Crossley’s approach to narrative analysis demonstrates a combination of constructionist reflections on the data – the identification of recurrent themes and imagery deriving from shared cultural narratives and interview dynamics, along with subjective meaning-making within the individual’s unique perceptual world. The former methodologically encourages some systematic analysis in my research study to establish potential, thematic commonalities of learning challenges and positive experiences across the full data set of international Masters students learning journeys (Christie et al 2008, Duberley et al 2012, Elliott and Robinson 2012). However, in order to understand the complexity of different personal meanings arising from these rich data, my analysis will also employ a set of more extensive, individual narrative analyses (Christie et al 2008, Maitlis 2012, Reissman 2008). Among such complexity, McAdams (1993, p.20) notes the power of individual narratives to ‘elicit aspects of that [narrative], offering me hints concerning the truth already in place in the mind of the teller’.

This highlights an apparent contradiction within my overall data analysis, and indeed the correspondingly paradoxical, fluid nature of my epistemological positioning. This applies different methodological views in different parts of the analysis, reflecting in turn my strength of feeling for the need to be similarly adaptable in real-life educational situations. Summarising her view of ‘narratology’, Czarniawska (2010, p.67) emphasises that does not prescribe a set of procedures to deliver ‘testable results’, but rather seeks to provide an ‘ample bag of tricks … a source of inspiration’.

From an early stage of defining my methodology, I instinctively tended towards an interpretivist belief in the importance of seeing each individual’s point of view. This is especially reflected in my 1-1 consultation work with students, which is informed by the theoretical perspective of an Academic Literacies approach to valuing unique self-identity. Epistemologically, as discussed, this positions me toward the relativist end of the social constructionist spectrum. I relate this aspect of my analysis and discussion to earlier work of educational researchers such as Montgomery (2010) – she reports on in-depth research with seven international students that focuses on how each bring with them a unique identity. She asserts that as Western educators we should recognise a complex cultural picture to our international cohorts, with significant individual variations between students from the same background or country. We need to keep remembering to treat each student with a fresh perspective, not one dependent on easy cultural stereotypes.

However, I do also see a pragmatic value in my daily working life to being aware of some common difficulties that a majority of international Masters students seem to typically experience. Without this willingness to recognise those problems that recur with each fresh intake of postgraduate students, far fewer effective interventions would be made in accelerating those students’ transition into UK HE. There is a corresponding need then to work in a similarly pragmatic way with the analysis of such a large volume of data transcribed from 46 interviews. These practical considerations ascribe a definite value to the thematic as well as dialogic approach to narrative analysis (Duberley et al 2012, Elliott and Robinson 2012, Maitliss 2102, Reissman 2008). Indeed, it is argued that this is actually one of the more important contributions of this thesis. The use of such a mixed methods approach within qualitative methodology accepts the inherent paradox of learning journeys, embracing their complexity to enable a deeper understanding of how educators can respond in appropriate ways to the co-existence of diversity and commonality within any student group.

The process of identifying thematic categories in itself blends realist and relativist methods of analysis in social constructionism. On the one hand, I aim to maintain an open-minded attitude towards allowing themes to emerge from data as inductively as possible. Yet, at the same time, I recognise that my interpretations of connections within and between narratives will also derive from my socio-culturally derived understanding of significant issues developed through my wider professional experience at the School. Flyvbjerg (2006, p.235) refers, in this respect, to an ‘element of arbitrary subjectivism’ in a researcher’s choice of categories.

The students’ personal narratives have evolved over some time in certain (now changing) socio-cultural contexts from which they continue to strive to make meaning (Turner 2007). As noted above, socio-cultural influences such as the prevailing academic discourse within a business school, for example, could appear to present notably similar challenges across a group of international Masters students. These seem to demand a thematic approach to analysis, which is often deployed, as Maitlis (2012, p.496) argues, to make sense of ‘core dimensions around which meanings are constructed’. These relate, too, to the pedagogic argument for some forms of normative learning support, as suggested by the Academic Socialisation model, which may well pragmatically enable a significant number of the students to successfully navigate their way through this new landscape.

However, a respondent’s narrative, although certainly not a transparent account of her experiences, can still be seen as a way to understand her better through the personally unique meanings she attributes to a perceived ‘external reality’ shared with her peers (Elliott 2005, Hollway and Jefferson 2000). Stories are such a recurrent form of our attempts to conceptualise and express the meaning of our life experiences. The meanings that students make of these ongoing narratives are bound up with aspects of their identities in many dimensions of their lives, inside and outside academia (Lillis 2001). In my case study, individual narrative analysis examines how international Masters students apparently make sense of their learning journeys (Elliott 2005), and so I was drawn to combining this with the thematic analysis explained above as both approaches seek to make some useful meaning of the narratives that are co-constructed in the processes of my data collection and interpretation.

 

Data Collection

Qualitative research often sets out to generate rich data from a limited sample of respondents’ perspectives on a particular issue through interviews. This form of data collection can reach deeply into participants’ perspectives on their experiences to reveal the meanings they make of those (Creswell 2007, Denzin and Lincoln 2005). This is a popular method in educational research because of the subjectively elusive nature of learning. Fung (2006, p.1) questions what we might mean by ‘the experience of learning’, and believes that we can gain a fuller, richer picture of that by listening at length to personal stories, shaped by participants’ own agendas, i.e. through relatively unstructured interviews for subsequent narrative analysis.

There is a broad typology of three interview protocols: structured, semistructured and unstructured. Semi-structured interviews are often used in educational research to allow storied journeys to emerge organically and extensively enough to explore a diversity of meaning-making across a large data set from a relatively small sample of students (Alvesson and Ashcraft 2012, Elliott and Robinson 2012). Fung (2006), for example, conducted a case study of 22 first year undergraduates at Exeter University. In her interviews she used narrative prompts, rather than specific questions, producing 60 narratives totalling over 400,000 words. In another example of exploratory, qualitative methodology in the UK HE context, Christie et al (2008) set out to investigate the transitional issues for first year, undergraduate students from non-traditional backgrounds, interviewing 28 students twice during that time.

In 2009-10, the total population at MSc and MBA level from which to draw my research sample was 330 taught postgraduate students from 48 different countries. I recruited participants for my research study by announcements in induction presentations to MSc and MBA cohorts in September 2009. This generated 41 original volunteers. I provided further details concerning the scope and purpose of the research to these students to enable initial, informed consent (see Appendix 1). Drop-outs during that stage reduced the pool to 25 students. I then applied a purposive selection to establish a sample with a relatively balanced mix across national culture, gender and programme (MSc / MBA). This produced a set of participants for first interviews of 18 students:

Culture: India: 5 Africa: 5 East Asia: 5 Europe: 3
Gender: Female: 10 Male: 8
Programme: MSc: 13 MBA: 5

The cohort ratios for the 2009-10 academic year population were:

Culture: India: 26% Africa: 23% East Asia: 18% Europe: 12%
Gender: Female: 38% Male: 62%
Programme:MSc: 80% MBA: 20%

The sampling process triggers ethical issues, particularly those of voluntary participation and informed consent (Sture 2007, Henn et al 2006). International HE students may feel the need to ‘do the right thing’ when presented with research opportunities by respected academics (Oliver 2003, Rosnow and Rosenthal 1997). However, Sieber (1992) stresses that simple, friendly statements, time for reflection, and active listening will all help a process of informed consent to continue throughout data collection as the course of a project can really only be guessed at in the beginning (Miller and Bell 2002, Sture 2007).

Hollway and Jefferson (2000) also emphasise the distinction between the likely directions that interview questions may lead the respondents and the information necessary for initial informed consent. Too much information at first can lead respondents towards giving the kind of answers that endorse researchers’ prior expectations. They suggest limited information at this early stage, and that respondents will themselves determine the level of consent throughout the interviews process by choosing how much personal information to reveal.

Hollway and Jefferson’s focus is on the avoidance of harm, which they believe can be safeguarded by responsible interviewing. This recognises that respondents will inevitably be affected, to some small degree at least, by their interview experience, especially when dealing with emotive issues such as those in my own research. Some distress may be experienced in discussion of sensitive, personal issues, but this is not necessarily problematic, providing that is contained in a safe way by responsible interviewing, i.e. by the researcher listening non-judgementally, implicitly or explicitly reassuring the respondent of the value of her expressed thoughts and feelings. Hollway and Jefferson (2000, p.88) sum up the creation of such a safe context as the researcher’s responsibility to demonstrate values of, ‘honesty, sympathy and respect’.

Empathy and open-heartedness are fundamental, supporting an interaction of mutual respect and positive progress. My therapeutic training and 20 years’ experience of providing 1-1 support helps me in establishing rapport with others from a wide range of backgrounds. I believe my case study respondents instinctively sense my non-judgemental attitude and openness to their experience: they come to a convivial, relaxed office situation where I listen carefully, with a well-developed alertness to when I can be tempted to secondguess their statements. I have a lot of experience of following, prompting and overtly empathising. These communication strategies can help to engender trust, hopefully enabling them to express deeply felt experiences more confidently. We can then follow a learning journey together over the year, exploring how their choices impacted on personal and academic life.

At the University of Bradford, all research studies with human subjects must be cleared through the Ethics Committee before data collection can begin. In my case study, approval was confirmed by the Chair of the Committee on 16 October 2009. This also referred to the Committee’s view that ‘this is a good project with the ethical issues clearly set out’. I was then able to commence the first interviews later that month. A longitudinal study was originally planned to follow the research participants’ progress through the 2009-10 year with three interviews taking place as follows:

Stage 1 during Induction or soon afterwards: this would capture first
expectations and how these had been impacted by early experiences of UK HE.

Stage 2 at the end of Semester 1: this would review experiences of the first set
of exams, plus the feedback and grades from this first semester’s assignments.

Stage 3 during the final dissertation process: this would allow reflection on all
academic results, plus early experience of dissertation study

So the initial schedule for interviews was:

Stage 1: October / November 2009
Stage 2: January / February 2010
Stage 3: May / June 2010

This also corresponds to Wu and Hammond’s (2011) description of a longitudinal study conducted with a similar group of Masters students over 15 months (including a pre-sessional programme) with three data collection times. I later recognised the importance of reviewing the students’ perspectives of the whole learning journey, i.e. once they had reached the completion of their dissertation. Following Stage 2 interviews, my supervisors and I discussed the possibility of extending data collection to a fourth interview stage right at the end of their year in August / September. We agreed this would strengthen the longitudinal aspect of the research, and gain a more ‘complete’ perspective of the students’ time here. Some would already have returned home to their countries of origin earlier in the summer, but it would be worthwhile having at least some views from this ‘final position’. So this resulted in a further set of planned interviews, i.e.

Stage 4: August / September 2010.

I expected there to be some natural attrition to the original sample group of 18 students as they became more immersed in the pressures of their academic programme. At the beginning, I believed this would be likely to result in an ultimate participation of around 12 students by Stage 3, that being sufficient for in-depth qualitative research of this nature (Alvesson and Ashcraft 2012, Saunders 2012). This proved to be the case with 13 students providing a minimum of the three interviews I felt necessary for effectively tracking their postgraduate learning journey. As the Effective Learning Advisor, I was also working with some of these students in a direct capacity supporting their academic progress, so I was able to easily keep track of their performance in their module assessments through these stages.

Another important issue for data collection is the length of time for the interviews themselves. In narrative interviews, several authors report needing at least 90 minutes to explore life issues in depth (Elliott 2005, Ford 2002, Riessman 1993). However, this clearly depends on: the extent of the research focus; time frame within the respondent’s life to be covered; and, of course, practical issues of access. In my own case, I would be interviewing students every three months over the course of the academic year, so at each point the students would only be reflecting on a relatively short period of time. Each subsequent interview would be picking up the threads of the last to some extent. So I initially estimated an hour for each interview, and informed participants of this in advance. Wu and Hammond (2011) conducted a similar approach with their international postgraduate participants, and reported interviews lasting 45-70 minutes. Although I allowed an open-ended time frame for each interview, the narratives stimulated by my questions around their educational and personal experience did generally draw to a close around the hour mark. Even in Stage 4 interviews, when I was encouraging students to reflect over the whole year, this time frame still seemed quite sufficient, partly because so much ground had already been covered in earlier interviews.

In order to meet my research objectives of learning more about the challenges and coping strategies of international Masters students, I understand that my data collection should be driven by the need to explore in depth the emotional and cognitive complexities of these students’ learning journeys, and how they individually make sense of them. Data generation within an interview creates a unique conversation, which is socially constructed in that place and time, but which also offers a rare depth of insight for both participants into the meanings already attributed by the respondent to her earlier experiences (Robson 2002). I believe that my research design should aim to encourage international Masters students’ confidence to tell me their stories as they perceive them at the time. Chase (2005) emphasises a shift away from interviewee-interviewer relationship to one of narrator and listener – allowing the former to tell a story in her own voice, rather than a set of responses to pre-determined questions. The researcher is taking a deliberate interest in how the narrator makes sense of her experience, uniquely expressed through her story and voice, revealing a richness of socio-cultural influences on the narrative’s direction and tone (Gubrium and Holstein 2002, Holloway and Jefferson 2001, Presser 2005).

Chase (2005) advocates a seemingly paradoxical approach to data collection in such encounters. This involves first identifying a broad question, based on the researcher’s understanding of the socio-cultural situation – knowing what is note-worthy in that social setting. Secondly, however, the interview should also allow the narrative to take other tangents to those expected. Similarly, Christie et al (2008) had not questioned students in interviews about the affective dimension of their learning journeys, yet this emerged as a predominant feature in students’ responses, and one that then directed a significant focus of the data analysis. They believe that this impelled them to recognise ‘the links between emotion and learning’ (p.570). Whilst their study was conducted with nontraditional entrants to undergraduate study from UK Further Education colleges, they are likely to share similarly emotional experiences of culture shock in common with the international students in my own study.

There should therefore be a conversational tone to normalise any initial feelings of alienation in first interviews. This informal approach could more naturally lead to a deeper exploration of the affective nature of their learning journeys. Interview questions should provide a framework to allow the interviewee’s story to unfold as far as possible, so that, unlike traditional approaches to more structured interviewing, the respondent’s experiences direct the emerging narrative in a way that is less controlled by the interviewer (Hollway and Jefferson 2001, McAdams 1993)

This is a delicate balance to achieve within an interview – staying within the research focus, whilst at the same time allowing the student to explore aspects of their narrative that seem to follow naturally for them. Whilst Hollway and Jefferson (2000) advocate this exploratory approach, they also suggest that the interviewer could best encourage the respondent to speak about quite specific situations so that a definite narrative emerges. Elliott (2005) supports this awareness of respondents needing some direction whilst not overly constraining their train of thought.

Mishler (1986a, p.99) refers to the much earlier work from Merton et al (1956), which many of the above qualitative researchers believe still constitute suitable criteria for effective interviewing by two means:

Depth … help interviewees to describe the affective, cognitive and
evaluative meanings of the situation and the degree of their involvement
in it.

Personal context … bring out the attributes and prior experiences of
interviewees which endow the situation with these distinctive meanings.

I believe these criteria establish an enduring, appropriate process for in-depth, qualitative interviewing, and I hold to those in my own approach to data collection. A common sense approach to interviewing students, informed by my longer, professional experience in our shared context, is conducive to building rapport. Hollway and Jefferson (2000) emphasise the importance of everyday language that the respondent will be able to relate to comfortably. For the reasons noted above, that is especially true, of course, for the international Masters students in my case study. In this exploratory research design, they need clear, empathically framed questions to allow them to express associated ideas freely. And then, through active listening, I can prompt further exploration of how the emerging narrative informs my research focus on their learning journey’s perceived challenges and opportunities (see Table 5 below for a list of first interview questions).

This exploratory study leaves as much scope as possible, within the sociocultural constraints of our School-based interviews, for students to reflect on a range of issues influencing their learning experiences. Referring to the outcomes of the above study by Christie et al (2008), it seemed important that I should create my interview protocol in a way that took account of the potential for emotional issues to arise whilst also still endeavouring to explore the more cognitive elements of the students’ academic journeys.

Clearly, it is important to tailor the enquiry in qualitative interviews to the focus of the particular research design – in this case exploring issues most pertinent to students’ transition from one educational culture to another in this case. Three pilot interviews had already been conducted with 2008-09 international Masters students to help develop the most helpful questions for the main exploratory study the following year (Gabriel 2000). Combining the pilot study’s generated data with the above considerations yielded the list shown in Table 5 for a semi-structured protocol to be used consistently across first interviews.

 

Table 5: Stage 1 Interview questions.

Learner identity:

• What kind of student are you ?
• What excites you about being here ?
• What are your academic objectives (what do you hope to achieve in your
  studies) ?
• What are your personal objectives (what do you want for yourself this
  year) ?
• How confident are you that you will be academically successful ?
• How has that confidence changed during your time here so far ?
• What affects your confidence (positively or negatively) ?
• What has influenced your beliefs about yourself (and in what way) ?
• What strengths in yourself will help you be successful ?

Educational Culture / Learning Development:

• How do you think UK HE is different from your previous education ?

o Where was that ?
o How were you assessed there ?
o What types of reading and writing did that involve ?
o How important were other forms of communication e.g. presentations, group-work ?

• What do you think tutors expect from you here ?
• How do you feel about that ?
• What will help you master academic writing here ?
• How much are you mixing and working with other students ?
• Are these mainly from your own culture or others ?
• How will you know that you are being successful ?
• What do you expect to achieve in your next assessments ?
• How would you respond to any negative feedback from assignments ?

Although I started the first interviews with this original set of prompts to cover relevant issues in a semi-structured way, I soon found even this approach quite restrictive. So this evolved over the course of the longitudinal time frame into a more free-flowing, conversational style, allowing participants to explore the relevant issues for themselves. I kept the original list of prompts by my side during the interviews, checking that we had covered these areas by the end, which predominantly proved to be the case through this apparently unstructured approach.

Paget (1983) embraces the positive potential of this co-productive process, by overtly valuing her personal interest in the respondents’ chosen directions of conversation as much as the formal research design. She does not seek an artificial neutrality or objectivity through strict adherence to pre-determined questions, but rather recognises that her questioning can be haltingly exploratory. This can also enable equally hesitant responses from the interviewees in their own search for deeper meaning through what they say and hear in the interview. This is reassuring in its endorsement of my own experience of the interviewee and I tentatively feeling our way into her subjective world, like groping through a dense forest to find a clearing. Everything is somehow familiar, but we are still exploring a new place, and can be open to the possibility of fascinating discoveries.

There is a circular process within an interview of this kind, in which questions are reformulated, and their answers created from how both parties continue trying to make sense of what each other is saying – rather than questions necessarily having a predetermined, shared meaning. The meanings emerge through the discourse itself (Mishler 1986b, Paget 1983). So, in addition to the interviewee taking responsibility for explaining the relevance of the narrative, there is a corresponding responsibility on the part of the genuinely interested researcher to follow the emerging narrative carefully enough to share the construction of that story (Ford 2002, Polanyi 1985).

Discursively orientated approaches are therefore based on a principle that resulting data for analysis are partially determined by the researcher. Holstein and Gubrium (2008) suggest that researchers should openly acknowledge this concept, and these authors even advocate the role of the interviewer as one of activating the production of a particular narrative through various prompts that can indicate possible orientations for the respondent. Mishler (1986b, p.93) states that ‘all investigators have to make choices’. It could be said that allowing respondents to narrate freely, rather than to follow structured questioning, enables a more faithful reflection of their real life experiences. However, it can also be argued that narratives always seek to make meanings as they are being constructed – an interpretative process that must distort the originally perceived experience (Elliott 2005). This latter position does mean that the respondent and the researcher are already co-creating a new narrative within the interview, which will itself then be re-constructed through later analysis.

This prompts me to reflect on whether I believe that my relatively unstructured interviews give the students the opportunity to accurately represent their experience to me, or rather to find clearer meaning through the narrative constructed in the interview itself. Holstein and Gubrium (2008) argue that this specific meaning does not represent a view that might be presented by the same respondent about that same subject outside the interview. McAdams (1993, p.13) actually suggests that we do not ‘discover ourselves in narrative, but actually create ourselves through narrative’. This implies that every interview data set is a unique, holistic production influenced by the intersubjectivity of that particular interaction (Chase 2005, Silverman 2001), and the socio-cultural and research context within which the interview is situated (Mishler 1986b).

This recognises the need generally for significant reflexivity from the researcher to consider what, in his world, has influenced the data collection, and I reflected in this way during each stage of the longitudinal data collection process. I became increasingly convinced that my facilitation of different directions to emerging narratives in the interviews enabled a real richness of data around what was most significant for each interviewee in that relatively short time of review. These directions were mutually developed, being driven by the interviewees’ interpretation of my questions, which they generally understood well enough from our shared experience of the same institutional world. At these points in time, we were sharing a learning journey together. When they then returned to their studies, and I to my job, we were, in a realist sense at least, still continuing to travel together in the same world. This then, I believe, facilitated more trust at each of our subsequent meetings. And so more openness and depth continued to be developed between us (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009).

Between the interviews, I was conscious of so many on-going changes occurring for students, and I therefore created a simple set of prompt questions for a self-reflective journal that I hoped some participants would keep from time to time during the semesters (see Table 6 below). This was mentioned initially in the first interviews, sent to them shortly afterwards, followed up by a reminder just before Christmas. We agreed this could provide a useful aide-memoire for them at Stage 2 interviews, and I hoped that some would be happy to share these openly with me at that stage, so that I may also include these in my data analysis. In that respect, several of them managed to keep some reflective notes throughout the data collection period, which proved very helpful in creating more of a continuing narrative between interviews and as question prompts for subsequent stages. These self-reflection prompts are shown in Table 6 below:

Table 6: Prompts for participants’ self-reflection between interviews

• What have I been pleased about (personally or academically) and why ?
• What has been upsetting (personally or academically) and why ?
• How have I reacted to these difficulties ?
• How do I feel now, at the time of writing this ?
• What are my priorities (personal and academic) for the immediate
  future ?

Data management

Once the data are being generated, the researcher needs to make the choice of whether to rely on manual manipulation of these, aided by a word-processing package, or to use specialised computerised software, such as NVivo. A software package is really a tool for storing, organising and retrieving data, and can be helpful for the coding and indexing approach, using the same ‘lens’ across the whole data set (Richards 1999). The choice of whether to use this does have significant implications for the researcher’s resources of time and application (Miles and Huberman 2004, Coffey and Atkinson 1996). Whilst some researchers feel the initial investment of time is worth the effort, Coffey and Atkinson (1996) suggest that this can lead to them overlooking important aspects of the form (or the whole) of the data. This is important for qualitative research in general and narrative analysis specifically, which searches more for ‘the particular in context, rather than the common or consistent’ (Mason 2002, p.165)

Hollway and Jefferson (2000) believe in foregrounding form, or Gestalt as it is known in German. This proposes that the significance of any one part of a text can only be realised in its relation to the whole. They describe the importance of immersing oneself in any one subject’s transcriptions and related data for some time, to start to have that deeper sense of who they are. There is a recognition that this will then be operating at an unconscious level within the researcher – Hollway and Jefferson report their subjects appearing in dreams and waking fantasies – so that any resulting interpretation will be influenced more by the researcher’s inner world. They believe that an ability to hold an overview of another person’s generated data within one’s mind is the key to applying Gestalt, and stress the problem of fragmentation of data that arises inevitably from the use of computerised analysis programmes. These, they claim, miss a vital, holistic function of analysis, by the very process of breaking down data into retrievable parts outside the mind of the researcher.

The consideration of the data as a whole can allow clear identification of the peculiarities in relation to the rest, in a way that automatically coded indexing could overlook. Mishler (1986a, p.88) refers to various models of content-based narrative analysis with a ‘referential’ focus, noting the importance of their search for coherence within the narrative as a whole and for connections between different parts. However, he observes their common dependence on shared cultural understandings so that analysis inevitably involves intuitive interpretations based on a variety of factors: including different elements of the narrative; wider shared knowledge of the two participants; and general knowledge.

Crossley (2000, p.104) asserts that meaning is not ‘transparently available’ in an interview transcript. She advocates a thorough, progressive approach to analysis of the respondent’s narrative, and suggests that themes and imagery often emerge together to start creating a ‘rough map of the picture emerging from the interview’ (p.91). But it is the subsequent, interpretative narrative from the final stage of analysis – ‘weaving all of this together into a coherent story’ that colours in the picture more fully (p.93). This element of Crossley’s narrative analysis model works with the full data set to explore a more holistic, some would say richer, view of the responses within that specific interview conversation. She suggests that this approach accepts an important opportunity to expand on the data in an exploratory way, rather than reduce and then reconnect elements, and I follow that approach with the individual narrative analyses presented in Chapter 7.

So I believe that my mixed methods of qualitative analysis, involving a blend of two quests – for differences as well as similarities – direct me away from a reliance on software that seems to be most useful for approaches primarily involving the ‘quantification’ of qualitative data for analysis. Manual data management may be more time consuming, but nevertheless more flexible to my exploratory research, which aims to keep a holistic view to the data analysis, even whilst considering individual differences in depth.

Data analysis

The narrative analytical approach

Robson (2002) observes there is no clear choice as to which type of qualitative data analysis to use. The narrative psychological approach utilised by researchers such as McAdams (1993) and Crossley (2000), which triggered my early methodological explorations into narrative analysis, is just one example of discourse analysis. The heterogeneous nature of this methodological approach defies clear and simple definition, as many different forms exist across academic disciplines (Jaworksi and Coupland 1999). The choice of which type of discourse analysis is undertaken by researchers is heavily dependent on their disciplinary interests, and the particular focus of their research questions. Certain of these such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis, whilst sharing the constructionist concern with the making of different meanings, are rooted in very detailed examination of the linguistics of interaction (Potter and Wetherell 1987). I find myself drawn more to narrative analysis methods, for reasons explained in depth above, that seek to deeply understand the ways in which interviewees strive to explain their individually constructed world (Hollway and Jefferson, 2001).

Narrative analysis of longitudinal data collected through interviews at beginning, middle and end points of the academic year offers the potential for an in-depth view of each student’s inevitably unique encounter with our educational system. Interpretive insights can be generated from each narrative into how some international Masters students are affected by the cultural collision with a new academic discourse – their inner struggles and triumphs along the journey towards becoming a ‘master’ of the UK HE system.

As explained in depth above, there is an important and legitimate dichotomy in this methodology entailing the presentation of some individual international Masters students’ narratives to explore the possible implications of diversity within this type of HE cohort, and a thematic analysis to identify potentially shared experiences among international Masters students as an identified group. I perceived an opportunity to ‘blend’ these two analytical approaches by employing an extensive, holistic investigation within some individual narratives as suggested by Crossley (2000), yet also utilising this process of familiarising myself deeply with the data to generate a set of categories as I went along for the purposes of thematic analysis across narrators.

Riessman (1993, p.21) recognises that there is considerable disagreement about even the definition of narrative, as well as many different ideas about its characteristic structure. One of the pioneers of early narrative work, Labov (1972) had provided a structure for the formal properties of a narrative: an abstract; orientation (to place and time); complicating action; evaluation; resolution; and coda (return to the present). This has been influential in the approaches later advocated by a range of qualitative researchers (Coffey and Atkinson 1996, Elliott 2005, Riessman 2008)

Elliott (2005) especially notes the importance of identifying the evaluative elements of the narrative structure for enabling the interviewer to empathise with the narrator’s ways of meaning-making. Reissman (1993) agrees that these evaluative elements of stories do show how individuals seek to make sense of their experiences, by capturing what it is they wish to understand and also how they wish to be understood. She calls these the ‘soul of the narrative’ (p.20). These narrative outcomes have been evident in several discussions I have had with international Masters students, especially towards the end of their studies for example, when they have come to retrospectively view earlier, traumatic experiences as somehow importantly formative in their personal development. They often express appreciation of the learning inherent in adversity, even sometimes to the point of regretting its passing once they reach the end of their time in UK HE.

Many commentators, even going as far back as Aristotle, have agreed that a chronological sequence is a pre-requisite for narrative (Czarniawska 2010, Labov 1972, Polanyi 1985). I had also been expecting to hear in my interviews about patterns of progression through the stages of our academic year. However, Czarniawska (2010) observes that such co-created stories will start to make sense around disparate, meaningful events rather than across chronological time. Reissman (1993), too, argues that even a simplistic structure of a beginning, middle and end reveals Western, white, male researchers’ pre-occupation with linear time, and that narratives are just as likely to be organised by the respondent into themes. This does seem to be the case with my own participants, many of whom are from non-Western cultures, who seem to narrate thematically rather than chronologically. This outcome provided further encouragement for conducting a thematic analysis alongside some individual narratives, as advocated earlier in this chapter.

Chase (2005), who draws on Reissman’s work above, recognises that narratives can refer to accounts of very differing lengths of time from simply one event through to a whole life history. Clearly this spectrum includes my research focus on international Masters students’ one-year learning journeys – what Chase initially terms, ‘extended stories’, although interestingly she also acknowledges that others would even describe these narratives around significant time periods as life stories in themselves (p.652).

 

The value (and limitations) of narrative analysis in this case study context.

Analysis of these narratives can deliver an in-depth exploration of emotional as well as cognitive elements of students’ experiences on their learning journeys (Crossley 2000, Maitlis 2012, McAdams 1993). There is an important opportunity in this context of UK HE to discover much more about how the relatively under-researched group of international Masters students can be affected by their study experiences, and how they respond more or less effectively. Narrative analysis of learning journeys at an institution such as the School of Management can explore students’ positive and negative experiences of a typical UK HE curriculum.

This study therefore seeks to generate discussion from which Western educators can gain insights that enable them to theorise helpful institutional learning development strategies. This qualitative approach is not claiming a universal generalisability to any of the findings – a proposition which originates in the positivist paradigm concerned with assessing validity from experimental, quantitative research measurements. Instead, this sets out to consider multiple, relative possibilities for the interpretation of any data, based around a socially constructed reality (Cunliffe 2008, Duberley et al 2012, Symon and Cassell 2012). This can reveal perspectives which have not previously been considered, offering new insights into existing preconceptions (Guba and Lincoln 1989, Richardson 2013, Stake 2005, Wolcott 1994).

Flyvbjerg (2006) does argue that some case study findings can potentially be generalised, but still attaches greater importance to the understanding that this is not the only step in advancing the social sciences. He asserts that case studies offer greater potential in their capacity for in-depth exploration to identify particularities and exceptions. Interpretivist researchers therefore set out to explore the potential for plausible, communicable findings, thus avoiding simplistic solutions to complex human issues (Chase 2005, Mishler 1986a).

Such interpretations can then be compared with alternatives from the same and similar data. Qualitative research of this nature offers the opportunity to theorise from individual cases and for similar studies to be replicated and undertaken elsewhere (Creswell 2007, Robson 2002). It is useful in this respect to refer back to the methodology adopted by Lea and Street (1998) in developing the Academic Literacies model. These authors recognise explicitly the exploratory and inconclusive nature of educational research:

Our research, then, was not based on a representative sample from
which generalisations could be drawn but rather was conceived as
providing case studies that enabled us to explore theoretical issues and
generate questions for further systematic study [my italics].

Similarly, in the context of the relatively new field of research into international Masters students’ learning experiences of UK HE, Zhang (2011) comments that an exploratory approach is appropriate, and this will naturally be orientated to signposting more refined future research.

Stake (2005) suggests that the researcher’s aim is to understand the nature of the case by becoming so personally knowledgeable about its many aspects that it becomes ‘embraceable’. In this respect, my professional involvement with international Masters students on a daily basis seems to offer that opportunity to intellectually embrace the context of this case study. Yet, I still doubt my facility to truly understand what is, by its very nature, a hidden and variegated world – a mosaic of thousands of pieces, each one seemingly there to be grasped, but often ultimately proving elusive. To return to my learning journey metaphor from the beginning of this thesis; on any mountaineering expedition, the path already travelled can be quickly forgotten, at least in significant detail. Shortterm memories are fragmented whilst the mind is mainly occupied with overcoming immediate obstacles and planning ahead. Similarly, as international Masters students’ academic journeys unfold through the year, perceptions of those change day-by-day in vacillating emotional states arising from a series of seemingly continuous learning challenges. Within the timebound encounter of any one interview, I can only take some ‘snapshots’ from the student’s own partially recorded, re-presented descriptions of that experience, rather than being able to directly observe ‘the uncensored film’ of the journey. These fragmented stories are then translated months or even years later through the filters of my separate understanding. As Stake sums up, ‘the whole story exceeds anyone’s knowing and anyone’s telling’ (2005, p.456).

It could therefore be argued that it is disingenuous for qualitative researchers to suggest that their findings can be transferred directly into other social contexts. However, Chase (2005) acknowledges that a narrative’s usefulness derives from the insights it provides into what is understandable and possible within a certain socio-cultural context. This surely also suggests that such insights are worth exploring in other contexts that share similar characteristics (Flyvbjerg 2006, Maitlis 2012). It is quite usual to accept a common sense approach that narrated experiences from one postgraduate student at a business school, for example, may not only be mimetic of other students’ experiences in the same school, but also of those in other business schools with student cohorts exhibiting similar characteristics. This principle recognises the need for readers to decide for themselves the extent to which they can apply these findings to their own settings (Elliott 2005, Flyvbjerg 2006, Ford 2002).

Stake (2005) proposes that the reader will instinctively relate the emerging ideas of the research to other known cases – that it is impossible for a case to be understood unless against a commonality of others. I can choose, then, to see the responsibility for assimilation of my case’s issues against others of a similar nature as resting with the reader. And equally, she may choose not to focus on such similarities but rather to absorb herself in the particularities of my study’s narratives and analyses. This principle respects the active engagement of the informed reader in considering this new ‘story’. There is an inherent recognition that an interpretive process is required of the reader – assimilating the presented narratives through the fresh filter of her own world. The epistemological emphasis is on an active reader’s involvement in judging the efficacy of this one, newly constructed ‘reality’ from a potential choice of many others.

Hollway and Jefferson (2000) make the point, as does Riessman (2008), that the research subject cannot be known except through another subject such as the researcher, and they remind us that we would not take everyday conversation at face value. We often question, interpret and read between the lines of others’ representation of their experiences. These authors therefore argue for a positive and necessary value to interpretation in qualitative research, and the researcher’s particular, representative view must also therefore be explored alongside that of the interviewee. This requires a high degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher – to ensure a correspondingly high quality of interpretation.

Paradoxically, however, Hollway and Jefferson (2000) also stress the emancipatory importance of providing media for the voices of subjects who may otherwise be under-represented. They describe a ‘tell it like it is’ approach to interviewing derived from a commitment to allowing this voice to emerge in respondents. So the researcher should focus on what, how and from where the narrator speaks (Chase 2005, Duberley et al 2012, Maitlis 2012). This raises the important epistemological consideration of how the voices of the narrator and the researcher are represented in the emergent interpretations of the interviews. Riessman (1993) observes that the reader can judge for herself the appropriateness of the one interpretation against the original transcript or extracts from that, such as those included throughout my own analysis in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.

An emancipatory epistemology does seem important in relation to my research focus on the experiential learning journeys of international students who have invested heavily in an educational programme that challenges them with unfamiliar, often unclear demands. It seems that international students’ cultural collision with the UK HE discourse is often a negative experience, initially at least, that may not be taken seriously by universities intent on maintaining this Western pedagogical model in its apparent superiority. So research that strives to be sensitive to the relative experiences of individual students, whilst also still setting these against a realist view of prevailing institutional practices is especially important in the current climate of UK HE internationalisation.

I had therefore originally felt the need to represent the students’ voices strongly throughout the presented narrative by inclusion of substantial direct quotes at appropriate points. It is, after all, the meanings that international Masters students purport to make of their UK HE learning journeys that are the focus of exploration in this research study. And I had believed that there was an imperative within that to therefore let the stories speak for themselves, as suggested by Carter (1993). However, even if the study aims as far as possible to stay faithful to the participants’ voices, the criteria for what has been included in the interview framework, at least, have already been decided by the researcher. Qualitative analysis also then involves the researcher in making his own meaning from the emerging data, thus creating a new narrative (Duberley et al 2012). Riessman (1993, p.22) notes that ‘narratives are by their nature interpretive, and in turn require interpretation’. This will also be true of the interview interaction itself, which will produce a particular construction of the interviewee’s experience depending partly on the nature of the interaction with the interviewer. They will shape together a further interpretation of that newly shared experience (Czarniawska 2010, Ford 2002). Others argue, too, (not least my supervisors) that there is a necessary role for the researcher to explain the stories. Czarniawska (2010, p.65) asserts that:

responsibility and respect do not have to be expressed in a literal
expression of what has been said … the researcher’s duty is, however,
to take the authorial responsibility for the narrative they have concocted
[my italics].

All research is interpretive by being based on the personal beliefs of the researcher about the ways in which experience of the world should be studied. The resulting narratives are therefore immediately partial, alternative ‘truths’ and the aim of this data analysis is to present a believable representation, which the active reader can judge for herself, as discussed above (Denzin and Lincoln 2005, Kincheloe and McLaren 2000).

Chase (2005) asserts that the researcher develops his own voice as he makes meaning out of the research data through the construction of others’ voices. She notes that this is a fundamental consideration in narrative research – which voice to use to best represent the voices of the participants. Her typology, contrasting authoritative, supportive and interactive voices, emerges from feminist challenges to traditional approaches to the research relationship – questioning in those cases how much women’s narratives are allowed to really speak for themselves. This particularly shifts the research perspectives onto women as subjects rather than objects. These might include multiple, perhaps paradoxical views, and the challenge for the researcher is in how to represent these different voices whilst also recognising his own subjectivity at work in the research process. Even in the field of ethnography, which could be argued to present a closer, richer representation of a lived culture, the fieldworker must still recognise his findings as a means of representation that has been somehow transformed by his own, socio-culturally derived interpretations (Van Maanen 1988).

 

Co-created narratives

Elliott (2005, p.39) assumes the importance of the respondents’ interpretation of their circumstances, rather than being concerned with finding an objective, ‘totally truthful account’. Reissman (1993) notes that there are different positions within narrative analysis as to the ‘telling of truth’. Some assume that narratives are recounting original events faithfully (e.g. Labov 1972), whilst others such as Reissman herself understand that, in the telling, narratives reveal the truth of the experience to the narrator. Chase (2005) observes that most researchers have moved to a view of regarding speakers as constructing events through their conversational language, rather than simply describing them. She suggests this involves making sense of experience retrospectively and means not just description but thoughts and feelings, which create an interpretation of that experience.

Within the qualitative research paradigm generally, there exists a dichotomy: there are those researchers who see the interview as a relatively pure source of information about the respondents’ experienced world (naturalist or realist) and Duberley et al (2012, p.20) place these within the methodological approach termed ‘qualitative neo-positivism’. There are others who view the interview as an opportunity to explore a new set of meanings created in the interaction of the interview itself, and the above authors place those within the range of philosophical approaches denoted by the terms interpretivism or relativism. This latter, epistemological position recognises the emergence of knowledge through specific encounters between social actors (Denzin and Lincoln 2000). There is an emancipatory value, discussed earlier, in seeking to represent students’ voiced, existing beliefs faithfully enough to inform readers about some UK HE learning journeys in ways that they, in turn, can also then relate to their own professional, or indeed personal, interactions with international Masters students. However, I believe I must also recognise the immediate, interpretive nature of both the interview itself and then the subsequent analysis (Alvesson and Ashcraft 2012).

In my case study, I wish to empathise with the international Masters students’ by accepting ‘at face value’ that their accounts do access existing understandings of the significance of their experience. I choose to expect that those meanings will then become further developed through the interactive (probing and reflective) nature of the interview itself. One realisation that has gradually become clearer for me over the last 20 years of supporting others individually is the continuous paradox of wholeheartedly entering into others’ narratives – hearing and, most importantly, accepting their contemporary versions of reality – but then needing to ‘step away’ and view these with some perspective of detachment. This latter step can then allow for interpretation, as seems to now be required to develop the ‘authoritative voice’ for my doctoral research thesis (Czarniawska 2010). Yet, any research is subject to potential bias from the principle that what one looks for, one may well find. Chase (2005) recognises that whilst this is an issue for all qualitative researchers it is especially significant for narrative analysts.

The advantage of my past experience lies, I believe, in having enough skill to orientate the discussion into a developmental exploration of students’ experience, so that it facilitates the evaluative function of narrative analysis mentioned earlier (Elliott 2005, Labov 1972, Riessman 1993). I believe that careful, active listening and a communicable curiosity can enable more understanding in any researcher during data collection, and that this attitude of suspended belief then leads one towards a more inductive approach to data analysis, which is supported by many qualitative researchers (Ford 2002, Mason 2002, Silverman 2001).

 

Theoretical influences on data analysis

In counterpoint to an inductive approach, it is important to consider the extent to which generated themes are pre-determined by theoretical positions of the researcher and his tendency to seek evidence of those theoretical perspectives in the data. Robson (2002, p.493) proposes that any researcher brings ‘conceptual baggage’ from a theoretically informed perspective that influences how he ‘sees’ the data, and Duberley et al (2012) concur that any researcher must approach any study with pre-conceptions. I would argue that whilst this cannot be ignored, the researcher needs to compartmentalise such influences as far as that may be possible, to prepare to be surprised by what he may hear during data collection. Flybjerg (2006, p.235) summarises the inductive nature of findings from a range of researchers’ in-depth case studies, highlighting that their preconceived, theoretical notions were predominantly shown to be incorrect by the emergent data. He argues that the valuable purpose of case studies often lies with ‘falsification, not verification’:

Social science has not succeeded in producing general, contextindependent theory and, thus, has in the final instance nothing else to offer than concrete, context-dependent knowledge.

Crossley (2000) explores the influence of personal and theoretical perspectives when she reflexively considers her analysis of a narrative related by a survivor of sexual abuse. In this case she contrasts how two different theoretical positions – psychoanalytic and feminist – dramatically affect the way in which a narrative can be construed by both the narrator and her interviewer. She describes how the narrator initially expresses her experience through a feminist lens, portraying her private abuse in the context of a wider, emerging, public critique of patriarchal power. Later, however, she relates more of a personal healing process leading towards forgiveness, informed by therapeutic, inner world concepts such as the unconscious. Crossley (p.126) describes this psychoanalytic perspective as ultimately usurping the feminist narrative.

She observes that each socio-culturally influenced perspective also directs how the researcher chooses to see the narrative. After time for further reflection,Crossley recognises, for example, that her determination to analyse the narrative through her own feminist epistemology has perhaps done a disservice to the narrator’s experience. She wonders, rightly I believe, whether her insistence on analysing the account ‘through linguistic and cultural narratives’ fails to address the personal dimension of the subject’s experience, even to the point of objectifying her (p.131). This raises the issue of the plausibility of any one narrative, and Crossley points out the moral, as well as personal and political, implications of this – what constitutes a ‘better’ narrative ? From the tradition of critical qualitative research, Kincheloe and McLaren (2000) maintain that all analysis is interpretation, and no one interpretation can claim a privileged position of authority. Ultimately, Crossley decides this depends on the purpose of the research analysis, with different narratives serving different purposes.

Hollway and Jefferson (2000) argue that the way into a more meaningful interpretation does lie in the application of relevant theory. In their own analyses, they make a series of interpretations, some inter-dependently, based around psychoanalytic theoretical propositions. They assert that these interpretations can be transparently explained in the analysis with reference to both the relevant aspects of theory and clearly identified extracts of data. They then claim that ‘this does not rule out the possibility of alternative explanations, but these too can be tested against the available data’ (2000, p.80).

However, from my earlier professional experience as a psychotherapist exploring convoluted links between behaviour and unconscious drives, some of Hollway and Jefferson’s theoretically derived interpretations seem a little too easy. It can be comforting as a researcher, particularly within the psychoanalytic discipline, to believe that one can discern what lies at the root of others’ difficulties, and so understand more of the human psyche. That professional identity is dependent on a perceived ability to see what is really ‘going on’ inside others. Yet how many layers of interwoven factors have actually resulted in a certain behavioural outcome, often manifesting much later in life ? Hollway and Jefferson (2000, p.69) themselves acknowledge that, ‘people cannot be known, much less that such meanings can be elicited in two interviews’.

Jefferson does comment reflexively, in one sense at least, on the similarities he shared with one of his subjects, despite a huge chasm in social class (Hollway and Jefferson 2000). This, he believes, enabled him to relate more empathically and comfortably … and to actually like his subject. The researcher, he argues, is thus able to apply his own life experience, as much as theoretical positioning, to understanding some of what it may have been like for his subject. Such connections should then be overtly acknowledged and explored as further data in themselves, as I explore in the later section of this chapter devoted to reflexive analysis.

Saukko (2005) proposes that such empathic interactions enable researchers to relate to multiple realities of different subjects and also understand these. However, whilst the former is inspiring in its expectation of being able to bridge different worlds, it is the latter point that I find difficult to reconcile with my epistemological position. I doubt the ability of anyone to really comprehend another’s evolving, nuanced world-view. It is tempting, of course, to be satisfied with one’s own version of why others are as they are, and how they should or should not be, based on some partial, psychological theory. But life experience has convinced me that one cannot really know another’s truth. Finlay (2002, p.218) raises this concern quite explicitly:

I can see the problems underlying the realist assumptions and the
impossibility of the task of gaining access to motivations which are, by
definition, hidden. Isn’t it problematic to simply import therapeutic
techniques into the research encounter without question ? And who am
I, simply by dint of my training [Occupational Therapy] to be so sure
when interpreting another’s world. I am uncomfortable about the power I
assume when explaining others’ motives (my italics).

In the metaphysical context that has informed my own deep immersion in a range of self-reflexive theory and practice over the last fifteen years, the dangers of researcher bias might be expressed as, ‘I’ll see it, when I believe it’. Ruiz (1997) stresses the necessity to not simply accept any story, including one’s own. This recognises that the international Masters students’ stories in my case study are showing something of my story – they are ‘actors in my play’. Any apparently authoritative interpretation will be influenced by my tendency to perceive my participants’ narratives in a particular, biased way. I need to highlight those influences to recognise that I am a participant in the research process as much as the students I am interviewing – my learning journey offers significant data too. That realisation prompted me to adapt my thesis title from, ‘Learning journeys of International Masters Students in UK HE’ to ‘Learning Journeys with …’

 

Reflexive analysis

Turner (2006, p.30) observes how the longitudinal and reflexive nature of her study (similar in both respects to my own) with Chinese students enabled her to reduce the ‘unthinking imposition of my own academic preconceptions on their accounts’. This then also lent further endorsement, if any were needed, to the importance of devoting a part of my analysis to the narrative data of my own learning journey, through a reflexive analysis section. I refer to reflexivity here, partly at least, in a way suggested by Symon and Cassell (2012, p.3) that:

encourages the researcher to understand and make sense of their
research by challenging and critiquing their assumptions and research
practices throughout the research process.

Reflexive analysis can recognise how my participants’ struggles with UK HE may be reflecting my own professional challenges, and how those in turn may be influencing data collection and analysis (Duberley et al 2012). So whilst there is an important role for the authoritative voice in analysis (Czarniawska 2010, Saukko 2005), there is a corresponding value to moving beyond that into a humbler examination of my pedagogic beliefs and pre-suppositions (Chase 2005, Finlay 2002, Flyvbjerg 2006). Van Maanen (1988, p.75) describes a similar approach in the use of ‘confessional tales’ in ethnographic methodology:

The omnipotent tone of realism gives way to the modest, unassuming
style of one struggling to piece together something reasonably coherent
out of displays of initial disorder, doubt and difficulty.

Saukko (2005) also critically reviews a dialogic aim of representing the lived reality of the participant, arguing this needs to recognise the influence of a prevailing social context, in my case the shared academic discourse. This requires a self-reflexive awareness, which she includes as the most vital element of hermeneutic methodology of cultural studies, giving an example with her research into anorexic women where she wanted to avoid, in effect, diagnosing the women from some kind of detached, privileged position. Similarly, Elliott and Robinson (2012) recognise their position of power within the context of their case study exploring internationalisation of MBA education. They emphasise the importance of establishing an analytical cycle within research design that includes a reflexive questioning of the researchers’ assumptions arising from their prior experience.

As established in the second chapter, many contemporary commentators emphasise that authentic internationalisation requires a more congruent reflexivity among Western educators. Yet a substantial research gap exists in the lack of explicit illustrations of reflexive strategies to achieve this critical perspective on the rhetoric of internationalisation. I have therefore adopted a searching, personally reflective dimension to this end in my data analysis, and this approach is explained in more detail in the remainder of this chapter.

Finlay (2002, p.225) outlines a number of functions common to all variations of reflexivity, and emphasises that whichever methods are chosen, they can be affirmed as part of a wider research context – another element of the rich diversity of evolving qualitative research. The two methods from Finlay’s typology that chime most immediately for me are:

•  Promote rich insight through examining personal responses and
  interpersonal dynamics.
•  Open up unconscious motivations and implicit biases in the researcher’s
  approach.

It is these that fit most closely with a process of personal development in which I have been engaged over the last fifteen years. This has been based on trying to learn more about myself from my interactions with others (inter-subjective) through an on-going, self-reflective process (introspection). These therefore inform my reflexive analysis methodology, establishing that any authoritative interpretation needs to be mediated by inter-subjective reflections on how the interviewee and I co-created narratives together, and introspective reflection on how those are really then told through my own story – the final, unique narrative of this thesis.

 

Inter-subjective analysis

From a social constructionist view, respondents will be influenced within the interview situation by a variety of factors, such as an inner drive to sound knowledgeable or the extrinsic relationship with the interviewer, for example (Alvesson and Ashcraft 2012). Presser (2005) asserts that there is no authentic story of the narrator, but rather a co-created one – our interview dialogues must be seen as particularly situated narratives. This recognises the inter-subjective nature of constructing the reality represented by the research – involving the researcher as much as the participants. This has been referred to as ‘the dialogic end of the hermeneutic continuum’ (Saukko 2005).

The choice and nature of original questions inevitably influences the responses of the interviewee, but researcher influence can also create a ‘performance’ in interviews, due to the inherent power relationship. Crossley (2000, p.102) suggests two themes for researcher reflection in particular, and highlights the use of these questions in a final stage of report writing. The first of these clearly concerns the issue of inter-subjectivity:

•  How the interactional dynamics of the interview affected the language
  through which the interviewee presents her/himself.
• How the presented ‘personal’ narrative is connected to, and influenced
  by, the ‘culturally dominant’ narrative that framed the interviewee’s earlier
  experience.

These reflect the immediate (inter-subjective) and wider (socio-cultural) contexts of my data collection, and it can therefore be readily appreciated how an overt acknowledgement of both dimensions are critical to my case study data collection and analysis. I need to be reflexive in my analysis and discussion chapters firstly about inter-subjective influences on the direction and extent of interview conversations around different topics. Secondly, I should consider the meanings attributed by international Masters students to their reported, short-term experiences in UK HE in relation to their historic learning journeys through previous educational cultures.

The question remains as to how I can reflect purposefully as a learning developer on this aspect of data collection and analysis – this challenge seems to have been rarely addressed by educational studies in the literature. With respect to inter-subjectivity, and again from the metaphysical context of my own personal growth readings, I have found that Mitchell (2002) provides an insightful framework for such a process of self-reflection on one’s interactions with others. My experience of using this over the last ten years has shown me the applicable value of this approach to my professional context: ‘Your judgements about others become your prescription for how to live’ (p. 246).

Mitchell poses four questions within the model that she terms ‘Inquiry’. These lead towards a final ‘turnaround’ that can offer dramatic insights into how we have been projecting our own internal dialogues into interactions with others. By frankly acknowledging our beliefs about others, we come to recognise that these actually only reflect our own challenges and opportunities.

 

The Inquiry model

Inquiry questions for exploring an identified judgement about another person:

1. Is it true ?
2. Am I absolutely sure it is true (can I really know that) ?
3. How do I react when I have that thought ? / What does it feel like to believe that story ?
4. Who would I be without that thought ?
5. Turn it around …

 

Mitchell’s essential proposition in this model is that the turnaround options will provide insights into what we usefully need to address within ourselves. So she advocates noticing in the process of writing each turnaround which one generates more of an emotional reaction.

Turner (2006) reports on how her own reflexive analysis enabled her to better recognise an emotional distance that she had previously maintained between her work and personal lives. Storrs (2012, p.3), in proposing the ‘emotional curriculum’, observes a value in reflexivity describing the insightful outcomes that arise from ‘reflective journaling as a pedagogical strategy to enhance student self-awareness, critical thinking, and learning’. However, she also makes the very important point that this extends to both students and staff. The Inquiry model offers a form of critical self-reflection that seems important for me as a professional educator if I am to avoid, as Trahar (2010, p.144) suggests, ‘perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism’ in the teaching and learning context. Mitchell (2002, p.246) comments, ‘you become the wise teacher as you become a student of yourself’. In the final, Reflexive Analysis and Discussion chapter of this thesis, I therefore work through examples of the Inquiry framework applied to some of my relevant experiences during the data analysis process generally, and also to some specific encounters with international Masters students in interviews and in my daily professional practice.

 

Introspective reflection

From within her typology of reflexive analysis noted above, Finlay (2002) expresses a personal preference for introspective reflection. One of her recurrent concerns with reflexive analysis is the potential for disingenuousness in claiming openness about the process of interpreting others’ narratives in a way that actually hides partialities. Finlay’s (2002) critique of the easy rhetoric of impartial reflexivity corresponds to my sense of why I must bring the research full circle to my own story, rather than simply proclaiming my interpretations of others’ narratives, or even inter-subjective analysis of those.

However, some examples of other studies used by Finlay to illustrate the use of introspection seem to still be more about using the researcher’s experience to then show she understands that of the other person. The implication remains of one seeking to be some kind of expert on the participant’s world through interpretation. Yet, I do not believe that my empathy is unveiling the narrator’s true self, but rather that my unique perceptions of the meaning of the unfolding student stories direct a particular, interpretative analysis. And that, in turn, continues to develop my own narrative. Others such as Elliott and Robinson (2012), who incorporate a reflexive element into their analytical cycle, do describe the surprise or puzzlement they experience with some of their unexpected, inductive findings. Yet, I perceive this as still essentially interpreting from an authoritative position, and I believe this self-exploration can usefully go further. A significant contribution can be made to the reader’s insights into the research study by exploring the normally unconscious beliefs that have somehow influenced my data collection and analysis. Tierney (2002) asserts that true reflexive analysis will expose vulnerabilities in the researcher as this needs to include extensive exploration of his emotions as well as thoughts, and the consequent instability of interpretations. She justifies this as a necessary process in coming to understand how these interpretations emerge through his perceptual filters and interaction with respondents in a particular socio-cultural context. Readers can then see how this emergent narrative has been co-created, and they will be less likely to assume ‘the myth of the researcher’s omniscient authority’ (p.392).

Finlay (2002, p.222) does worry over possibly skewed findings of introspective ‘navel-gazing’, or the danger of self-indulgence. She cites DeVault’s (1997) argument that the personal may ‘signal a retreat from the attempt to interpret a wider social world’ (p.226). However, I believe that is just what I do need to be doing, for some time at least during the research study, as I dig deeper into the different layers of my story. That increasing self-awareness informs my practice, and the reader may choose to recognise issues of significance in that for her own self-reflective practice.

As a framework for developing an introspective, reflexive analysis, I draw on another model of self-reflection, the More-to-Life process, which has again proved valuable in my own experience of personal development over the last fifteen years, engendering clarity and calmness in challenging situations. Created by the More-to-Life Foundation (2013), a charitable organisation providing global personal development programmes, including the prison system in South Africa, this again draws on principles of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy. This process explores how one thinks about oneself, the world and other people, with a view to considering possibilities for changing those views in ways that may be beneficial for psychological well-being (RCPSYCH 2013).

 

More-to-Life model

As with the Inquiry model, this process involves a few, simple, self-reflective questions with the aim of identifying, and so changing, misleading or unhelpful self-dialogue. The model employs certain jargon to describe the stages, as follows:

1. Re-experience a ‘Life-shock’ that has triggered an emotional reaction. This could be a significant trauma, or something as apparently trivial as a student forgetting an appointment, for example. Note the feelings provoked by this incident.

2. Listen to, and note down, the ‘Mind-talk’. These are the thoughts that arise in reaction to the incident.

3. Verify this dialogue. This entails labelling each statement with either ‘True’, ‘False’ or ‘Don’t know’.

4. Tell the truth about the Life-shock. From recognising the assumptions in the above narrative, a more factual representation of what actually happened can be expressed without the emotional storylines.

5. Choose what to do next, and visualise doing it. This can involve selecting particular narrative statements that were recognised as false and unhelpful, and turning these around to identify a different, constructive way of
responding to the situation.

These two psychotherapeutic approaches – Inquiry and More-to-Life – may, at first sight, seem remote from the analytical context of international Masters students’ learning journeys, yet my research focus does seek to investigate the affective elements of those journeys. I have found over several years’ application of both these processes that seemingly unrelated experiences can yield deep insights into perceptions that influence my professional, as well as personal, life. It is a contention of this thesis that one can only tap into this important source of continuing professional development through recurrent reflexivity around life challenges, which can be explored productively through self-development frameworks such as Inquiry and More-to-Life.

 

A three-stage methodological approach

In summary then, from the data generated by 46 semi-structured interviews with 13 international Masters students over at least three interviews each, my qualitative methodology adopts a three-stage investigation to:

1. Discuss their learning journeys with respect to thematic similarities that seem to be commonly experienced by a number of students across the group. This aims to identify significant learning development difficulties
and personal and institutional strategies for student success over the one-year Masters programme.

2. Qualify this thematic analysis by the inclusion of some individual narrative analyses. These seek to highlight differences between international Masters students, and so maintain a spotlight on the paradox of challenge and opportunity presented by diversity within any such cohort.

3. Reflect on how my own beliefs and values may influence the interaction with the student participants (inter-subjective reflexivity) and my subsequent interpretation of these co-created narratives (introspective
reflexivity). This process aims to highlight the potential value of selfawareness for other learning developers, academic tutors or programme managers, and provide some practical means by which they can achieve
that.

This three-stage, analytical process determines the broad structure of the following chapters of data analysis and discussion.

 

 

Chapter 4
Analytical Conceptualisation

Students’ affective learning journeys:
What kind of generic model may usefully represent the data ?

The 13 students selected for this analysis were those having provided three or four interviews over the academic year, and this produced a total of 46 transcripts for this thematic investigation. Having first read each transcript to gain a sense of the overall tone, as suggested by Crossley (2000), I then allowed categories to emerge relatively inductively on a second reading. This involved me instinctively identifying any sentences that I felt may have something important to say in relation to the research questions, and writing one or two word categories against these. The categories arose from: my awareness of those overall research questions; my learning from the literature review; the thought process involved in setting the original interview prompts; and my careful following of all the responses across those interviews. The categories were also informed by my wider, professional experience of following hundreds of international Masters students’ learning journeys since 2005.

I worked through each student’s full set of narratives in turn to follow their longitudinal journey, assigning the categories to sections of text throughout each of these. I then manually noted the frequency of responses across all narratives for each student on an A3 sheet linearly under each of the derived categories. This produced 13 sheets of category frequencies, which I aggregated together to create the first list of 39 potential issues for analysis (shown in Appendix 2), listed in descending order of total frequency of narrative comments across all the students in the final sample of 13 used for analysis.

However, I was uncomfortable with the disparate nature of this list, with some very general, and other quite specific, categories. At the same time, I could not ignore the strong sense that most of these journeys were being described in clearly affective terms, with emotional highs and lows triggered by identifiable, external factors that stood out across several participants’ narratives. So I decided to review my categories in relation to the concept of an affective learning journey, to consider which ones could be incorporated most relevantly into a model to depict this process. The categories selected from the first list (in Appendix 2) for more in-depth thematic analysis of the overall, affective dimension of students’ learning journeys are therefore shown in Table 7 below. It can be seen that these were all drawn from the top ten categories by frequency in the first list of 39, and still therefore constituted a significant proportion of the overall data collected. It was clear that these four categories alone would provide plenty of data for in-depth narrative analysis, whilst also focussing in on the important theme of affective learning journeys:

 

Table 7: Identified categories subsequently selected for the more focussed affective thematic analysis

•  Emotions
• Self-belief
•  Motivation
• Personal development

These are the categories under which I originally allocated respondents’ comments that I had considered indicative of significantly affective reactions to a range of different external triggers on the learning journey.

In a secondary level of more detailed analysis of similarities emerging across this affective dimension, 25 specific, affective codes with more than two comments were identified (see Appendix 3). This coding process followed a similar approach to that described above for the first categorisation process, i.e. all transcript sections already identified within these four affective categories were carefully reconsidered to assign more specific, one or two word codes to sentences and phrases within them on the transcripts. Each entry was noted on another A3 sheet as a mind map under the relevant code. These entries were each given a distinct key relating to the student, transcript and page so that I could then refer back to these individually as I conducted the in-depth data analysis, e.g. Y 4/6 for an entry on the sixth page of Student Y’s fourth interview transcript. The full list (shown in Appendix 3), and the subsequently reduced version of the top 9 issues used in the actual data analysis (shown in Table 8 below) were created by aggregating responses across all the narrative transcipts within each of the codes, and then listing these by descending order of frequency of mentions.

In their similar analysis of interviews with international postgraduate students in the UK, Wu and Hammond (2011, p. 429) report a corresponding hierarchy and composition of levels for data management: a set of 42 codes, pertaining to three overall categories. In my case, a majority of these codes contained relatively few comments, and so I chose to concentrate on 9 categories that were especially prominent with the highest frequency of comments, and that had been referred to by a majority of the 13 students. See Table 8 below.

 

Table 8: Top 9 coded issues within the affective dimension of thematic analysis (in descending order of frequency):

1. Grade disappointment or confusion
2. New self-belief
3. Personal ambition and investment
4. Confidence level
5. Peer support and new understanding of others
6. Level of familiarity with academic discourse and other socio-cultural factors
7. Level of motivation and determination
8. Academic pressure
9. Inspiration from own success

 

The proposition for a U-shaped curve model of international Masters students’ affective learning journeys

Foremost amongst my observations from six years’ experience of 1-1 student consultations has been an emerging notion that international Masters students’ common emotional issues seem to follow a pattern which might be approximately modelled on a U-shaped transition curve. I was familiar, from my earlier experience as a psychotherapist, with such a model presented by Kubler-Ross (1969), among others, for conceptualising emotional processes emanating from trauma. This depicts a suggested sequence of emotional states through which one may progress over time in response to stressful change events such as bereavement.

The model has since been widely adopted in configuring people’s responses to any kind of life change, notably performance in organisational contexts, including education (see Figure 2). This is a debatable concept, of course, and others have since critiqued such models for their temporal simplicity, recognising the more individualistic, frequently oscillating nature of people’s emotive processes (Black and Mendenhall 1991, Brown and Holloway 2008). Yet there still seems a place for careful consideration of such models to help recognise key factors at different stages of a learning journey, and how people are affected at those times.

This may lead to identifying useful strategies to help others in similar situations in the educational context. Turner (2007), for example, observes that international Masters students do experience significant learning difficulties in the first half of the academic year, but the vast majority recover their performance sufficiently for graduation by the end of the year. Such a depiction of a typical learning journey could encourage emotional support in the form of pastoral guidance, or the provision of more practical resources such as workshops or learning materials, at appropriate stages of those journeys. This also accepts the contention that emotional gains, as much as cognitive development, are needed by students to retrieve a successful learner identity after that may have been undermined for many in the initial phase of confrontation with an alien educational culture (Christie et al 2008, Illeris 2003).

Adapted by University of Exeter (2013) from Kubler-Ross (1969)

Kubler-Ross (1969) had utilised self-esteem as the dependent variable in her graphic modelling of the change curve. In this case study, I recognised selfefficacy as a recurrent, significant issue for the research participants, and I had previously assumed, as Bandura (1997) notes others do, that the idea of selfesteem could perhaps be used interchangeably with perceived efficacy. I was interested to read that Bandura draws a clear distinction between these two variables, as does Pajares (2008). They illustrate quite clearly with everyday examples how one does not necessarily invest one’s sense of self-worth in the belief about one’s capability in any particular field. So, in the context of this case study, whilst a student’s academic self-efficacy might falter on receipt of a perceived low grade, this may not correspond to an overall devaluation of how well she likes herself. However, Bandura (1997) does note that people generally may apply themselves to aspects of life that generate feelings of selfesteem, and this can be argued to be the case for international students choosing to devote a year to achieving a prestigious, globally recognised qualification.

This data analysis therefore focusses on the sources and effects of students’ self-efficacy in particular, but also retains an interest in other affective variables that may be reported by them (Pajares 2008). Russell et al (2010), for example, refer to the importance of international students’ connectedness and selfconfidence in their study of subjective well-being, and Turner (2006), too, links personal confidence to international Masters students’ levels of success and happiness during their studies. Wang et al (2011) assert the importance of selfdetermination in minimising the marginalising effects of adaptation to a new academic discourse. Ryan (2005b, p.148) predicts that international students will experience some loss of what she calls self-esteem or self-concept whatever their background or previous experience of success. It does seem reasonable then to embrace several, related, emotional constructs in my narrative analysis of international Masters students’ affective learning journeys. This is supported by a meta-analysis of 18 self-efficacy studies, in which Black and Mendenhall (1991) explain that the various studies operationalised adjustment through different, intrinsic variables, including academic morale, psychological mood, satisfaction, comfort with new environment (p.231).

 

The value of self-efficacy as a variable through which to explore affective learning journeys

The significance of self-efficacy seems to have been rather overlooked in learning development theory and practice from a default position of the deficit model, skills-based approach, especially in relation to international students (Carroll and Ryan 2005). Bandura (1977b) originally explored the importance of self-efficacy within the context of social learning theory, which recognises human behaviour in terms of a continuously reciprocal interaction between people and their current environment. This has a particular relevance to the case study’s interest in the three models of learning development because social learning theory recognises that whilst students, for example, are partially self-determining and not entirely powerless in the face of external forces, environmental factors such as a new educational discourse will also significantly influence emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses. The first two, skillsbased models of learning development adopted within the theoretical framework of this study tend to focus on individual capabilities as the main predictors of student success. The third model, Academic Literacies recognises that role of personal agency, but also highlights a corresponding importance to institutional factors such as varying academic expectations across different sectors of the academy. Social learning theory depicts a complex range of varied potentialities because of a continuously interactive process between, for example, international Masters students and their new UK HE learning community.

Whilst originally exploring learning in terms of this broad interplay between personal and social factors, Bandura (1992, 1995, 1997) came to especially focus on self-efficacy in his later research and publications because he already understood at the time of developing social learning theory that ‘the strength of people’s convictions in their own effectiveness determines whether they will even try to cope with difficult situations’ (1977b, p.79). In affective terms, selfefficacy came to be recognised as one of the significant personal resources for coping with stress brought on by challenging environmental circumstances (Jerusalem and Schwarzer 1992). This understanding is particularly important for the case study as it was clear from the gathered data that international Masters students commonly face serious difficulties in their transition into UK HE, especially in the early stages of the learning journey. Bandura highlights the importance of efficacy expectations, in this respect, as being key determinants in how much time and persistence students will expend in the pursuit of overcoming such obstacles. This theoretical perspective clearly proposes that self-efficacy has a major role to play in students’ progress on their academic programmes.

The relevance of this theoretical concept to the case study analysis is reinforced by another of Bandura’s (1977b) early propositions from social learning theory, i.e. that psychological changes are produced most readily by experiences of mastery (or not) from one’s performance. As will be seen from the later data analysis, this corresponds with the most commonly cited factor relating to changes in the student participants’ emotional state and self-perception – that of summative assessment grades. The generated data highlight the consistently affective nature of international Masters students’ learning journeys, and, as Bandura explains, emotional arousal particularly affects selfefficacy in circumstances perceived as threatening, such as poor marks and/or confusing feedback from assignments. This position is supported by others’ subsequent research into educational self-efficacy (Oettingen 1995, Skinner 1992, Zimmerman 1995). Conversely, low expectations of one’s capability to manage perceived threats raises stress reactions (Bandura 1992). Such anxiety does then detract from future performance, and so a cycle of diminishing efficacy can often develop based on a reciprocal relationship between emotions and self-regulated cognitions (Bandura 1977b, Kavanagh 1992, Schwarzer 1992).

Bandura (1997) qualifies self-efficacy in the title of his book as ‘The exercise of control’, asserting that we all feel this need to take charge of many aspects of our modern lives. There can be major, negatively emotional impacts of perceived inability to exert that control, which is therefore an imperative for all of us (Skinner 1992), and it is reasonable to expect that many international students will find the new academic discourse in UK HE sufficiently disorientating as to render feelings of relative helplessness. Having only recently left familiar environments in which they are likely to have been demonstrating competence and feeling in control of many consequences of their actions, they soon encounter levels of perceived academic incompetence perhaps not experienced for many years, if at all. A resulting sense of inadequacy could be disproportionately unsettling.

In addition to the significance of emotional arousal explored above, Bandura (1977, p.80) discusses three other major sources of self-efficacy expectations: performance accomplishments; vicarious experiences; verbal persuasion. These specific elements of the broader context of social learning theory especially relate to the learning journeys identified in the later data analysis, and therefore further endorsed the choice of self-efficacy as the dependent variable in the creation of a U-shaped curve against which to plot the students’ learning journeys. The theoretical treatment of these three factors in Bandura’s (1977b) original work on social learning theory are therefore discussed further here in relation to the case study analysis:

Performance accomplishments relate, of course, to the issue of students’ assessments, and Bandura foregrounds this factor as the most reliable efficacy predictor, based as it is on direct, personal experience. As noted above, academic success or failure was the most prominent, single factor raised by students in their narratives. They often described this in terms of having immediate and strong impacts on emotional state, but Bandura suggests that the severity of effects depend on the timings and overall pattern of experience. So this seemed an important aspect to explore through the opportunity of a longitudinal narrative analysis over the course of a full academic year that comprises mixed results for most students.

Bandura highlights a major role for vicarious experience in efficacy development, and this, too, is important for this case study in relation to Academic Literacies theory and practice. As discussed in the earlier literature review, theorists in that field strongly advocate the use of modelling in learning development, notably around exemplars of past students’ assignments. The literature review also recognised the emphasis placed by many educational researchers on peer support, and this was also very much borne out in the data analysis. Both of these issues encountered in the theory and practice of learning development clearly correspond to Bandura’s concept of vicarious experience, i.e. that students persuade themselves that they may be capable of successful or improved performance, having observed others reaching those achievements. This aspect of social learning theory proposes that modelling influences learning by providing observers with symbolic representations that usefully inform their own future performances. Zimmerman (1995) also later emphasised that self-efficacy in educational contexts is significantly affected by comparative evaluation.

This then contrasts, as Bandura suggests, with the final element of his efficacy expectations model: verbal persuasion. He attests to the weakness of the common assumption that telling, or simply implying, that international Masters students should be able to perform capably in the new UK HE system, for example, will enable them to do so. Bandura (1995) later elaborated on this by asserting that verbal attempts at boosting students’ self-efficacy are soon undermined by actual, conflicting experiences, as is borne out clearly by the data generated in this research study. This is an important factor at the heart of this exploratory case, particularly in terms of Academic Literacies theory, which argues that direct, participative practice, with on-going, formative feedback is necessary for successful adaptation into a new, academic discourse. Again, this can be viewed in the context of an affective learning journey with reference to how Bandura draws this discussion around a cognitive issue back to the emotional context of learning. He observes that ‘combining modeling with guided participation … proved most effective in eliminating dysfunctional fears and inhibitions’ (1977, p. 83).

In the case of my research study, I do therefore believe strongly that selfefficacy is a highly significant factor in the progression of learning and the quality of academic experience as well as in our lives more generally. This has long been recognised by countless inspirational writers and leaders, including Virgil, Gandhi through to Barack Obama, who promote the importance of an awareness that what defines one’s potential are not personal capabilities but rather what one believes those capabilities to be. Contemporary, educational researchers have certainly recognised the significance of self-belief to students’ emotional enjoyment and cognitive performance, over and above apparent capability (Hsieh et al 2007, Mills 2013, Pajares 2008). These authors embrace the concept of self-efficacy as the extent of personal belief in one’s capability to act successfully in a certain situation (Bandura 1997). Specifically, Bandura defines self-efficacy as the ‘beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the course of action required to produce given attainments’ (1997, p.3).

Bandura (1992) asserts that self-efficacy is the central factor of human agency, which he defines as ‘the power to originate actions for a given purpose’ (1997, p.3). It is important to distinguish this intention from any outcome of such action, and international students often discover in their search for academic success in UK HE that implementing the study strategies they believe appropriate does not necessarily lead to effective learning or high-grade assessments. In this case study, I am therefore defining a relevant form of selfefficacy for data analysis as an international Masters students’ belief in his/her capability to achieve a desired level of academic success and personal development on the one-year programme. In other words, I take self-efficacy to refer to a student’s perception at any given time of her/his own capability to be a successful member of the institutional, postgraduate community.

From the self-reported data in relatively unstructured interviews and reflective journal entries, self-efficacy for these students clearly fluctuates over the academic year according to a range of extrinsic and intrinsic influences. There is a value in mapping such self-efficacy variations across students, as well as over time, as these have been shown to have a bearing on important institutional issues such as student retention rates (Hsieh et al 2007). Mills (2013) emphasises the usefulness to university departments of measuring the impact of learning development interventions, for example, on self-efficacy as a contribution to developing understanding of the complexity of factors affecting students’ academic progression. Like other educational researchers investigating self-efficacy (see Ghaderi 2009, Matoti 2007, Mattern 2010), Mills describes the use of questionnaire studies aimed at establishing rankings of existing levels and changes in self-efficacy among students. Although she is investigating this phenomenon in a related context of foreign language teaching, my study does not attempt any quantitative measurement of selfefficacy levels from scaled responses. I recognise that kind of approach typifies the experimental psychology methodology from which the term ‘self efficacy’ derives in the work of researchers such as Bandura (1977, 1997) and Pajares (2003, 2008). Yet like other, originally tightly-defined psychological variables adopted into the management discipline, e.g. ‘identity’, there is a clear, pragmatic utility to employing such a term in a more qualitative, exploratory research context. It is also important to note that the above studies have been conducted with international students attending HE institutions on other continents, and there is an apparent dearth of educational self-efficacy research studies in UK HE.

I believe that the identification of extrinsic triggers and intrinsic responses to self-efficacy changes, which appear to be shared by a majority of participants’ may still, however, be usefully presented in an approximate, graphical form in my qualitative analysis. I am seeking a theoretical modelling of the ‘how and why’ factors called for in Black and Mendenhall’s critique of the U-shaped transition curve (1991, p.226). This can highlight potential issues for further research into why shifts in international students’ self-efficacy occur at different points of the academic year, and how they may then move through those different phases. In other words, such a theoretical framework of the students’ affective learning journeys may establish generally relevant points for different kinds of institutional interventions, along with potentially useful independent learning strategies for the students themselves.

 

The U-shaped curve in the educational context

The depiction of foreign students’ adjustment along a U-shaped curve of transition is not new at all, having been first proposed by Lysgaard in 1955. That model was strongly vested in the idea of early and dramatic culture shock experienced to varying degrees in this case by three groups of Norwegian students entering US education. Lysgaard recognised transition in affective terms, suggesting four stages with distinctive, emotional characteristics to each: the excitement of the honeymoon; the shock of realising fundamental cultural differences; a growing comfort in adjustment to those; and the satisfaction of mastering relevant demands of the new environment.

Lysgaard does propose a generalised adjustment relating to all of these stages in that chronological sequence. And, as noted above, it is this universally schematic prediction that has resulted in some later criticism of this model (Brown and Holloway 2008). As diversity has increased so dramatically among both the home and international student population in Western HE in the last twenty years, so this has raised a concern that the U-shaped transition curve does not sufficiently allow for individual and situational differences. These various, more personalised factors may of course significantly alter any student’s learning progression from the predicted U-shaped curve. This is certainly confirmed in Black and Mendenhall’s (1991) empirical review of eighteen major studies of applied research in the U-shaped transition curve, from which they agree that such factors could influence students’ patterns of adjustment.

However, they do conclude that, despite a lack of statistical testing within a majority of these empirical studies of the U-shaped transition curve, this predictive model can be generally applied to cross-cultural adjustment. 12 out of the 18 studies seemed to indicate the applicability of the U-shaped transition curve, and, in theoretical terms, they discuss in detail how that variation can be explained through social learning theory to still support the general value of the model. Social learning theory proposes that learning is based not only on the consequences of one’s actions, but also on observation of the consequences of others’ behaviour, and from imitation of this vicarious experience (Bandura 1977a). On these bases, learners can then choose how to act successfully in later, similar circumstances.

Again, from the perspective of social learning theory, it can be understood that the greater the disparity between home and host academic cultures, the harder it becomes for students to model effective study behaviours. They are then less likely to practice and experiment confidently with those in the way advocated by Academic Literacies, and so the less effective is their academic production. The distance they experience intrinsically from the host culture during this stage is likely to begin reducing self-efficacy, and subsequent, poor grades are then even more likely to externally reinforce this, driving self-efficacy down even further. From this position, it is reasonable to theorise that there will be a significant second stage of decreasing self-efficacy culminating in the U-curve pattern relating to culture shock of Lysgaard’s (1955) first model.

By the end of Semester 1, significant numbers of students have experienced traumatic bewilderment at disappointing grade assessments. Their shock often derives from a stark contrast between these ‘failures’ and previous academic achievements. Earlier educational experiences had recognised their hard work, but they discover that the UK system does not necessarily seem to reflect that in the same way (Turner 2006). This corresponds in a way to the importance that can be assigned to the role of social persuasion in developing or maintaining self-efficacy during a process involving unfamiliar challenges (Bandura 1997). This is more likely to be sustained through times of changing circumstances if others who are perceived to be significant, e.g. academic tutors in this case, overtly affirm, rather than doubt, one’s capabilities.

Bandura (1997) concludes from various psychological self-efficacy studies that moods induced by such external consequences directly affect perceived efficacy even more than cognition of those outcomes. One tends to rely on ‘gut feelings’ rather more than rationalised analyses, especially when there is a large amount of new information, as characterised by international Masters students’ adjustment into an alien educational culture. And the more intense the emotion, the greater the impact on self-efficacy. Bandura asserts that this can be generalised across self-efficacy in various contexts, but by way of specific illustration at the School of Management, an international Masters student’s despondency triggered by a D grade will lower self-efficacy further than simply the comprehension of that constituting a marginal fail in one of only six modules within a semester. Lower self-efficacy has then been shown to undermine motivation and diminish accomplishments, so it could be concluded that a downward spiral of decreasing academic performance can emanate from negative affective states mediated by deteriorating self-efficacy and vice versa (Hsieh et al 2007, Mattern 2010, Pajares 2008). Conversely, these authors propose that positive moods seem to raise perceived efficacy, in turn improving motivation and persistence, and so heighten likely attainment. This correspondingly becomes an upward cycle with raised self-efficacy promoting better moods.

Interestingly, in terms of identity, Bandura’s (1997) research has indicated that emotional states, however induced, will tend to stimulate corresponding memories of past experience. So students’ positive moods will encourage recall of successful past achievements. This relates to the Academic Literacies contention that many students enter UK HE with strongly successful student identities derived from their performance in previous educational cultures. They are likely to have been the high achievers, having developed a resourcefulness that they would naturally expect to continue to serve them well on their new, international Masters adventure (Russell et al 2010). They will strive to protect their existing self-identities with corresponding levels of self-efficacy that, for a while at least, will allow them to overlook some disparities between their learned behaviour and how they are expected to act in the new culture.

However, this can easily be undermined by affective changes. How a student reacts emotionally to perceived differences in the academic discourse can have a powerful impact on their continuing self-belief, and hence their on-going performance too (Hsieh et al 2007, Mills 2013, Zimmerman and Schunk 2008b). A downturn in self-efficacy can occur as the intrinsic sense of unfamiliarity and external feedback around students’ inappropriate actions accumulate. Strauss and Mooney (2011, p.541) ascribe ‘an increasing desperation’ among their students to this ‘lack of familiarity’. This starts to outweigh existing, optimistic self-expectations so that self-efficacy is affected accordingly. The cultural collision is compounded by assignment deadlines already looming after the first few weeks. Students do seem to start the first semester with excited anticipation, but by October or November, they have three or four different assignments to work on, each requiring several texts to read … and confidence plummets (Sedgley 2010a, 2012b). Carroll and Ryan present this common experience of deteriorating self-efficacy among international students as ‘academic shock’ (2005, p.7). They deliberately contrast this with the wider view of culture shock to emphasise the significant impact which an alien academic discourse can make on many international students.

A criticism of the U-shaped transition curve from some educational studies is that the severity of culture shock is less than suggested in that model. Wu and Hammond (2011, p.425), for instance, refer instead to ‘culture bumps’. As with my own research study, they too were studying international Masters students on a one-year UK programme, and yet such a description does not seem to correspond to the affective learning journeys of a majority of my research participants, or to my general observations of School of Management postgraduate students. Many of our students report severe anxieties around their lack of familiarity and understanding, especially in Semester 1.

Wu and Hammond’s suggestion of culture bumps from their interviews of a small sample of eight postgraduates could indicate variability in students’ individual learning experiences. Certainly, when I asked a later cohort of MBA students (2011-12) at the end of their sojourn to depict their one-year journeys along a ‘curve’, there were major variations – some following a deep U shape, whilst others depicted flatter, more linear patterns. Interestingly though, Black and Mendenhall (1991) do question the reliability of findings from a number of empirical studies of the U-shaped transition curve which had asked students to retrospectively report on their experience. My longitudinal approach to generating student data directly at several points during the academic year should overcome such potential memory distortions.

A focus of Lysgaard’s (1955) study was to compare the experiences of different lengths of stay of three groups of students, and he concludes that adjustment is easy for stays of up to 6 months, only becoming difficult and unhappy for longer sojourns of 6-18 months. The latter time period corresponds to UK Masters students’ study programmes. International students often comment on the serious nature of their investment in Masters education, and with so many family and career aspirations riding on measureable success in this new academic context, any perceived disjuncture can have highly emotive impacts (Ryan 2005b, Sedgley 2010b).

Overall, I find the U-shaped transition curve’s depiction of culture shock sufficiently encouraging as a theoretical conceptualisation of my previous observations of Masters students’ one-year experiences to consider this as a useful approach for the thematic element of my data analysis. I have therefore tracked the relevant interview data at chronological stages along a potential transition curve model, to see if this facilitates a helpful understanding of the students’ emotional learning journeys. This is depicted in Figure 3 below, which is discussed in far more detail later in this chapter, but shown here for the purpose of easier conceptualisation.

 

Stages of the proposed model

I can briefly summarise the key stages of this model as follows (the categories used for subsequent analysis in later chapters are shown in bold):

Students may bring with them an initial self-confidence founded on their selfidentification as successful, hard-working students in the previous educational culture. This positive self-belief is often enhanced by the initial excitement of undertaking a UK Masters degree, which can extend into the first few weeks of study. At some stage during Semester 1, however, the unfamiliarity of the new educational discourse, combined with mounting academic pressures, erodes initial self-efficacy. This decline along the transition curve is then deepened by any early summative assessments that fall short of the students’ own expectations of their academic performance. Having submitted several coursework essays, probably for the first time in their educational careers, the School of Management Masters students typically receive some C grades, or perhaps fails at D or even E grade. So from December, through the January exam time, and into February when all Semester 1 marks are finally confirmed, many students are reporting a variety of negative emotional states characteristic of the bottom of the transition curve, including: confusion; frustration; anger; depression; and sadness.

These major challenges, emerging commonly across the data set, indicate significant downturns in self-efficacy for many of the sample, as suggested by the transition curve model. Yet this also proposes that these depths of despair can actually herald brighter times. And this does seem to be the case for several of the participants. Sometime into Semester 2, more positive determinants of students’ affective states begin to gain more influence. The following categories are identified as instrumental in this resurgence along the transitional self-efficacy curve running through Semesters 2 and 3:

Extrinsically, peer support and new, intercultural understandings of working with  others seem strong components of this renewal of self-efficacy. The stimulation of new academic subject knowledge and notably the opportunities for deeper study in the final dissertation are also important in regenerating motivation. These stages are all usually supported by a growing familiarity with academic expectations and consequent acceptance of the different standards of the UK HE grading system. This is helped by any summative assessment successes, which validate a student’s emerging learning identity – which in turn lies at the heart of self-efficacy. In the case of the School of Management, our postgraduate students would tend to recognise a satisfying level of achievement at perhaps B, or certainly A, grades. All in all, an accumulative effect of some or all of these factors typically leads to a new plateau of self-belief towards the summer. This is often reported by students as quite a profound process of personal development, and they recognise this later fulfilment as deriving substantially from the adversity factors that had actually plunged them down the transition self-efficacy curve in the first place.

Underpinning all of this process throughout the year, I see a foundation of the further, intrinsic factors that were cited by students, namely: personal ambition and determination. These have been depicted in the proposed model shown in Figure 3 as the ‘bedrock’ running beneath their sense of self throughout the year, notably sustaining them through the hard times with a core level of intrinsic motivation. Bandura (1997) notes that little action would take place in the world without an inherent belief that one can achieve desired objectives. The greater the levels of self-efficacy, the greater the resilience to adversity, and so the greater the persistence, effort, and (usually) the accomplishments (ibid).

 

Purpose and limitations of the model

Black and Mendenhall note the main criticism of the usefulness of the U-shaped transition curve being with its descriptive nature, i.e. showing a lack of analysis of ‘how and why individuals move from one stage to the next’ (1991, p.232). I believe that a key contribution that my research study can make in this respect is the identification of likely extrinsic and intrinsic triggers of changes along an affective learning journey.

Black and Mendenhall (1991) also point out that individual differences could significantly affect the shape of an aggregated U-curve across a group. So although they might each follow a U-curve learning journey to some extent, these could have different amplitudes of stages at different points over the researched time period. For my small qualitative study, it should be emphasised again that the use of the U-shaped transition curve as a theoretical framework is primarily to provide what Black and Mendenhall refer to as a ‘cross-sectional snapshot’ (p.242). It is hoped that this will offer an easily accessible view of one set of international Masters students’ commonly experienced learning challenges and coping factors, albeit that these may be encountered at somewhat varying stages and experienced with different degrees of emotional impact.

However, as discussed in the Methodology chapter, I can then further illuminate the possibilities of variability among students with complementary exploration of a number of individual student analyses. Clearly, student diversity is even more significant than was apparent at the time of Black and Mendenhall’s (1991) study, so in-depth individual analyses might be expected to yield variations on the U-shaped transition curve pattern. This also reflects the approach taken in a recent study by Wu and Hammond in which a thematic analysis was then complemented by ‘cameos of student experience’ (2011, p.433). These provided the opportunity to contrast individuals’ different levels of adjustment to UK university culture, illustrating the significance that personal factors still play in learning development (Bandura 1977a, Black and Mendenhall 1991).

Having explored the above model as a means to represent important data from the Masters students, the following two chapters now consider in more detail the data emerging around each of the major factors identified in the model. The first of these, Chapter 5, elaborates on the affective challenges driving the suggested downturn in the proposed model during the first part of the academic year – through Semester 1 and usually some way into Semester 2. Chapter 6 then explores the more positive emotional factors that seem to result in a resurgent ‘mirror effect’ along the curve for a majority of students in the latter part of the Masters programme.

 

Chapter 5
Thematic Analysis – Part 1

Affective learning journeys of international Masters students:
What similar challenges did I find across this sample ?

 

This chapter and the following one explore some of the similarities across the students within the research study. This thematic analysis follows the path of the suggested U-shaped curve model chronologically by explaining in more depth the apparently common factors emerging at each stage through a majority of the respondents’ data. As these relate to a range of issues, the thematic analysis has been divided into two chapters – this one corresponding to the downturn suggested by the first half of the model, and the following one then exploring the reasons for, and the effects of, the proposed upturn during the second stage of the academic year. These two phases of the learning journey can be otherwise conceived of as learning challenges and learning strategies respectively.

Each of these two chapters has therefore been divided into sections with subheadings that correspond to each stage labelled in the model (see Figure 3 in the previous chapter). It should also be noted, as discussed earlier, that this thematic analysis embraces several emotional constructs that seem closely related to the concept of self-efficacy in other internationalisation researchers’ studies (see Ryan 2005b, Russell et al 2010, Turner 2006, Wang et al 2011). These include self-confidence and self-belief, and the following thematic analysis chooses to construe these as having interchangeable meanings in the academic context that has been used to define self-efficacy for this thesis, i.e. students’ perceptions at any given time of their own capabilities to be successful members of the postgraduate UK HE community.

My proposed U-shaped curve model suggests that a typical international Masters student will enter the one-year learning journey with a reasonably high level of self-efficacy. First interviews were, however, conducted up to a month or so after the start of Semester 1, and a complex picture was already then emerging of varying self-confidence levels across the student group. So, whilst most students did report feelings of optimistic excitement at the very beginning, these were soon diverging across different students’ experiences, and this evolving diversity is explored below:

 

Self-confidence

This attribute might seem an obvious pre-requisite for any student managing to reach the starting point of a Masters degree at the School of Management. Having left home for the first time, with many travelling several thousand miles to such a different culture, it could be expected that students would need to possess a certain dynamism and positivity. However, I might also conjecture that any high self-expectations would be tempered by a significant level of trepidation at stepping so far away from previous comfort zones into the unknown. The first two or three weeks’ experience of Semester 1 study that had preceded the first stage of interviews could also already be highlighting the extent of the differences in this new educational culture. So I noted with interest how some students clearly aimed to balance any such concerns by trying to sustain early levels of self-confidence in the perceived value of hard work:

Student J: Over the whole period … yeah … I feel real serious, and uh, working hard, you can manage the course … yeah … I think we can all manage it.

Student H: … actually… to some extent… I’m confident. But … how much I can clear this target, I don’t know … but as long as I keep trying very hard. … concentrate on … studies … yes I’m confident… to get a MBA degree.

And in two cases at least, this conscientious approach was already reflected in thorough preparation before arriving in the UK. This had instilled a strong selfbelief, particularly in terms of their abilities to pre-empt any major academic surprises:

Student P: I have planned for this course for the past three years, and I am very much prepared, I know the work … this is nothing new for me … so I don’t feel any problem with this one.

Student M: … actually my friend’s living here, and he and I have plan for this trip, around over one year ago. I plan everything properly and that means I do not have a culture shock [laughing] I know what I have to face here.

These positive examples of initial self-belief might be expected to translate into higher academic performance (Zimmerman 1995). All the above students did ultimately become successful in terms of passing the Masters programme, yet their degree grades ranged from Distinction to Pass, and two of them failed one module in the process. So although Ouwenell et al (2011) predict that selfefficacy leads to greater engagement among students, a suggested link between these variables and eventual academic performance seems tenuous at this point. In this respect, and by way of further contrast, other students – one of whom went to achieve a Distinction grade degree – were already expressing lower levels of self-belief in the first interviews, after two or three weeks of study:

Student L: … there are some questions that I don’t know anything about … I’m clueless … everyone in my house [family] thinks … I’m the smartest … [because] of my previous educational results.

MS: How much do you think that counts for here?

L: I don’t know … I don’t think it counts much!

Student K: I hope I can contribute more in class … or understand more … but so far, not … following that very well … so, that is a problem … the speak, maybe inefficient of the reading … the whole thing, yes.

Student N: Basically I’m not comfortable. I’m not at all feeling confident. I have work experience, I have done my MBA in HR, I was a very bright student … but still somewhere I’m not feeling that great about myself. … at this moment if you asked me, how successful are you going to be, I would be like, I don’t know, I’m scared. I don’t know where would I be after the year.

So although I am conjecturing through the transition curve model that many students’ affective learning journeys might follow a broadly similar pattern, the starting points on the self-efficacy axis vary. It is clear from these latter students’ comments that the perceived gap between their previous (successful) modes of study and the UK academic discourse had been largely responsible for their lower, initial levels of confidence.

As we review the next, chronological stage of the learning journey into Semester 1, it is important to consider how students fared emotionally in relation to their perceived degree of preparedness and self-efficacy. Black and Mendenhall (1991) propose that higher self-efficacy will produce greater willingness to enact new behaviours and so enhance effective learning, even by experimentation. It is suggested that this will lead to persistent application even in the face of initial ‘failures’. So it will be interesting to observe how individuals with purportedly higher levels of self-efficacy actually manage to maintain motivation and a positive learner identity through the early learning stages of the academic year.

 

Unfamiliarity with the academic discourse

Early challenges around not knowing how to study in a different educational system, or later relief from a growing familiarity with this, were mentioned by a majority of students. If we first consider those latter students in the previous section, who expressed significant self-doubt at the early stages, perhaps it is not surprising to hear of their concurrent concerns around not understanding tutors’ academic expectations:

Student N: I just don’t have the confidence. I’m just trying to cope with the studies, especially the assignment … I have never done any assignments in India.

India. … education system in UK is totally different. … maybe I’m feeling depressed because I’m put into the total different atmosphere … I was always being spoon fed, but here you have to do everything on your own, maybe … I’m feeling that all the burden is on me.

Student L: There are some subjects that you actually have no clue about … and then lecturer comes and has this… um… assumption that everybody in class knows about the subject, then he just rattles on … oh my God… so either I’m very stupid, or I’m very stupid [laughing].

In my experience generally at the School of Management, these doubts are echoed by other students, sometimes through much of the academic year. So what of the other students in my sample who had seemed to begin the semester with greater self-efficacy – how seriously did they view the new academic discourse as a barrier to success ?

These more confident students actually reported very few fears of obstructive difficulties in early interviews (1 or 2). This would make sense in terms of initial self-efficacy triggering a positive attitude to new challenges. Such strong selfstarters may expect to always find the solutions to apparent problems, or perhaps not even perceive these as significant obstacles in the first place. One such student acknowledged potential difficulties but expected to counter these through a determination to be strong in dealing with them:

Student O: Not afraid. If I’m afraid I won’t be there [in the UK] for studying, I stay in China …

MS: Yes right, so no fear at the moment ?

O: No, just uh, more normal, learn normal. Maybe sometimes I just feel upset because the language or materials or something, make me don’t understand, make me upset … but uh, the whole year, I will make my faith very strong – make me through that.

So it does seem that, confronted by the unfamiliarity of the academic discourse, some students’ self-efficacy can be rapidly undermined, whilst others may appear to sustain that more consistently through some kind of affective strength. Wang et al (2011) chose to construe that quality as selfdetermination, and this has been depicted on my proposed U-shaped curve as a form of ‘bedrock’ underpinning students’ progress through the year. However, it is interesting to note that by the third interview stage, even highly achieving students observed retrospectively that early experiences had been more challenging than anticipated, due to the opacity of the UK academic discourse and other unfamiliar factors. At that stage, the above student reflected:

Student O: You worry about something you don’t know, and … what will be happening. It’s very big, different pressure.In first semester … whatever you feel you will have done … all you think, oh, what are we going to happen ? … I need to do more, I need to more.

 

Academic pressure

Stresses in Semester 1 can stem especially from academic pressure relating to volume of workload – a factor highlighted by a majority of the students. Higher levels of stress have been linked to lower levels of self-efficacy (Ghaderi 2009), and even those more confident students who believed that they had prepared thoroughly for the transition were reflecting in later interviews more pensively on their early challenges:

Student M: In this semester [2] it’s much more difficult, but uh, I feel that I will not yet panic [laughing] like the first semester.

MS: So the first semester you had some panic ?

M: Some days, I just cannot bring any other thing into my mind than the study. If, I had something to say to the newcomer … prepare for the one year of fighting … we, cannot uh, relax any time [laughing]. It’s so, um, so stressful I think. Yeah.

Student L: [Interview 2] Working hard has become hard work ! [laughing]. Student

J: This year was actually always you had to do something … in your mind it’s always oh tomorrow I should work on this, and after tomorrow I should work on this.

Interesting questions do arise though around where this pressure comes from, and whether this could also be positive in some way – eustress rather than distress. I have become increasingly aware through the course of this research study just how important such a recognition may be, both for this thesis and for future pedagogic practice in working with IM students. Certain students from among the group achieving PASS grade degrees, even though not performing at the highest levels to which they may have originally aspired, later recognised opportunities for personal development in their new academic challenges:

Student H: I have a lot of time, how to deal with myself or this kind of pressure, and ah… as a result, maybe successfully, I get one step. For me, this is a great step.But this pressure is quite different from ah, the pressure I felt in my workplace. I can control, easier. I could change the way of thinking.

Student A: When I came here I said ok I’m going to study every day, every hour, I’m going to spend my time studying and studying and studying, no parties… and… that’s why [laughing] I got bad results. Because … you need to have time to relax yourself. I mean you are stress … and you cannot learn properly. If I could give recommendation for next student, they need to manage well the time. I spent time with my friend in the bar, drinking beers, and [then] studying. And I noticed that I had better results. Better than staying in my room the whole day.

 

Reading difficulties

As I sought to explore the perceived sources of academic pressure, my early interview questions tended to probe students’ writing issues, assuming a reaction to the imposition of multiple assignment deadlines within a few weeks around the end of Semester 1. I was somewhat surprised then by how their comments instead focussed much more on reading challenges, with this factor heavily outweighing their apparent concerns with the subsequent writing production. Reading is clearly a major, overwhelming issue for international Masters students in Semester 1. Key factors include: independent study expectations of six different tutors; how to research electronically; inability to be selective without direction from tutors; slow reading due to language; and self expectation of needing to understand every word of every recommended text.

So, in Stages 1 and 2 of the data collection, I found it difficult to pin students down on specific writing difficulties, without asking what I felt were overly leading questions, when they were more proactively identifying reading as their major challenge. This seemed an important observation of the primary problem in Semester 1, i.e. they do not know what to read, how to get to it, what to do with it when they get there – both for understanding and then interpreting that into their assignments. These were major barriers to confident, effective academic writing, and clearly needed more exploration in the next round of interviews and subsequent analysis:

Student A: I don’t have problems writing, in fact I love to write … for me the main problem is to be selective … five, ten books … phew, where are you going to start ?

Student B: I don’t think I struggle in … finding the reading. What happens is I find too many readings, then … trying to find out what to include and which I shouldn’t include. Because … I want to … include everything I always end up writing a lot more than I should. I don’t want to get rid of that idea …

It seems that international Masters students simply do not know how to read for a UK Masters level assignment. Many of them have undertaken an undergraduate programme in their home country, where they were mostly asked to work from one textbook, usually to prepare only for exams. With such limited experience of any kind of critical reading, further misgivings were expressed by some students around reading expectations:

Student H: The amount of reading contents were huge. And I couldn’t deal with this in reading speed. I need to understand learning contents, otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to write.

Student K: First two or three weeks I really willing to spend time on reading … Two or three hours in a night, four or six in a week-end day. But uh recently I feel run out of energy. For reading.

This last student from southeast Asia had been describing his English language problems – he went on to explain to me that he had been having real difficulty understanding the lectures, especially in Semester 1. So his strategy was to try and grasp as much as he could through pre-reading – to get the concept before he went to the lecture. Sometime after the lecture, he would then do some more in-depth reading. But, the amount of material that he had to assimilate in order to do that in all the different subjects had proved quite overwhelming for him. Ryan (2005b) observes that second language students can easily take four times as long to assimilate texts as their counterparts who have English as a first language. This factor leads to consideration of the next issue raised by these students that is clearly determined by the internationalization context of their learning journeys:

 

National culture differences

In the midst of such a disorientating experience, it seems natural that students will seek the familiarity of same culture friendships. This may well confound their own pre-arrival expectations, having entered UK HE with enthusiastic intentions to embrace ‘the new’. Several participants had expressed an initial aspiration to develop their intercultural skills by actively seeking opportunities to learn about other nationalities.

It is noteworthy, in this respect, that the factor of national culture was the most frequently raised of all data categories across the whole study. However, this produced ambivalent responses, and seemed bittersweet for many students. An initial optimism around opportunities for intercultural development was often darkened by a negative experience of multiculturalism within the postgraduate cohort during Semester 1. Later, this did change for some students into a rewarding expansion of intercultural awareness and communication skills (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Pritchard and Skinner 2002).

In the first interviews, several students certainly affirmed their longer-term hopes for developing their intercultural understanding in new relationships:

Student F: International experience is very important … to get a sense of all the cultural differences … for the world to be a better place to live like that.

Student L: I’ve had enough of Nigerians in Nigeria. Make friends … with other cultures so you can know what they think, what they feel.

Leask (2010) confirms an expressed intention for intercultural mixing not being followed through by international students, and urges institutions to develop well-planned strategies to overcome this natural reluctance. From my own, non-participant observations of campus student life, at both the School and the main University site, international students seem to predominantly socialise and move around in the same culture groups. In the School cafe and informal working areas, I often see Chinese students at one table, Nigerians at another, and so on. This does seem to confirm a necessary comfort as an international student abroad to have a close circle of at least one or two friends from the same cultural background. They can then enjoy the subtleties of nuanced, first language conversation and cultural-specific activities, such as cooking traditional dishes together. There is a sense of this being a relief from the concentration of negotiating cultural barriers, or studying an alien education system in a foreign language. This is an important insight, bearing in mind that although institutional staff might see resistance to continuous immersion in English-speaking situations as counter-productive, even highly performing students feel this need, as evidenced by these Distinction grade students below:

Student M: I’m not the one who likes to speak English all the day … there’s something that we can share in Vietnamese better. My close friends here, naturally that is a girl from Vietnam, and from Singapore.

Student B [Kenyan]: I probably tend to mix more with the African students … the Western Africans they’re Christians as well, so on a Sunday we will normally get together … to a place of worship … I suppose like British people go for their Sunday roast. We normally conglomerate at somebody’s house and … we’ll all bring something and cook …

The latter student does make the point that the relatively large number of students from western Africa is a factor too. The suggestion being that it is easy to gravitate to others from a similar home culture when there are so many around the campus. This is perhaps borne out by Student J (Dutch), who claims to observe that same trend among Chinese students through the year. At the same time, he seems to have followed through with his own aspiration to seek out knowledge of others from different cultures, citing friendships with Chinese, Lebanese and Jordanian students, as well as other Europeans. He shows an open-minded, curious attitude that is shared with the two other ‘European’ students from my research sample (one from Bosnia and the other, although from Chile originally, having lived in Italy for several years). Whilst they were not the only students to proactively seek intercultural friendships from the beginning, it does raise the interesting question of whether Europeans are more likely to mix interculturally because none of this continent’s constituent countries are strongly represented in the student cohort. These European students do seem to share a real excitement about the multicultural nature of
the MSc cohort:

Student A: Yes, brilliant, interesting because … you have been in a class room, 200 people speaking English, but no one of there’s speak English as a mother tongue.

Student J: In Holland … you don’t even a lot talk with foreign people … here, you’re all a big family … so it makes you world … bigger… it’s nice.

This last student did express regret at the small number of UK students on postgraduate programmes at the School – a disappointment that was very much echoed by the others on the MBA programme (in which 70% of students were from India). Student G bemoaned this high proportion of students from his home country as ‘unexciting’. The MBA students therefore particularly seemed to appreciate mixing with part-timers in some of the Semester 2A modules because they naturally introduce different perspectives as experienced UK managers. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be reflected in my conversations with part-time MBA students, who can view those international full-timers’ eager curiosity as somewhat needy. So this seems a rather oneway, intercultural process in which our international students very much appreciate the opportunities offered by the direct involvement with UK practitioners, but which is not reciprocated by a corresponding interest among those home students. This is somewhat ironic in the light of the emerging importance of the fast-growing economies in India and China – two of our major catchment areas for Masters recruitment. But this does rather confirm other commentators’ disappointing findings around the lack of multicultural interest among home students (Carroll 2005b, Leask 2010, McLean and Ransom 2005).

MSc students, at least, do find themselves among an especially diverse cohort: in the 09-10 academic year, they arrived from 48 different countries. It could be expected that this should provide tremendous opportunities for intercultural development. However, as indicated earlier, communication difficulties seem to arise through encounters with students from other foreign cultures, especially in tutorials and study groups. Whilst still paradoxically holding longer-term potential for developing better, cross-cultural understanding, these meetings with ‘the Other’ soon expose a discomfiting, stylistic communication clash at a fundamental level of learned cultural values:

Student O: You don’t have that opportunity to talk too much because … I don’t like to interrupt others. And I think they very enjoy that … interrupt others speaking. Never seen people argue like that [in group-work]. In China, a boy yelling at girl – you’re a very bad man. How could a little thing make that very big performance ? It looked like an opera. I was so scared … I don’t want people be unhappy.

As suggested from the beginning of this thesis, many international Masters students’ early encounters with UK HE can unfortunately be experienced quite negatively as a cultural collision, rather than the more positive opportunity easily assumed by well-intentioned Western educators. The stark disparities in cultural approaches to communication across the international cohort may then sometimes be exacerbated by perceived barriers to integration into the home culture, including not having English as a first language.

 

UK culture and language challenges

Whilst most international students arrive with a keen anticipation of developing their English skills, this can be frustrated by startling variations in English language expression by students from different countries:

Student O: That girl, she always say, ‘I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you’. That feeling is very bad. So I think it’s my fault. Sometimes I can’t understand a word they say … they speak very fast or their pronunciation I’m not used to.

Models of international student transition such as those noted earlier in the problem domain discussion do cite language as one of the key issues (see Bamford 2006, Allhouse 2012). This was raised by some students in the research interviews, but not that frequently compared with the other factors identified in this chapter so far. In certain cases though, a lack of confidence in English speaking ability was indicated as an inhibitor to socialisation with students from other cultures. So this could be seen as a significant barrier to friendship making, also identified in the above models as another important dimension to successful acculturation into a new learning environment:

Student K: Sometimes, we hope to avoid social opportunity because it’s really a problem to use English to communicate different cultures, people. We will start a conversation and very suddenly you don’t know how to keep going … the way of the thinking is much more different.

Osmond and Roed (2010, p.121) cite MacIntyre’s (1995) recognition of two psychological aspects to language anxiety: emotional arousal and negative selfrelated cognition. This latter factor relates to the issue of international Masters students’ self-efficacy, and the authors argue that this is an affective determinant of international students’ tendencies to retreat into ethnic groups wherever possible.

However, it is also quite possible to conjecture that language may not be the issue here so much as educational and cultural values. When asked about an apparent reticence to contribute in class discussions, students from oriental education systems will often refer to the notion of respect that has been instilled at home and at school. They explain that this strongly discourages them from interrupting others, and also leaves them vulnerable to being interrupted themselves. Once they are directly asked to offer their views, and if these are listened to patiently, accommodating additional language hesitancy, then they can often demonstrate intelligent and useful reasoning around a topic (Scudamore 2013). This paradox is well illustrated by one student from Taiwan:

Student K: Our learning team is not working very well because they all learn English [in India] so they think they don’t have to prepare beforehand. Most of them … read the text … during the discussion. But, I … and Eric [also from Taiwan] already prepared it. I cannot judge that … because we are team then… we need their contribution. So, you have to let them to read all the assignment. They start to discuss. Yes.

It is also important to recognise in my emerging data that, despite the suggested linguistic barriers to participation mentioned above, students can also refer to this dimension as a positive motivation. For some, it is because of their desire to improve their English, particularly for career opportunities with multinational companies, that they are prepared to travel so far to a dauntingly foreign culture. This was certainly highlighted by Asian students, but even in the case of our European students, as exemplified by two below, this may well have been an initial, decisive factor too.

So it can be surprising, and often disappointing, for them to find such an apparently non-British student mix. This is compounded by the tendency for international Masters students not to be involved with undergraduates at the School, where the lecture cohorts and tutorial groups are the defining parameters for burgeoning, academically derived relationships. As already noted, same culture groupings then become the norm in informal settings too:

Student F: I’m a little bit disappointed because I didn’t expect so many international students here … what I was really looking for is … the British culture … and to improve my English … I’m not sure that I’m happy with that.

Student J: I always wanted … first of all to improve my English … There’s only 2% of our class who are from England … so if you talk with Chinese or … Indian people … you don’t learn the real English voice.

Interestingly then, it appears that a significant element of national culture shock occurs not so much with the new, British culture but rather through the very lack of that hoped-for encounter. Perhaps this reflects a strongly felt need among our international Masters students for peer support, as much as tutor guidance, for effective transition into the UK educational system (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Sedgley 2012a):

Student B: The only downside is because … the number of English students is not that many … I’d like … to … have a lot more of their input because … that would help other people who might be struggling with the whole thing about analysing something critically.

 

Local culture – disappointing and upsetting encounters

Many international students also express their shock at this lack of ‘Englishness’ being reflected in Bradford itself as a city. The significant, apparently Asian presence especially in areas between the city centre and the School campus can be regarded as a real let-down. Although many of these local residents and a majority of home students actually will be British Asians, this national origin is often lost on the new international arrivals. The initial culture shock, often compounded by nonplussed first encounters with the fastpaced, dialectic speech of the home students, is often expressed by international Masters students in terms of strong disappointment. Clearly, this has a significant emotional impact when they have arrived with high expectations of a certain kind of British culture. Later in the year, students report visiting cities such as Birmingham and Manchester, describing in quite dramatic language how they have finally discovered ‘the real England’, or a ‘model British city’. Such reflections also tend to refer to the presence of so many more white faces on the streets. This may seem surprising considering the multicultural population of such centres, but the students usually often explain that it is because these places do not look like an Asian city, which is how they suggest they have come to see Bradford.

Unfortunately, reports from students within my research sample, and more widely in my ELS consultations, also include disturbing public incidents such as disorderly behaviour, direct intimidation, verbal and even physical assault, particularly experienced by female students. These are extremely upsetting, shocking experiences for young students, most of whom have led relatively sheltered lives, and had tended to expect the kind of civilised British society they had seen portrayed in our more sentimental films and TV dramas.

So a significant mismatch between the anticipation international students have of their new UK environment and the actual reality they encounter seems to derive from several aspects:

•  A startlingly different academic discourse centred on independent
  learning.
•  Lack of contact with British peers on the postgraduate programmes.
•  Unmet expectations of a predominantly white population.
•  Bradford seeming like a small, provincial town in contrast to students’
  home cities, such as Shanghai or Lagos, in supposedly developing
  countries.
•  All of the above issues perhaps then thrown into stark relief by an early,
  intimidating experience on or nearby the university campuses.

Clearly, such factors could easily lead to a sharp anti-climax for those students arriving with such high hopes, many of whom will have just embarked on their first trip away from home and family. Within the context of the affective learning journey, it could be expected that such a severe cultural shock might well send students plunging down a slope of self-doubt. Along with their families, they have invested so much time and money into this trip to the promised land of educational and professional development, so to have to face the more disturbing realities can be a chastening experience (Ryan 2005b). At a time of understandably fragile self-confidence, so far away from the familiarity of previous comfort zones, students could start to question whether they have made the right choice in coming to this British university. Whether this directly affects self-efficacy is another issue, but it does seem reasonable to consider that students’ levels of comfort with their new environment have some impact on their academic motivation and application.

However, despite any such socio-cultural concerns, the real educational culture shock for most students is still yet to come – in the looming spectre of assessment grades. Some of the early assignments can seem, perversely to many of our international students, to combine the twin, alien perils of an opaque academic discourse and intercultural group-work. In the generalist MSc programmes for example, the first assignment is usually a group-work critical review of a journal article. Such in-depth critical analysis within the first few weeks of entering UK HE is a major challenge indeed, especially when it involves working with others from different countries and educational cultures in a second language (Sedgley 2010a, 2010b).

Critical analysis – a threshold concept in adaptation to the unfamiliar
Western academic discourse

Difficulties with this particularly unfamiliar aspect of the academic discourse are clearly evident by Stage 2 of the data collection:

Student D: Critical analysis is every student’s nightmare now. Even though the tutors keep telling us, every time we ask … It’s different when you go back and you want to put it into practice, it’s somehow you get stuck again, I don’t know.

Student G: There are so much of contradictory things in articles that it’s very difficult, as a person reading it for the first time, to really understand who is right … It’s very difficult because in most of the articles they don’t actually say yes or no, it’s in a very subtle way which they will take a stand.

I observe the recurrent lack of that key skill in many of the draft essays submitted to ELS for review. The way that we write academically in our Western discourse does indeed involve a subtle way of blending different ideas and holding one up against the other, sometimes in apparent contradiction. Tian and Low (2011, p.73) report that Chinese students’ struggles with this skill are not so much a national cultural issue but rather a product of ‘small culture’, or the learning context both in previous and current education. They conducted a meta-analysis of studies into Chinese students’ apparent difficulties with critical thinking and related class discussion – two crucial characteristics of UK HE – and concluded that their problems stem from a ‘lack of training’ rather than a cultural deficiency as is sometimes proposed (p.63). The authors encourage Western researchers and educators to support international students’ development of critical thinking skills by not stereotyping students through national culture – individuals will vary according to their previous experiences.

International Masters students at the School of Management do often express appreciation for having eventually developed the capability of independent critical thinking so much more keenly through their Masters study. This observation is supported by Ryan (2005a). However, there may be a darker side to this apparently beneficial personal development:

Student E: My friend started writing on Facebook that you are critically analysing everything, even in your life.

Student A: Why should I criticise every time ? You don’t have to criticise everything you know, otherwise you’re not going to be happy. What do you think about that ?

Critical analysis is a complex issue even for those already well-versed in the UK HE discourse, and yet international Masters students need to quickly achieve a working understanding of this to become effective members of this learning community. This clearly presents significant challenges and, as noted above, the confusing and time-consuming nature of the transitional process is then compounded by another major characteristic of summative assessment: groupwork.

 

Group-working

Group-work assignments are widely used at the School of Management, and are assessed through a written report, perhaps accompanied by a group presentation. This usually accounts for 30% of the overall module grade, but occasionally 50%, the other component being either an individual essay or examination.

Overall, in the first and second interviews, group-work assignments seem to have polarised views about this particular form of study and assessment. A minority affirmed the valued being pushed together for establishing a connection with other students, which then paid other dividends in new friendships as well as more direct academic support. More often than not though, students criticise this as: very negative; unfair (being pushed into groups where some members do not contribute but still receive the same mark); or overly time-consuming for lower-rated assessments:

Student F: There’s always at least one person who is not going to do anything. First meeting, two guys didn’t show up, other two guys hadn’t read the case … I felt really stupid because I’d lost two hours. We met again and one guy didn’t show up … the one guy … barely speaks English, the other guy speaks English but he … was just listening to us. So you have five people … but just two are really working on it.

De Vita (2005) observes that despite, on average, group-work grades being higher than for individual coursework, students remain apprehensive about this form of assessment. They often suspect a pragmatic convenience for tutors in having fewer group assignments to mark. Tutors often promote the value of group-work as emulating the team-working dynamics of the workplace, but students remain unconvinced (Carroll 2005b). Students note that in the School group-work, unlike the workplace, there are no established team policies, and no recourse to a team leader with authority to resolve disputes. And they argue, as Carroll (2005b) agrees, that team members in the ‘real world’ would not be rewarded equally, regardless of effort expended or quality of work produced.

Student B: I understand … you find yourself in teams … you can’t really choose … but the grade is so significant … your grade sells part of you … fine let’s have the group work, but let’s keep it down to like 10%.

In relation to the latter comment, again we meet a paradox of group-work though. Another student who recognised the advantages for his own leadership development also emphasises that group-work is usually for an assessment constituting only 30% of the final module mark – a fact that in itself apparently discourages the engagement of some of the more strategic learners in the group.

It is perhaps not surprising to discover that most of the highly performing students in my sample often assumed the leader role in their assigned groups. Whilst this was not always reported with great enthusiasm, the overall sense is that most adopted this role willingly, not least because of their focus on achieving high grades in all assignments wherever possible. Several of the students had already realised that they were quite capable of leading the group, and they also quite soon suspected that some of the group members’ contributions could easily fall short of their own standards.

However, for some leaders, the reality was particularly challenging, with a common recognition that organising group members’ inputs and synthesising their outputs to an acceptable standard could be very time-consuming for the leader. Although virtually all of the highly performing students in my sample had adopted a ‘needs must’ commitment to group-working in Semester 1, it was quite startling to hear how this experience had directed some of them to deliberately avoid as many assessed group-work modules as possible in Semester 2. In several cases, they were deliberately deselecting certain elective subjects on that criterion alone, in what could be construed as a strategic move to safeguard self-efficacy by taking as much personal control of their own academic outcomes as possible.

These students had also apparently made a point during Semester 1 of actively observing which others were serious, applied students, in order to seek out selfselecting, highly performing groups in unavoidable Semester 2 courseworks. Otherwise, a strong preference emerged for studying very much on an individual basis:

Student O: For study I’m very reluctant to ask people help. I think … I can do it so I won’t ask. You will be happy because you do it on your own and then you try your best. This all it matter for me.

Student B: People are learning more from me than I am from them, so it doesn’t really work for me. Which is why I probably did a lot of one-to-one work with (Student F) … seeing that we are on the same sort of level.

 

Intercultural complications to effective group-work

Group-work is usually a new type of study experience for many international students, previously used to only attending monocultural lectures, and revising alone for an individual examination. De Vita (2001) acknowledges the difficulties of achieving successful group-work with any large cohort of students, and stresses that a multicultural mix adds another challenge to this perennially thorny issue. Boyacigiller (2013) concedes that it is this kind of project that is likely to create the most conflicts among students. So although diversity can be a stimulating factor in group-work, a lack of overt acknowledgment of cultural assumptions that affect group participation and interaction will create extra difficulties (Carroll 2005a, Sedgley 2010a,Tomlinson and Egan 2002). Storrs (2012, p.7) helpfully reminds us of the emotive nature of such encounters where diversity of personality and work ethos can also exacerbate the multicultural challenges:

While some students were frustrated with their peers, other students
experienced negative emotions of frustration, anxiety, and doubt about
their own academic abilities and, in response, disengaged from the
project.

Marlina (2009) cautions us to recognise that participation in tutorials, for example, is more determined by the Western classroom context, in which students are now expected to learn differently, rather than by their own cultures. In other words, active participation is construed as talkativeness, and those students that do not readily engage in group-work in this way can easily be negatively labelled, in a deficit model context of UK HE, as passive, disinterested or incapable. Several authors have recognised that many Asian cultures regard silence as an integral element of critical learning, in direct contrast to the verbal argument that is so highly valued in Western academic contexts (Harrison and Peacock 2010, McLean and Ransom 2005, Trahar 2010).

Marlina (2009) highlights the paradox with which many of the above authors are attempting to grapple though, by reminding us that the real danger can be in generalising about international students, or categorising their learning styles within national cultures. My data analysis intends to demonstrate that there can be some such apparently common factors among cultural groups, but equally there are international Masters students in my sample who show active participation in groups and appreciation of those opportunities. Then, there are others who are frightened of this new type of learning forum at first, but later come to embrace it enthusiastically. And, as Marlina reminds us, there can be plenty of home students who are frustratingly inactive group-workers too.

Ideally, tutors need to somehow develop responsiveness to a greater diversity of learning approaches in the classroom, not only those that are assumed to be culturally derived. As Turner (2007, p.9) sums up:

In spite of acknowledged classroom diversity, a range of factors –
including the homogenizing tendency of admissions criteria, disciplinary
norms, the brevity and intensity of programmes and the privileging of
cultural academic models and conventions – coalesce together to militate
against its explicit recognition in everyday classroom practices.

The School of Management curriculum does seem to typify this kind of obstructive discourse for international Masters students. Students are sometimes divided into groups rather arbitrarily by tutors, on a broadly multicultural mix, but usually without guidance on how to harness that diversity. De Vita (2005) stresses that intercultural interaction presents emotional challenges, and he is supported by later research from Kimmel and Volet (2012). It raises quite ambivalent feelings among students, even those who try hard to make it work and learn from the experience.

As a personal development process, this can be quite successful for those who: recognise the importance of planning work organisation early on; allocate tasks according to members’ strengths and capacities; and adopt a leader who takes on an extra, co-ordinating responsibility. Strengthened friendships and enhanced intercultural skills can be emergent benefits from such groups, just as School tutors and programme managers may hope (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Osmond and Roed 2010, Summers and Volet 2008).

But Carroll (2005b) observes that, all too often, conflicts can arise out of unacknowledged linguistic misunderstandings or clashes of cultural values, and these can be emotionally damaging when they are then implicitly attributed to personal inadequacies. These are not easily managed within the very limited time available for assignment production.

In summary, assessed group-work is clearly a contentious, emotive issue, more so than any other single category raised within this research. The issue at stake seems a difficult one to resolve for both staff and students alike – how to organise and facilitate students’ group-working in ways that help to stimulate genuinely shared learning, and represent a fair opportunity for all. When the students are paying for what will be an individual Masters qualification, they may (and often do) reasonably ask whether this is a justifiable means of assessing their individual capability. It is noteworthy that Bandura (1997) relates self-efficacy to personal control, yet with several group-work assessments in one semester, these are likely to impact negatively on an individual’s sense of control over his academic destiny.

So it is not surprising that this form of assessment proves particularly stressful for many of our Masters students. Group-work does seem to be a potential contributor to the decline suggested in the U-shaped transition curve selfefficacy model. Emotional reactions to group-work setbacks may then be inflamed by the individual assessment outcomes that usually follow chronologically in most Semester 1 modules. The major impact of assessment generally on students’ affective learning journeys is explored in more depth in the next section:

 

Assessment grades – disappointment and confusion

Feedback from some early Semester 1 assignments can come out before Christmas, and for quite a number of students these may already have an impact with personally disappointing grades. This can continue with some further results through January. Again, these will undermine students’ selfefficacy if they are fails or even C grades when they have been used to high percentage scores in other educational cultures (Ryan 2005b, Turner 2007).

By the time of most second interviews, students had received feedback from four assignments. This had often caused some confusion, due to long lead times, limited and sometimes illegible, handwritten comments, and then what seemed to the students to be contradictory grades to their actual perceived input in the assignments. Students’ performance anxiety is then heightened through a kind of limbo until the end of February, when all Semester 1 results are finally released from several January exams as well as written assignments. This waiting time can have a disconcerting effect on students’ self-belief, which is harder for some to maintain in such uncertain times. This was expressed strongly and emotively by the respondents across the academic performance spectrum of the sample, showing how much students depend on this external judgement of their academic capability. They can often make matters worse for themselves through critical comparisons with peers’ performances:

Student L: Our results came out for the first essay. And I got a C. Oh my god I feel very stupid, and I didn’t want anyone to know …

MS: You have two B’s … so did those marks pick up your mood at that time?

L: Yeah they did, it got me feeling into like maybe it’s not that bad… It’s pretty sad because it feels like I don’t have control over my emotions. Like something has to happen for me to be happy, or something has to happen for me to be sad.

Student A: The exam I got D … but the E that I got was a coursework. And this was the first mark so can you imagine how worse I feeling because I was expecting As, Bs, I got E ! Whoah ! That’s very bad, I felt very depressed. When I got that, well I didn’t have any control myself, was completely lost.

Student N: In a few of the subjects I thought I’d done it extremely well, but I landed up getting Cs, so I don’t know where I went wrong. Now I’m really scared … few guys are … chartered accountant by profession, and believe me they’ve got B – in finance. Yeah, they’ve got B. I’m like, oh my God … I will get an E because I’m nothing in front of them you know.

As Turner (2006) observes, there seems to be a strong link between grade outcomes and emotional state, including self-efficacy – at least for a temporary period until students realise they have to somehow re-motivate themselves and re-engage with the next, relentless series of assignments. This link is one of the most powerfully expressed by my participants, and has been reinforced many, many times during my ELS consultations with students, especially around December to February period when Semester 1 results are being confirmed. So if their learning journeys are following a form of the proposed self-efficacy U-shaped transition model, this is the time, and major reason, for the bottom of the trough.

Wu and Hammond (2011) report students’ experience of disappointing marks as simply being a motivation to perform better by seeking more effective study strategies. Whilst the momentum of the intensive Masters programme did seem to force my own research participants into further study, there were many instances of emotional upheaval in the process. The Wu and Hammond study seems to overlook such affective references, perhaps because they focussed on outcomes of academic adjustment rather than the students’ emotional processes. This may then go some way to explain why they describe ‘culture bumps’ rather than culture shock as characterising the pattern of their students’ learning journeys. However, their thematic generalisation is then qualified by the cameos of student experience in which one student, for example, explains that she was ‘very upset with her academic performance, and believed that she deserved higher grades’ (2011, p.434).

It does transpire from some interviews that an introspective view of failure is not how some students react. Others took a more externalised view and challenged the supposed fairness and transparency of the system. Interestingly, in the two examples below, these were from students who ultimately achieved degrees with Distinction. This could suggest a link between high levels of performance and an alertness to guard against perceived threats to their self-efficacy:

Student F: I think it’s too much actually. I mean I got emotion, I was very much upset. For instance the C assignment, it was all Cs and even the referencing and I thought this can’t be right. I couldn’t find any mistakes. On the other hand, in this one I found mistakes but it was an A. I hear students saying, ‘Oh my God, I got an A and I didn’t even have a SWOT analysis. [Laughing] then, you just go home very angry.

Student L: Then I did something very risky, I’d written a topic for ethical consumption for consumer behaviour, and the assignment for business ethics was on ethical consumption. So … I just cut and paste … and I got … an A, and then I got a B for the consumer behaviour. So I’m wondering, why do I have A for one and B for the second one, and it’s pretty much the same thing. So anyway I was happy and then I was sad.

I have witnessed a number of corresponding experiences since I started in my full-time student support role in 2007. Each year, there have been instances of significantly inconsistent grading between staff across different modules. So some students experience a great shock on receiving a much lower mark than they expected within a particular module, which they cannot understand in the context of higher marks for what they believe is similar work in other modules. This leads to the bewilderment described in the Introduction Chapter. In early to mid Semester 2, perhaps just when they thought they were finally coming to terms with the academic discourse, they find themselves once more floundering on the periphery, even more confused now about what to deliver in their academic work.

The impact of that apparent injustice does not just affect the current students though – the immediacy and ubiquity of social media now means that perceived poor quality in the student experience can soon be translated into negative feedback on the university that is seen by potential students worldwide. The institution’s reputation and consequent levels of recruitment are more vulnerable nowadays, and student satisfaction is a key mediating factor in the development of alumni who can play a most valuable, later role as institutional ambassadors with aspiring students from their home countries (Ramachandran 2011, Ryan 2005).

 

A disempowering discourse

As Trahar (2010) observes, elements of an opaque Western discourse such as critical thinking are culturally embedded, and yet, perversely, students are either unable or not allowed to challenge these. An educational system apparently based on the values of independent, critical thought does not tolerate real critique – an irony not lost on some educational researchers (Candy 1991, Guo and Chase 2011, Lillis 2006). There seems to be an inherent contradiction in expecting students to develop the critical thinking with which they could then skilfully challenge the assessment criteria that are not realistically open to negotiation.

As Brown et al (2007) point out, Western academics demand a paradigm shift in international students’ thinking, yet seem unable to countenance such a movement in their own approach to the teaching and learning situation. Over 20 years ago, Candy (1991) was already highlighting the inherent paradox within many Western HE institutions of imposing self-direction on learners who are encountering elements of a system that may be epistemologically averse to that very principle. In other words, how freely do the institution’s criteria of success actually allow students to determine their own direction of learning ?

Others have since argued that students’ voices should be encouraged, even if this may also equip them to challenge that discourse within which they are increasingly participating (Lillis 2001, Wingate 2006). Yet Turner (2006) notes that the epistemological intransigence inherent in our academic discourse perversely reinforces many international Masters students’ ‘passive-receptive’ identities learned in the purportedly more didactic Asian education systems. Many international Masters students are coming from an epistemological position that effectively says, ‘I’m looking for you to tell me the right answer(s) to tell you in my assignment’. This self-expectation has been well-developed through international students’ previous educational cultures, in which teachers had stressed the ‘correct knowledge’ in their lectures. When a Western lecturer delivers what we would perceive as good teaching – explaining pros and cons of different options, for example – international Masters students can find this bewilderingly disengages their previous learner identities, or they may even feel cheated by the teacher’s apparent equivocation (McLean and Ransom 2005, Strauss 2011).

Storrs (2012) argues that this also contrives to repress the affective element of students’ learning journeys, which would otherwise allow them to ‘keep it real’.

Students respond in ways that they believe teachers want, whereas they could be empowered by education to, ‘acknowledge, reflect upon, and address the emotions that underline and intersect with teaching in an effort to extend students’ learning’ (p.1). At the School of Management, as noted in the preceding discussion, students felt profoundly dissatisfied with the defensive response to their complaints about apparently inconsistent assessment processes across different subjects. Those who felt brave enough to challenge the grading judgements found very little willingness on the part of tutors to discuss the academic expectations that they had found so confusing.

So critical thinking can seem a contradiction in itself, yet this is certainly a highly valued skill in UK HE, at least in social sciences such as management, and the one that international Masters students often report they struggle with most. Trahar (2010, p.152) poses the uncomfortable question,

To what extent are we … perpetuating imperialism by not opening up all
of our higher education practices to scrutiny for their unacknowledged
cultural entrenchment ?

It does seem that, more often than not, our Western academic discourse can be quite baffling for international Masters students in early encounters. This chapter has utilised thematic narrative analysis to explore data arising predominantly from first, and some second, interviews that have determined the downturn in my proposed U-shaped transition curve model. These correspond with the affective challenges to the respondents’ learner identities experienced in a pronounced way by many of them in the first semester especially.

 

Key challenges for effective learning strategies

This general thematic analysis has raised some common difficulties that have been shared among this sample of students and others with whom I work. The especially challenging factors in international Masters students’ experience suggested by that set of data relating to the downturn in the U-shaped curve include:

• Volume of work within a short space of time.
• Unfamiliar reading and writing practices.
•  Peer support opportunities initially inhibited by cultural and
  personal differences.

These are important issues that HE managers and tutors could consider in relation to teaching, learning and assessment strategies. These may be briefly summarised as follows:

Volume, time-scales and unfamiliarity of written assignments encourage strategic learning. One external issue that impacts on the majority of international Masters students is the volume of work, which often proves extremely challenging. Their approaches to learning can therefore be quite strategic, especially early in the year. This is a disappointment not just for the tutors, but also for many of the students themselves who had come with high hopes of deeper learning. They had been very curious about the subjects that they were going to be studying, and then became quite frustrated by not achieving a corresponding penetration of understanding.

By the later stages of the data collection, students were usually able to reflect more holistically around their challenges with independent learning. Several commented on time management in particular, realising with the benefit of hindsight the crucial role played by this self-management skill in planning their assignments more effectively (Sedgley 2012a). This is captured by Moore, recommending a sustained, four-stage process: rough draft; working document; penultimate draft; final proof: ‘There’s no such thing as good writing first time off, everyone has to rework it, and rework it’ (2010, p.101). As we hear from certain, highly successful students in my sample, this skill figured strongly in their repertoire from the beginning of the academic year. But unfortunately, and despite repeated early emphasis from staff, many students do not grasp this very quickly at all. This can deliver a ‘snowball effect’, inhibiting student engagement. International Masters students feel they are being pulled from so many different sides with six modules in each of the taught semesters, often with particular timetable pressure points within these (Sedgley 2012a).

Productive writing is an important part of the learning process, but this first depends on effective reading strategies. Of all the external factors that the students raise around the issue of unexpected work volume, reading difficulties seem to be paramount. What they produce in their written assignments is dependent on how they are selecting, understanding, interpreting and representing their reading. However, the effective development of these reading skills is hindered by the proliferation of potential texts for study. This is further compounded by the students’ confusing encounter with the opaque discourse in UK HE regarding academic reading and writing expectations (Sedgley 2011).

Yet reading challenges and strategies are not prominent in the learning development literature. So much more practitioner research seems to have focussed on academic writing, and this had influenced my expectations and consequent emphasis on foregrounding assignment production in the early interviews. One of the few authors to highlight reading as a significant barrier for international students was Carroll (2005a), who importantly notes how even an apparently simple directive from tutors for ‘wide reading’ is quite confusing for students whose previous educational culture may have required the study of only one textbook for each subject. However, even she immediately follows this point with a suggested list of four academic factors about which Western tutors should be explicit, and reading is not included.

McLean and Ransom (2005, p.54), at least, acknowledge the gap highlighted in my data between tutors’ expectations of international Masters students’ research skills and their actual capabilities:

The ability to read critically, extract information and use sources to support
an argument is highly valued in Western tertiary study, yet can mystify
[international] students.

Peer support is crucial, yet often underused or resisted early on. The above challenges with reading and writing, which are encapsulated in the context of independent learning, suggest the importance of students working together to at least support each other in the relative absence of tutor guidance. Yet early experiences of multicultural group-work, for example, are often counter-productive. So whilst peer interaction is ostensibly already recognised as a crucial factor for the enhancement of international Masters students’ experience, there is another paradox at the School of Management, where students tend to be allocated into groups by tutors. It is notable that by Semester 2, when they can choose their own groups, far more international Masters students actually start developing very productive peer support relationships. In Semester 1, tutors often form those groups through mixing students by culture, partly with an implicit aim of developing intercultural teamworking skills. However, this is rarely an overt criterion of assessment, and can lead to resentment and frustration, especially when group members all get the same grade (Sedgley 2010a). Leask (2010) also points out that substantial amounts of time and effort are needed to develop communication skills necessary for new situations. Tutors need to prepare their assessments and the students more explicitly for the challenges and purposes of group-work. Otherwise, tutors’ deliberately multicultural allocations of group compositions can easily backfire (Osmond and Roed 2010).

 

Conceptualizing an affective process of learning development for international Masters students

The above factors are common learning experiences that do seem to be shared to some extent by many students in general, and international Masters students in particular. These are clearly significant for both students and tutors, and so highlight opportunities for useful interventions in clarifying academic expectations and proactively supporting students’ transition into UK HE. I have taken these predominant issues arising in the thematic analysis to conceptualise a model of international Masters students’ aspirations and challenges in UK HE, as shown in Figure 4 below:

Adapted from Sedgley (2010). SE refers to self-efficacy

The outer circle represents the challenges experienced by international Masters students – symbolising their marginalisation at the periphery of the learning community in the first stage of culture shock. Some of the inhibitors to successful penetration of the discourse, especially when students first arrive, are emotional issues – particularly concerned with feeling different, abnormal, and that one does not belong. Such feelings can threaten existing student identity, and undermine self-efficacy. These are then compounded by extrinsic factors such as the sheer volume of information that one is required to absorb in short spaces of time, and tacit expectations of how to then assimilate and personally interpret that, apparently whilst working much of the time on one’s own, away from classes.

The centre circle indicates the possible aspirations that students have for their UK HE sojourn, and the range of outcomes for the vast majority, who do achieve successful learning journeys. However, for many international students, the early stages of these journeys can take them into a frighteningly far away landscape. They need guides to help them find their way and to not waste too much precious time and energy.

The second circle is highlighting a key challenge for these Western education guides – academic tutors and learning developers – in how to best enable international Masters students to travel from outside our learning environment into its heart. As existing practitioners already in the centre of the community, we are in a position to normalise these students’ early, marginalised experiences, potentially enhancing their confidence to explore further. That does not just involve an inward direction on their part, but also requires an outward movement from us to meet them halfway, as it were. We can decide to become explorers too, reconsidering our educational culture through newcomers’ fresh eyes, searching for bridges between their known worlds and our own (Biggs and Tang 2011). The emphasis in the past has been on students having to change their learning identities when they enter UK HE, but Western educators are now recognising a value in adapting our teaching and learning practices too (Kelly and Moogan 2012, Ryan 2011).

Yet, some second, and certainly third, interviews generally indicate a growing familiarity with the academic discourse. The consequent affective improvement expressed in those data supports the proposed idea of re-ascent along the later timeline of the U-shaped model, in direct counterpoint to the earlier distress from unfamiliarity, as explored in the accounts above. This upward resurgence is explored through the emergent data in more detail in the following chapter.

 

Chapter 6
Thematic Analysis – Part 2

Affective learning journeys of international Masters students:
What similar coping strategies did I find across this sample ?

 

Louie (2005) suggests that in intercultural situations increasing familiarity will have positively affective connotations, and this seems to be supported in the academic context by the findings of Wu and Hammond (2011) that cultural challenges for international Masters students are reduced in Semester 2, and academic performance generally improves through this stage. Based on frequency of mentions across the categorical analysis of all interviews in my case study, this upturn in students’ affective states seems to derive from the following factors: new subject knowledge; assessment successes; peer support and new understandings of each other. These three categories form the basis of the following investigation in this chapter into the students’ more positive narrative elements in the later stages of their affective learning journeys.

 

The stimulation and satisfaction of newly acquired subject knowledge

The positive influence of content learning on students’ motivation over the duration of the taught Masters programme produced much discussion in a majority of Stage 3 and 4 interviews, hence the apparent importance of this external stimulus and affective response. Researchers have long asserted that educators should not seek to build students’ academic self-confidence without first addressing subject contextualised skills development (Bandura 1997, Pajares 2008, Peterson et al 1993). I believe that the students here are indicating a strong link between new learning and improving self-perceptions, supporting the School’s hope of the Masters programme being a transformative process, as well as indicating the significance of self-efficacy in learning development:

Student H: Most of subjects, I didn’t learn previously, so … I need a lot of … time or effort. I can do by myself, and I believe this helps me to create confidence.

Student J: It’s not only about I want to get the MSc no matter what … it’s not like this. I want to study something I interested in, I want to get more knowledge. And with that combination, I get the MSc – it’s good.

Student G: Coming from an engineering background … I was really excited about … the new things, mostly finance and operations because … I’ve never been exposed into, … and my perception for this MBA was I’ve been given a bit of room to explore and exploit things … this is interesting, I should read about it more in depth … really exciting for me.

Not surprisingly then, several students commented on becoming especially inspired at the dissertation / final project stage when they are encouraged to choose a topic they have found particularly interesting or relevant during the first two teaching semesters. After the intensity of conflicting demands from six modules in each semester, students find that they now have some time and space for independent learning in a subject area more of their own choosing:

Student B: Yeah I am pretty happy working on my own, and I love my dissertation, is my priority.

Student J: Finally when I find my topic, I really liked it. And … dissertation period I really liked as well actually. Even though it’s a lot of work … it’s like hobby, you like to do it, you know.

Student O: I have a very happy time writing dissertation !

However, there are exceptions to this enthusiastic approach to the final stage of the Masters learning journey, which sometimes seems to hold mixed blessings. Supervision difficulties, in particular, can severely challenge students’ selfefficacy, which hopefully will have been bolstered, at least, by the preceding learning journey:

Student N: He was not that helpful in meeting us … I used to get scared to mail him in fact … if this was the case in the beginning, I’d have cried but now I was like what can be done, I have to do. I sent my first draft much early, I was like, basically I kind of enjoy … the dissertation. He said, yeah, and he didn’t even look at it and I waited, I waited, I waited and um, I called him over the phone … and I told him I have to give it for binding so I would like to know the feedback – he’s like, ‘I’ve not gone through. When did you send it ?’

Unfortunately, this type of problem is regularly echoed in my on-going ELS discussions with other students at this stage of each academic year. However, the majority of students in my sample certainly achieved high grades in their final dissertations / projects, and these indicate an overall picture of growing familiarity with academic skills development, and consequent self-confidence.

 

Personal successes:

A further category that I coded for the detailed classification of analysis was ‘Inspirations from own successes’. Students’ narrative comments entered into this category were typically around summative assessment successes, but there were also other aspects of wider personal development here:

Student O: You can see the large mountain and … I didn’t think, I just climbed there, and … there is some of rocks, very high, and … first I am get a little scared. I was struggling to climb the mountain. Yeah, and then you think, all this thing is worth. No matter how scary you have, and no matter how trouble you go through, all this thing is worth. Yeah, worth it to be on the top, and then you see everything is under your foot. It’s very like … you win all the things.

Students can also feel inspired by quite simple achievements en route to the greater destinations of the summative assessments. These small steps can assume far greater significance in that they somehow signal a more penetrative understanding of the academic discourse. Perhaps what is most crucial in selfefficacy terms though is for students to reach an intrinsic satisfaction with their own academic performance, and commentators have argued that international students can, and do, have this kind of positive UK HE sojourn, relatively irrespective of the external outcomes (Montgomery and McDowell 2009, Wu and Hammond 2011). This seems an important recognition when it can be easy to assume from anecdotal evidence and our perceptions of antecedent Asian educational cultures that all students may initially at least be expecting to achieve A grade passes throughout. A growing realism concerning benchmark grades represents a major, attitudinal shift for many students:

Student H: In the first semester I felt the MBA programme was like a high mountain … extremely high. But uh, second semester, I climb up the mountain, I’m becoming to feel the mountain is not so high. I got a pass for all modules, and I realised if I make effort for this amount, you can get this kind of degree.

Student A: I really feel happy with my performance in exams, and I study a lot so, even if I don’t get an A, I am happy.

MS: So that’s the important thing to you – that you feel you’ve done your best ?

A: Yes, it is important because, I don’t have to pressure too much myself, I mean we are studying in English, not my mother tongue, in another environment – it’s difficult. But I am doing my best, so it’s the attitude, yes.

Student N: I have learnt a lot and I am really happy, and with the overall performance I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’ve given my best, and I’ve done as much as I could … and even for example, I got a very bad grade in one of the subjects and I was very depressed, but … I spoke to myself saying that I have read, I have done as much as I can, if I still manage to get a bad grade, I’ll just leave it to the destiny.

 

Acceptance of others and peer support

Brisset et al (2010) report a wealth of evidence from various studies affirming the importance of social and psychological support from close peers. And Elliott and Robinson (2011) note that alumni and peer networking opportunities represent an important factor for students when choosing a British MBA. In addition to the motivational impetus realised through their own academic successes, students also recognised the influence of others, particularly peers, on making new meanings of their experiences. ‘New ways of relating to others’ and ‘Peer support’ were originally categorised as two separate factors, but these seemed to be closely related, and so have been combined in the resulting analysis.

The main, intercultural opportunity for undergraduate / postgraduate mixing typically occurs in halls of residence, where students sharing facilities have sometimes been deliberately allocated on a multicultural basis by the accommodation office. However, because of Bradford University’s strong local catchment profile, most of our resident undergraduate students tend to be international, thus still limiting possibilities for our postgraduate students to find the elusive ‘British culture’.

Some students though, noted the positive opportunities offered through this university-directed intercultural initiative. Student M, from Vietnam, commented that although her close group for sharing home cooking was from her own country, her best friend for ‘going out’ was actually an undergraduate flatmate from Brunei. She felt the university should do even more to encourage acculturation, which requires practical encouragement of both monocultural and intercultural developments. This view is supported by contemporary commentators (Carroll 2005a, Montgomery 2010, Ryan 2011), and seems to exemplify the paradoxical nature of international postgraduate students’ relationship needs. Student D also reported developing one particular friendship with a younger Indian woman that, ‘I really cherish and value’. Similar to Student M, her domestic circumstances had influenced further, crosscultural friendships – in this case in private accommodation in a larger house with PhD students from Pakistan and Kenya. She found these very supportive at an important level of settling into a new domestic life without her immediate family.

Close peer relationships can often be culturally derived though. Many students hope to develop cross-cultural friendships for both personal and professional motivations, but also seem to need the ‘safety net’ of close friends from their own country, or at least the same area of the world. Even though a Taiwanese student spoke of enjoying life because he was meeting new people from other cultures, he still imagined he would feel ‘helpless’ in Semester 1 if he were not to have friends from the same country. Paradoxically, this is also true of Student D mentioned above, who missed her family, including a young son, and so still gravitated to others from the same country. She expressed the view that, for Africans, ‘It’s fundamental for us to relate with one another’, which seems to echo the Kenyan participant’s earlier comment about this being ‘builtin’ to African society.

Yet, interestingly, a further paradox arose through comments from Nigerian students themselves about not knowing how to collaborate with each other on educational studies. They saw other cultures, such as Chinese and Indians, as being much more co-operative, and it is interesting then to hear from one of the Indian participants too that she was happy to seek friendships across other cultures, providing those students were non-competitive and willing to share knowledge.

Commonly, students do make friends across cultures from within programme cohorts, particularly in tutorial working groups (Elliott and Robinson 2012). Mentions of these interpersonal developments, predominantly at third and fourth interviews, seemed to concern an emotional boost that stemmed from a growing realisation through the academic year of the value of sharing knowledge, experience, or understanding:

Student N: In the first semester I didn’t have anybody with me, I didn’t feel good. I realise … there are many like me who actually take time to open up. The second semester … I made a lot of friends, and started feeling good that I’m not in an unknown place. We shared, shared, shared … so I got that emotional support … they’re ready to help me so, there was nothing that I actually hid from them, nor did they hide.

Student H: But, I found to talk to others, to socialise with others, is very enjoyable. And I didn’t realise when I was in Japan, because I didn’t have necessity to talk to others … if I live in Japan, I know almost everything, I don’t need to ask [laughing]

Student D, who was very concerned about her personal security, lived a little distance away from the campus. For most of the first semester, she would not leave her flat to study with other students after a certain time at night. We have a central atrium at the university that is open 24 hours a day, and students apparently congregate there at 3 o’clock in the morning. This student had not been participating in those informal groups, but this changed around Christmas time:

Student D: I’m so scared of walking about in the night, but during the exams all that guard was let down, I would walk like fifty minutes … I would go to far places … just to get someone to help me.

Other students reported that same shift towards sharing much more with others occurring from Semester 1 to Semester 2, but with individual variations of timing within that. They asserted that they had been able to carry their earlier convictions about the importance of intercultural skills into practice, in spite of the barriers encountered. They described situations where they were now able to acknowledge that group conflicts were perhaps emerging out of different cultural values as much as personality issues. Most importantly perhaps, they recognised that the potential value of these experiences lay in their own personal development. They could choose to become more open-minded to the differences in others – in the way they approached team-working projects, for example. This also encouraged them to become more creative in relating tasks to members’ strengths and inclinations, so that they developed the intercultural, team-working skills that many international postgraduate students often report will be important to them in their career aspirations of management positions in multinational companies (Osmond and Roed 2010).

Interestingly, after Easter, a further intercultural opportunity arose with an influx of European masters students on the tri-lingual Masters programme from otherwise under-represented Mediterranean and South American countries. This seemed to inject a further, dynamic, intercultural energy to the postgraduate group, whose existing members commented favourably upon that.

Certainly, the development of intercultural communication skills seemed to be an important factor for many students – both as an initial motivation and a pleasing element of later satisfaction along the transition curve, once the challenges around clashing cultural values had been overcome or at least accommodated into a more broad-minded acceptance of others. International Masters students usually experience culture shock when first trying to adapt to the UK, with naturally limited knowledge or understanding of other ethnic groups. Their cultural awareness and sensitivity is broadened dramatically on an intensive year of study in the UK in such close working proximity to a widely multicultural cohort of peers. Recognition of the ultimate value of the diversity inherent in Masters level UK HE commonly proves to be an especially satisfying element of the resurgent familiarity stage towards the later part of the year, in terms of both personal and professional development.

So in summary, the upturn in self-efficacy suggested by the U-shaped model can be attributed to three major issues explored above: peer support and acceptance of others; new subject understanding; and successful achievements – in terms of academic performance and/or personal development. Any and all of these can contribute to students’ growing self-belief in their evolving identities as successful learners in the new educational environment. It is the contention of this model of international Masters students’ experiences that this latter stage of the suggested affective learning journey is a common, positive outcome, and one that typically derives from having to develop strategies to cope with earlier struggles and adversity. This ‘happy ending’ is explored further below through students’ reflections on their journeys.

 

Towards (re)discovering self-belief

The interpersonal data categories described above are highlighting selfdevelopment issues that can lead towards a new plateau of self-belief. A central proposition running through the transition curve model is that one grows into new understandings of oneself and one’s world through the challenges of adversity. Difficult circumstances trigger a search for new meanings of life experiences, and these can often then lead to new forms or levels of self-belief that are more productive or satisfying in some way. And this is certainly the type of experience that many of our international Masters students reported towards the end of their one-year programmes – this category of new self-belief recorded a high frequency of mentions across a wide range of the sample.

The prominence of this category also reflects my wider experience from supporting students through ELS over the last five years. After reportedly plumbing depths of despair at earlier stages of the academic year, many students, anecdotally at least, seem to mature in some way. They typically come to view the struggles as having been worthwhile, and they learn something encouraging about themselves in terms of self-confidence for facing similar challenges more resourcefully in future. The implications for on-going self-efficacy seem highly promising – along the lines of, ‘If I can survive that, I can survive anything.’

Experiences of this kind among the research sample participants are exemplified by the following extracts. This aspect of the data analysis reveals a breadth of different personal development outcomes. Whilst an upturn in selfefficacy generally seemed to be shared across a majority of students, this end stage of the one-year Masters programme did also reinforce the notion of a distinctively individualistic learning journey for each student. So whilst I have linked these particular examples under loosely unifying concepts, I have included a range of students’ comments to emphasise the uniqueness of each participant’s learning outcomes. Firstly, it could be suggested that there is growing sense of independence and self-reliance, in contrast to pre-programme dependency on others:

Student D: … can really see it’s worthwhile that I came here to study … I have dealt with all those things that were weighing me down, I know at the end of the day, the river is going to get filled up … and I’m going to leave this place happier than I expected. It makes me see I have some sort of strength in me, I used to rely so heavily on my friends or family, or especially my husband for everything … but I’ve been here all this while alone and make decisions to do some things all by myself.

Student M: I think the last year is one of the most challenging year in my life [laughing] … and now, looking back, I know that I can cope with that stress.

Student O: One thing I could do is yourself, you find that you go through difficult things by yourself, you’ll feel a great adventure, you feel very happy what you did, being successful.

Not surprisingly, this has led to enhanced assertiveness. This can be a somewhat alien, individualistic concept for Asian students, yet discovering a greater willingness to articulate one’s own needs, values or capabilities seems
to have been a satisfying, energising aspect of personal development for them:

Student N: Initially, instances … where I was scared and I was crying, but now if something like that had to happen I would … vent off my frustration, or give it back to them then and there. The way I think and talk has totally changed … my family being so strict, and even thinking to stand against them … this is … a first step … at least I have gathered the guts in me saying, I can work [employment].

Student P: … that paid off in my interview … allowed me to get the project. Basically because of my confidence, I was able to discuss freely with them and they got impressed with that.

With regard to this theme of cumulative learning over the whole year, the data did raise some other, interesting and positive gains for the students. These involved some very specific learning outcomes for individuals, dependent on their personal life narratives:

Student A: [At] induction … I remember I went near to 100% I could control my life … now I completely choose the 50%. You depend for external factors … for example in your marks, group assignments, with the other people. You cannot control that … other people.

MS: So how do you feel about that realisation?

A: [laughing] Happy now !

Student K: I feel very happy that I can learn such different kind of perspective, the way of learning, like a critical thinking, like the value in UK, see different culture. For me it’s very good experience. If I review my whole life, I think this year is … very colourful period. I have a really strange feeling in my mind because I feel the one year life here makes me confident, I don’t know why … probably I see more and have contact with different kind of people. I just want to figure out what kind of person I am. Try to understand myself more … is another way to make me confident [laughing].

Student N: I forgot what I was, and started acting very kiddish … and started enjoying my life. So it seems that, overall, many students do develop personal strengths and qualities that they have especially come to value in their new learning community, and perhaps in the wider, Western culture. These commonly involve deep, personal change that the students themselves suggest will have a lasting effect as they re-enter the world of work, often in other cultures in different parts of the world.

 

Life beyond the Masters programme

From spring into summer, there is a growing pre-occupation for students with their immediate job prospects (Wu and Hammond 2011). This does often seem to be a time of ‘betwixt and between’ for many students, and indeed for staff. The campus suddenly becomes much quieter, and staff-student contact time is radically diminished, other than for 1-1 dissertation supervision. So whilst we are all conscious that the academic year is by no means over, the atmosphere is one of a premature ending often without evident closure. This is when quite a significant number of international Masters students will leave Bradford for other areas of the world to access some primary business research opportunities. Whilst this usually involves a return to familiar home cultures, it can sometimes trigger surprisingly problematic issues associated with repatriation, or perhaps a sense of bereavement in significant relationships:

Student G: … the climate itself was quite hot … they didn’t have much rain. So, that was really bad. The working culture itself is quite different … a lot of hierarchy which people don’t expect you to break … and, of course, you go back to a different language, so all those things …

Student N: Life is very different there [back home] as a married woman … I didn’t have a student life before, but the feeling that I have now is like really, really nice. Um, yeah, I’m kind of feeling bad that I have to go back.

This prompts me to conjecture whether, for some students, the U-curve may well plateau out, and even decline again, in the latter part of the Masters programme. This may be a key divergence from the traditional self-esteem curve related to life-changing events, or conversely it may be that this time simply signals the arrival of a new change process – that of repatriation, or at least a readjustment away from the intense arena of academic study back into the more familiar world of work. So for the purposes of my proposed model, it does raise the question of whether this should be depicted as a descending extension of the full postgraduate cycle, or rather as a separate model in itself, representing the beginning of a new learning journey offering fresh potential for another level of self-awareness. A study by Pritchard (2011, p.95) does investigate suggestions from others’ earlier research, notably Gullahorn and Gullahorn (1963), of a W-shaped curve over this longer process of adaptation to a new culture and then re-adjustment back into a home culture (building on the principle of a U-shaped curve for the former).

That focus clearly lies beyond the remit of my research objectives, but it is interesting to note Pritchard’s observations about the socio-political implications for the professional cultures of returning international Masters students. They are likely to have been transformed in some ways by their UK experience, and will often then wish to contribute something of the Western perspective back into their workplaces.

 

Personal growth

It is important to bring the analysis back full circle to the original motivations that students had in studying for a UK masters. I categorised mentions that came from most students under the heading of ‘Personal investment and ambition’ to attempt to capture what it was that they had been seeking originally. Part of the aim was to then relate those early aspirations to the kinds of outcomes that they spoke about most by the end of their learning journeys.

The aspirations identified by students in early stages of the data collection divide fairly easily into discrete factors. I have therefore collated these as below in descending order of frequency to then enable an overview of any correspondence between these popular initial goals and eventual valued achievements:

 

Table 9: Respondents’ original aspirations for their Masters programme, identified at Stage 1 interviews

Ambition …                                          … sub-factors
1. Career success                                           Job types
UK work
2. Academic success                                     Pass grades
High grades
3. Family pride
4. English skills
5. Inter-cultural                                               UK people
experience                                                      Foreign language
International business
6. Personal                                                       Independence
development                                                    Assertiveness

 

It is clear from this simple table that the personal growth outcomes often celebrated by students at the end of the programme are not perceived to be high priorities at the beginning. The original motivations seem to be driven primarily by external factors such as career development, academic results and family expectations, and these findings correspond to those from a similar study into postgraduate management students by Turner (2007). New students who do recognise the potential that postgraduate UK study may hold for personal transformation are the exceptions. Yet Ryan observes that whilst international students do come into Western education for a range of different reasons, an emergent, unifying theme of those individual journeys is one of personal growth: ‘The experience … will often change the person’s outlook on life and their own concept of themselves, in deeply transformative ways’ (2005b, p.147).

Leask (2005) reports that students see personal growth as a particularly important outcome of their international experience, extending far beyond that sojourn alone. Wang et al (2011, p.637) find that Chinese management students’ perceived achievements also transcend the assumptions of their Western educators. They assert that these constitute a major step beyond the mere acquisition of business knowledge and qualifications towards becoming ‘independent, creative, open-minded, culturally competent and confident’. This is a consistent outcome indicated by data across the research sample, and one that may usefully qualify an assertion by Turner (2006) that most international Masters students do not have an intrinsically happy experience of UK HE. Bamford (2012) believes that personal development happens for international students more by accident than design, and perhaps this touches on the paradoxical nature of the transformative, postgraduate learning journey – some unexpected suffering must be endured and transcended to achieve sustainable personal development. Turner (2006) argues, in the UK academic context at least, that international Masters students’ concentration on having to quickly learn how to learn means that their engagement with the subject material is inevitably reduced to a more superficial level. This seems to be borne out by the widespread adoption of useful socialisation support mechanisms at all universities. Yet, even for those in my sample who struggled throughout the year with academic challenges, the issue of self-development is still mentioned as being the most significant and positive outcome for them.

So there does seem to be some kind of deeper, affective learning process emerging through the adverse circumstances of the one-year Masters programme, which although not necessarily equating with happiness, may at least offer significant personal satisfaction. Student K is a particular case in point, as someone who consistently felt out of his depth through much of the year, having had to undertake several supplementary assessments in the summer, resulting in the deferral of his management project for six months. Yet, he still seemed genuinely moved by the valuably transformative nature of this experience:

Student K: I feel like I have a really strange feeling in my mind because I had the one year life here and that makes me confident. I don’t know why I have more confidence … probably … I have contact with different kind of people, and learn more subjects, so have more knowledge in my mind. That makes me … see the things from different side. Probably those things make me more confident. But at the same time I feel like am I choose the right way … to study MBA because … I always struggled on the subjects.

This may be one of the more significant revelations of the data analysis so far. The learning journey is, almost inevitably, emotionally turbulent for many international Masters students. Several participants alluded to the idea that they would never have started if they had had any awareness of the challenges they would actually be facing. This seems true for my own life journey and, I am sure, for many others. Another truism that seems to emerge from this – spelt out in so many spiritual traditions – is that it is this struggle with life’s traumas that not only makes us stronger, but also apparently happier with ourselves (see Gangaji 2011, Germer 2009, Tolle 2005).

This surely must have some significant implications for educators, notably in recognising the importance of sustainable self-efficacy for any student to work through severe setbacks, and ultimately achieve success. Whilst we could therefore consider carefully how to support students through that process, we can also ask how they could learn to best help themselves through the principles of agency and personal control proposed in self-efficacy theory (Bandura 1997).

 

On-going self-motivation

Students commonly recognise the vital nature of Willpower and Determination. They understand that self-belief must underpin any progress, and that they must somehow keep sight of a congruent, aspirational vision that will enable them to continue in the face of adversity.

This reminds me of a recent consultation (summer 2012) with a Nigerian MSc student, who had seemingly lost that internal drive and corresponding selfefficacy. After some module fails, he was suffering from self-doubts, questioning his intellectual capability, and even the rightness of choosing the programme. He had lost any sense of enjoyment from the course, but when we referred to the undergraduate graduation ceremony he had witnessed a few days earlier, his enthusiasm suddenly returned. We created a visualisation around these exuberant sights, sounds and feelings now transposed into his own future graduation scene. This visibly raised his spirits, and he left my office with the expressed intention of reinforcing this on a daily basis.

In the case study research, the fundamental nature of students’ motivation in sustaining their study commitment was discussed by a majority of participants, illustrated by some examples below. The first of these particularly demonstrates an earlier point made in relation to the affective impact of assessment grades. These defining, external events in the academic calendar are commonly internalised by the students and determine their immediate, subsequent levels of motivation. Fortunately, most students manage to find further reserves of self-efficacy to re-engage with studies to some continuing effect:

Student K: … in the beginning I did de-motivate myself when I … knew the result. But, after that, I back to the real, why I want to come here … I want to learn, and I want to get the MBA … I need to motivate myself more to improve my time management or my studying skill … to get more energy, to concentrate on the work.

Student L: I look at it as a puzzle, and keep telling myself I can do it … it’s going a long way in determining who I am … in ten or twenty years time … when it feels hard … able to look back and say I did it then, I can do it now. When I get married, I want my children to have a certain attitude toward life. If I becoming strong now, then I can teach them how to be strong then. I can’t wait for grades to come in to make me happy, or wait for something else to happen to make me happy, I have to motivate myself, or speak to myself, encourage myself.

The low occurrence of emotional disturbances reported by the highest performing students could begin to suggest that their academic success resulted in greater emotional stability throughout the learning journey. However, Student P did experience one major disappointment with a fail grade, which upset him greatly, albeit over a short period of time relative to the rest of his learning journey. Student F also highlighted at length a strong resentment around some apparently conflicting assignment results received in Semester 2. This does seem to endorse the earlier suggestion that affective learning journeys – including those of high-performing students – are directly influenced, and even perhaps driven, by grade outcomes. However, if this premise were accepted in terms of the immediate severity of students’ reactions to disappointing assessments, it soon becomes clear from just two examples below that the longer-term response to such emotional setbacks can differ greatly:

Student F: I’ve experienced sort of a total change [laughing] of attitude. I um … stopped caring [laughing] about the grades. I’ve got two [Semester 2] feedbacks, the one was A the other was C and I must say I felt the same.

Student P: It’s not the end of the world … no one can disturb my confidence, that’ll always keep me going. I know that I will overcome all the difficulties because I have the willpower and guts to fight against anything, so I always hope that I will come across any difficulties.

It is interesting to note that Student P was referring to a fail grade, initially at E (upgraded after appeal to a D marginal fail), whereas Student F is commenting ‘only’ on a C pass grade, which was the lowest he received throughout the year.

This again shows the paradox that I believe lies at the heart of these data. There are some important trends that may be valuably harnessed in directing educators’ interventions and responses – in the case of the examples above, to perhaps be less defensive generally through a heightened awareness of students’ reasons for stridently challenging low grades. At the same time, this qualitative research study needs to recognise individual learning journeys, which are just that: uniquely personal meaning-making in action. A number of those narratives are explored in more depth in the following chapter.

Montgomery (2010) emphasises how important it is to remember that students are uniquely individual characters, each with their own complex mix of strengths and weaknesses. These personal characteristics are not necessarily easy for staff to identify early on, especially with so many students and such limitations of time. However, none of these barriers should obscure the essential implication of Montgomery’s assertion, i.e. that genuinely interested staff deliberately seeking to recognise individuals’ existing qualities and abilities will go a long way to making new international Masters students feel welcome in such a strange environment. This signals a need to explore how this case study can illuminate some examples of individual differences, in addition to the similarities already unearthed in the preceding thematic analysis. This can examine in some more depth, among this under-researched group, the distinctive challenges and achievements of individuals’ learning journeys, and how these have related to self-efficacy levels and adopted strategies of learning development. The next chapter will therefore consider the learning journeys of five students from the case study sample, comparing and contrasting their reported experiences in more detail.

 

Chapter 7
Individual Analyses

Affective learning journeys of international Masters students:
What differences did I find across this sample ?

 

The thematic analysis has indicated some common experiences among international Masters students’ learning journeys that could benefit from strategic learning development interventions at key points throughout this process. However, it has been emphasized that this thesis is grappling with a paradox: whilst the preceding analysis can guide educators in becoming more proactively empathic towards international Masters students’ general challenges with UK HE transition, this could sometimes lead to simplistic categorizations of students’ learner identities, particularly into cultural groupings.

So this chapter is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of five students’ narratives accounts gathered over the course of the academic year. This firstly considers the experiences of the three, female, African students, and then two, male and female, Indian students to investigate any significant differences in their learning journeys, despite an apparently shared, socio-cultural background. Important distinctions between these individual students from the same culture do indeed emerge across various internal and external factors, including: self-efficacy; academic performance; emotional distress; independent learning versus peer dependency. Whilst these findings clearly qualify the proposed U-shaped affective learning journey, they do seem to confirm the fundamental principle of this model: the degree of international Masters students’ (un)familiarity with the Western academic discourse consistently and strongly influences their levels of self-efficacy and perceived success during the year.

 

Comparative individual analyses: Three female African students – B, D and L

Firstly, this analysis of individual narratives considers the possible relationship between self-efficacy and academic performance. Interestingly, most of the students from my sample who spoke at length about dramatic personal changes related to self-efficacy were the lower academic performers. So there may be a suggestion from the thematic analysis that the higher performers (Distinction and Merit degrees) already had stronger, more consistent self-efficacy from the beginning, thus precluding the scope or even the need for such an affectively transformative experience. This thematic assumption seems to be supported by a closer comparison of the individual narratives of two African female students. These women could appear similar for a busy tutor with limited time or inclination to differentiate between students in the classroom: they are both black African, female and the same age, with an apparently fluent command of spoken English. However, Russell et al (2010) reported in a large-scale study of international students that patterns of adaptation on their affective learning journeys were not predicted by demographic factors. So it is perhaps not surprising that, with the benefit of time available in research interviews, informal conversations and their reflective journal entries, significant differences emerged between these two students’ affective learning journeys in my own study.

Student B showed herself from the very beginning to be a really independent learner – very focussed on academic study, and happy to work on her own. She emerged as the second highest performer in my sample group, graduating with Distinction with an exceptional score of 170 credits at Merit level or above. In terms of an affective learning journey, she presented a consistently focussed approach to study with very limited commentary on any emotional disturbances to that pattern throughout the year. Mapped conceptually against the model’s self-efficacy dimension, this would suggest an almost flat, linear progression through the year with very few of the downturns suggested by the U-shaped transition curve model.

Student D, on the other hand, was evidently upset by the whole transition experience, especially in the early stages of the research, when she was very emotional – crying repeatedly in the first interview, for example. She was clearly reliant on support – both pastoral and academic – from other students, describing recurrent instances of seeking help from cohort peers and domestic neighbours. Although she was ultimately successful academically, and in a way that was clearly very satisfying for her after such a traumatic beginning, she was one of the lowest academic performers of the sample overall, attaining 60 credits at Merit level or above, and graduating with Pass.

On the surface, this comparison of two individuals’ affective experience could seem to bear out the principle, suggested above, of high self-efficacy stability predicting higher academic performance. However, this possible relationship is then challenged by a detailed exploration of the backgrounds and reported experiences of UK study from two, equally high performing students. For that purpose, the two highest performing MSc students – both originally from Africa countries, and one of whom is Student B – are described in more detail below. I then consider their affective learning journeys in relation to one another.

As indicated above, Student B was the highest performing MSc student of my sample, equalled only by the top MBA student. She achieved her Masters with Distinction in Finance, Accounting and Management, with 7 taught modules and her final dissertation at grade A, and a further 4 modules at grade B. In the first research interview, she was animated about her academic change of direction, having studied law at undergraduate level. She noted that she had just missed out on a 2:1 for her first degree, which she attributed partly at least to her lack of engagement with the subject, this having been imposed by her parents. She believed that her own choice of financial management at Masters’ level would contribute much more directly to her longer term aspiration of running her own business.

Student B: I am actually very academically focussed I think, yeah. That was a big aim for me when I came here because … I really don’t want to come out with a B – so I’m just gonna put my all, and see if I can get the top grade. So … where my power is concerned, I’m just gonna try and do it best I can.

She presented a highly organised attitude, concentrating on clearly establishing her study goals and strategies, and maintaining a dedicated commitment to those. This ‘no-nonsense’ approach seemed to be reflected at various levels, so that although casually dressed like most students, she always presented a very neat, smart appearance in her clothes and hairstyle. Any emotional expression that she exhibited throughout the interviews tended to be around a positive attitude towards her academic work, and the satisfying nature of that for her. She gave very little, if any, indication of emotional disturbance throughout the three interviews ranging between October 2009 and June 2010.

This was in stark contrast to the second highest performing MSc student, also female and from Africa:

Student L, a single Nigerian, was 23 years old at the time of the first interview. She had successfully completed an undergraduate communications degree in Nigeria in 2007. She achieved her Masters in Marketing and Management with Distinction at Bradford with an assessment profile of 160 credits at A or B grades. Out of a possible 180 total credits on the Masters programme, this is an exceptional achievement for any student. In addition to her final dissertation, she achieved grade A in 5 taught modules, and a further 5 at grade B.

In spite of this success, her emotional curve through the year showed a rollercoaster profile, with several major ups and downs, which she herself attributed to grade outcomes. In addition to frequent examples of negative selftalk and some references to her mother’s concern about her vulnerability, she showed a lot of non-verbal agitation, particularly when she talked about the downside of her self-acknowledged perfectionism.

She rated her academic self-confidence at the first interview in early November at 3 out of 10. She was clearly scared by the prospect of UK Masters study, yet was also already becoming excited around instances of acquiring new knowledge. Even by the third interview stage, her reported moods fluctuated between elation, dejection and even, at times, boredom. Her self-talk reflected these extremes, oscillating from castigating her perfectionism to very deliberately re-affirming her efforts, and regularly moving back and forth between these extreme cognitive-behaviourial positions.

Clearly, there are so many possible variables that could be responsible for these widely differing affective learning journeys of two students, who both still achieved similarly high, academic outcomes. Neither failed a single module at first attempt, showing great resourcefulness at such a demanding academic level across so many disparate subjects. Yet one seemed consistently satisfied with herself, demonstrating steadily high levels of self-efficacy, whilst the other evidenced much more unstable self-perception.

Although sharing some similar socio-cultural background influences, the latter student’s struggles could be ascribed to her being younger, away from home for the first time, and with a lack of UK HE or work experience. Intuitively, those could seem to indicate the reasons for such a different emotional response. But even if this were so, I am conscious that in our large MSc cohorts, two, same culture students who present untroubling academic results could both be regarded within our system as equally ‘successful’, and thus not flagging up any pastoral support needs. This academic performance pinnacle of my small sample presents a poignant illustration of how easily the assessment lens through which we often conveniently view students can blur differences to such a degree that they disappear into a ‘grey mass’. This then presents an easy justification for a deficit model of learning development support, as discussed in the literature review section on Academic Literacies’ critique of such approaches. Whereas, we could choose instead to appreciate diversity within any particular student category as well as between them. And, at the same time, if we accept the paradox that there are also some commonalities between a majority of all students, then we can develop practical approaches to learning development that potentially serve any student, not only international Masters students (Scudamore 2013).

Even these apparently simple vignettes indicate what actually must be more complex, individually unique pictures. The research data did encourage me to dig deeper into their backgrounds to unearth the fascinating distinctiveness of these three women discussed so far in this chapter. They are all from an apparently similar socio-cultural background, very determined to succeed and intellectually capable of doing so at Masters level, but each with very different personal factors directing that learning journey:

Student D presented the more classic profile of an international student – new to UK HE, with an undergraduate degree from her home country of Nigeria, where she had worked for a few years in a financial institution. In addition to the aim of consolidating her professional development through Masters study, she expressed high hopes of proving her abilities to her family. Student L also presented herself very much in the context of her family, but from the other extreme, as it were: she is the youngest of what sounded like a large, closely protective family, and this was her first experience of being so far away from them and their nurturing influence. She spoke repeatedly across the interviews about that family connection. She mentioned that her family identified her as ‘the smart one’ and they seemed to have high expectations of her.

Once the data sets are studied from an affective perspective, other important differences arise too. Whilst Student D’s more emotively turbulent experience (representing a particularly pronounced version of the U-shaped transition curve model) could be partly attributed to the unfamiliarity of the discourse, this was compounded dramatically by her sense of dislocation from her young son, aged 6. This had been an unexpected separation, arranged at a late stage of the planning for her UK move, and so was particularly traumatic for her. Student L was young, single, and clearly used to being without significant responsibilities for others. Although this was her first experience of a world away from home and everything familiar, where she at least had to learn to be responsible for herself and her learning.

Both these students experienced major, transitional difficulties, resulting in erratic movements along the self-efficacy U-shaped transition curve. Yet Student L achieved considerably higher academic performance. Whilst the data explored above could suggest a tendency for ultimately high-performing students to generally appear emotionally robust and resourceful because of a strong commitment to study, these further, individual contrasts show that we must recognise that affective learning journeys are more personally complex than this. Without then devaluing the importance of those thematic recognitions, my individual student analyses have still thrown into sharp relief a paradox that educators somehow need to hold: the co-existence of sameness and difference in students’ learning journeys.

It is interesting then that Student B, unlike these two other African students, had already studied at Sheffield University for a law degree, after coming from Kenya. She had since worked in the UK in conveyancing before deciding to change professional direction through this Masters degree study. So it does seem quite possible that Student B’s familiarity with HE and wider life in the UK could have contributed significantly to her easier, accelerated transition at the School of Management.

Brown et al (2007) point out that the conceptualisation of truth in Africa results in learning through experiential application on a trial and error basis. Teachers occupy an important role in guiding learners on that journey. So those African students as yet unfamiliar with the independent, predominantly theorised approach to learning in UK HE are likely to encounter significant transitional difficulties. Turner (2006) argues that previous experience of an educational culture contributes significantly to more usefully responsive adaptation. Perhaps that should encourage us to consider a further classification of international Masters students for learning development purposes, i.e. those that have studied here before, and those that have not.

 

In-depth analyses of individual narratives: Two Indian students – P and N

The section above has begun an exploration of diversity across the research sample by using a comparative analysis of three students, and I now continue that process more extensively by considering two students’ learning journeys separately as ‘complete’ narratives across four interviews, and then comparing and contrasting significant elements of these.

In presenting their analytical interpretations of individual narratives, Hollway and Jefferson (2000, p.70) use notes from readings, summarised in a two page pro forma, and a pen portrait for each subject, which they believe enable the participant to come alive for the reader. I have adopted the latter approach at the beginning of each of these two analyses for the same purpose. My interpretations of the two individual analyses are organised with Student P’s narrative presented first, as I had produced this at a relatively early stage of my data analysis as a ‘separate entity’, albeit influenced by my wider, on-going thematic analysis. I then present my interpretation of Student N’s narrative as a direct comparative analysis to that of Student P.

Student P

Profile:

P is an Indian, single, male student. He was aged 24 at the time of the first interview in October 2009, when he had just started studying for his MBA. He has an engineering background, with a first degree of B.Tech in Ceramic Technology. Immediately prior to arriving in the UK, he had worked for three years for a ceramics manufacturer in India, in the Production and Marketing departments. He comes from a very large city in India, and was now living with other Indian, male students in private accommodation close to the School of Management on the outskirts of Bradford.

P appeared to me to be an exceptionally diligent and well-organised student, with very strong self-belief. His time management skills and application seemed especially consistent, so that he maintained a daily discipline around focussed, planned study activities. He always seemed highly self-motivated, with one exception later in Semester 2 which was during a particularly challenging academic setback for the whole MBA cohort (described in Interviews 3 and 4 notes below).

He spoke of having planned for three years for this opportunity to study in the UK, and so felt very prepared for the demanding workload. He was clearly completely focussed on his aim of achieving the MBA, although he had no specific academic targets in terms of grades. He believed that all the necessary institutional resources, e.g. books and staff to support that success, were available to him here at Bradford.

All in all, these initial impressions suggested that Student P entered postgraduate study in UK HE with a high degree of existing self-efficacy. His outward expression seemed to be clearly congruent with a genuine inner conviction. I do not believe that he would have countenanced the possibility of academic failure. He described much of his previous academic and professional experience as having culminated in this long cherished dream of achieving a British MBA qualification, and he must therefore succeed. He knew himself as someone with unquenchable resources of persistence and endeavour, honed by many years’ reinforcement of a disciplined work ethos from his parents.

 

Stage 1: Early November

P seemed excited and happy in the first interview about now having the chance to study at this level. He spoke repeatedly of the desire to gain knowledge that would help him in his future career. He recurrently affirmed that his organised study system and dedicated application would enable him to be highly successful, and was easily able to identify core strengths which contributed to this clearly optimistic view of tackling an MBA successfully:

Student P: Manage your time, make a proper planning of how you’re going to do everything, then it will be very easy … I’m planning it very well … I know what is lacking in me, so I really know what I’m doing … I can really do it. I have the confidence.

MS: So you sound like you feel you are in control of it even though there’s a lot to manage.

P: Yes, it’s under my control so I can really cope with this one …

MS: So … on a scale of one to ten, how confident are you … ?

P: I am on a scale of 9, yeah. Even though I’m not that much 100% confident, I have the confidence that I can do it.

There were some caveats to Student P’s affirmative self-assessment, but even then he was quick to reframe those in a positive way, which seemed to characterise his approach to the challenges ahead. Communications skills exemplified this:

Student P: The problem with me is I’m a little bit more reserved, I’m not very much open person, so for any relationship … I am a slow mover. But once it’s started and it progressed, it will be very good relationship. So probably in another couple of months or after the semester, I’ll really have a good rapport with other people.

As suggested in the thematic analysis, some anxiety with making early friendships is typical for many new students in HE. Their expressed frustrations with early interactions – in group-work conflicts for example – is a contributor to the U-shaped transition curve model’s suggested early decline in self-efficacy. It seems quite natural that the pressure to find ways of belonging at a time of entering such new terrain could phase even the most confident of communicators for a little while. In relation to self-efficacy, Student P’s trust in his ability to build the right relationships gradually, but surely, may present an early departure from the proposed U-shaped transition curve. His selfexpectation of a sustainable capability to nurture friendships over the longerterm could be an important personal quality to bring into this alien environment, where many of his peers may be grasping for personal support too quickly and indiscriminately. Perhaps that general trend may be inverted in some cases by a greater self-awareness that one naturally needs time and patience to succeed at building the ‘right’ relationships. In Student P’s case, this seemed a particularly interesting example of recognising not only one’s strengths, but also constructively appraising one’s known weaknesses and how to self-support those in new, potentially threatening situations.

His drive to be successful appeared to also inspire an enthusiasm for the new UK HE discourse, specifically independent learning. Interestingly, as discussed at length in the literature review, this is the factor often identified by commentators as most responsible for international students’ sense of academic bewilderment and alienation. And this did seem to have been borne out by the thematic analysis. Student P expressed a startlingly contrasting view to this common experience:

Student P: It’s really great actually. I’m facing a different learning environment here, because back in India everything is spoon-feeding, we used to get plenty of guidance. Here … only basic instructions we’re getting, and we need to work really hard to understand everything. So it’s really a good thing, and I love it.

This is quite rare in my experience to meet a student who, through some kind of deliberate process of self-coaching, as we might call it, seems to have been able to develop and maintain a positive attitude towards the strangeness of UK HE, and in particular the unfamiliarity of having to learn so much away from formal classes. However, he is not entirely alone in this respect, as another student in a comparable study by Kingston and Forland (2004, p.14) expressed similar sentiments: ‘At home the teachers feed me with knowledge, but in the UK they help me pick up the spoon and learn to feed myself !’

Student P did not necessarily construe independent learning as a requirement to always study on his own – which can be a rather common misconception among many international Masters students in the early stages of their programmes. Despite his own measured assessment of his interpersonal skills, noted above, Student P’s general state of proactive curiosity already seemed to be ‘spilling over’ into his interactions with others in a positive way too. He was pleased to be meeting so many other students from different backgrounds from whom he could learn new aspects such as finance. At the time of the first interview, he was already engaged in working on a group assignment with the seven colleagues from his MBA learning team. In quite stark contrast again to many other students, he cited this Semester 1 group-work experience as a most positive one:

Student P: I am slowly observing the skills each others have. It’s great because we all are from … different backgrounds … in that aspects it is working well. We plan a timetable … clearly on all the subjects … we’re working very closely. We enjoyed the companionship of each other very much. We had a group outing … a lot of fun … I’m very much pleased to the group.

I pursued this issue of interpersonal communication further, as his earlier comments had suggested this might have been a troublesome aspect of transition for him. This surfaced an example of the type of opposition that can arise from deeper exploration of individuals’ perceived self-identity. In this case, although Student P came through an engineering background at undergraduate level, he now claimed to have recognised early on that it was his people skills rather than technical abilities that served him best. So during his pre-MBA career, he transferred from production to marketing where he ‘was able to perform very well’. After just a month into the MBA, he did seem pleased at being able to bring both his operations and marketing experience into course discussions and learning, yet this was also complemented by an apparent level of interpersonal skill that enabled him to actively learn from others.

So although assessed group-work had been raised as a predominant cause for concern and even distress by students across the thematic analysis, Student P apparently experienced this as yet another opportunity, rather than a problem. I felt this was another example of his decisive approach to Masters study. It really did seem to be the case that he deliberately and consciously employed a high degree of self-efficacy. It was as if, each day, he decided to be successful by applying the self-management skills that he clearly believed he possessed so strongly. All this corresponded quite directly with the conceptualisation of self-efficacy which I have been applying to this study (Bandura 1997).

 

Stage 2: Early February

Before the second interview in February 2010, Student P provided some responses to the Reflection Journal prompts (shown in Table 6 earlier). In these, he noted how pleased he was with his first assignment grades (all passes). These included two A grades, which set a benchmark that motivated him even further. Notably, he also emphasised how he was ‘learning new things which satisfies the objective of joining the University’. However, despite his enthusiastic descriptions of the assessed group-working experience, explored above, his original concern about communication skills paradoxically remained an issue. Again, this exposes the apparent oppositions that can emerge at different points over the course of an individual learning journey. He stated in his reflective journal commentary that he felt he was losing confidence in communicating due to avoiding opportunities to practise and develop.

He also expressed concerns about his exam performance (results pending at that time), and acknowledged the importance of writing more practice papers. However, overall, he still saw his general skills, e.g. time management and assignment writing, being improved by the ‘rigorousness of the course’, and he remained positively determined to overcome any barriers with renewed application. This capability had already helped him manage his study programme well and still include a social trip to London at Christmas, along with a week-long, block module exchange in Germany in January.

In the second interview, we explored this European experience. The trip to Bonn just after his exams had been very positive for him, because, fascinatingly, he had experienced what he described as his first truly Western cultural encounter. He found that the Germans he met had very little experience of Indians, so finally he felt like a stranger in a foreign country – and one where the locals were also very friendly and helpful. From the School’s point of view, that seemed an unfortunate contrast with Student P’s Semester 1 cultural experience.

He found this German block module ‘rigorous’ because of the intensive, timeefficient study format. He had been enjoying the predominant UK emphasis on independent learning, so this further adaption to a more intensive form of taught delivery tested his acknowledged weakness with more immediate learning. But again, in self-efficacy terms, he managed to balance this by setting the experience in the larger context of independent learning, which he believed empowered him.

Student P: The lectures are just supporting me to do work … we will not be able to grasp everything immediately. But by having the books we have the sufficient time … learn at our own pace … able to concentrate and … understand more. … block module … very intense, that doesn’t matter because that’s just a part of learning.

This is a further, notable contrast with other views emerging across the thematic analysis. Issues of confusion and pressure from reading are major factors in descriptions of academic culture shock, and these contribute directly to the downward movement in self-efficacy depicted by the U-shaped transition curve model. Conversely, for a student like P, who is so determined to see each challenge as a personal development opportunity, it seems that self-efficacy may be maintained at a consistently higher level. The turbulent U-shaped transition curve affective learning journey indicated across the thematic analysis is apparently not reflected in his steady state progress, at least by this interview stage early in Semester 2. This could, of course, be due to a relative absence of any particularly personally challenging events so far, but the impressive nature of his seemingly unshakeable self-belief did present a strong argument for the value of students deliberately seeking to cultivate this personal attribute.

This seems important in the light of the assertion that individuals are able to exert anticipatory control (Bandura 1977a, Pajares 2008). In other words, students can choose to respond to future situations consciously and differently:

Student P: Before doing … anything, I’ll just prepare my resources … I will have made some research on Internet, and have those sites as a backup … after that, have a pre-reading of those books … to find out the main conceptswhich I can excerpt … and make a little note. … So when I start the assignment, my notes will help me … which book to choose and which topic where I can find everything … so that will help me to learn everything fast.

MS: Oh, so you anticipate problems as well ?

P: I will decide what will be the problem I’ll be getting … so I prepare for that as well. I’ll always … watch problems are there … make sure I’ll find some resources to find the answer … I’m always succeed in that one.

Although the curriculum is theoretically based, as Student P had originally hoped, the University’s slogan is ‘Making Knowledge Work’, and he appreciated the emphasis placed by tutors on application into business practice through case studies and other examples. This was not only conferring a breadth of understanding, but a depth too, which he especially valued as he had only a few years of business experience prior to joining the MBA.

It seemed clear that Student P’s learning aspirations, expressed so enthusiastically at the beginning, were very much taking shape by this stage of the programme in early Semester 2. His consistently positive attitude did strongly suggest that perceived efficacy could well be a major factor in the attainment of his personal aims. Black and Mendenhall (1991), when reflecting on Bandura’s early work on social learning theory (1977), caution that although they agree self-efficacy is predictive of success-seeking behaviour, it does not necessarily result in that attainment (individuals may have unrealistic expectations of their personal control over external outcomes). And Bandura does differentiate between perceived self-efficacy and outcome expectation, relating the former to performance judgements rather than predictable results. However, his later research (1997) does recognise that outcomes are generally predicted by performance, reporting on many different experiments which established that individuals with high levels of perceived efficacy not only performed better, but were also often more successful.

Relating this to Student P’s consistently optimistic self-efficacy did make me reflect on the extent to which perceptions can create the reality that follows. It is tempting to think that his solidly positive expectations were almost inevitably confirmed by his subsequent experience. There was a certain, inexorable determination evidenced by Student P, so that he seemed to be a living demonstration of the expression, ‘I’ll see it, when I believe it’ (Dyer 1989). This was not just wishful thinking, but more a daily mantra that spurred him into concerted action. In making his academic dream manifest, at least in Semester 1, Student P was exercising a high degree of personal agency, which Bandura (1997) sees as integral to self-efficacy, by drawing actively and constructively on others’ support as well as his own substantial self-management skills. He had consulted with me as the Effective Learning Advisor for feedback on his first essay drafts, along with regularly attending the ELS Semester 1 ‘Assignment Success’ workshops on modular academic expectations. He had clearly combined this learning with his own time management discipline to produce some high-grade academic writing:

Student P: I followed the same techniques, which you highlighted. So after writing I … have two or three reviews on the one assignment … on the last time … I will have a feeling like it’s a complete assignment … I am able to convince the reader. Another thing I can say is that I’m starting very early so I have ample time to cover everything …

However, even with Student P’s high level of perceived efficacy, one specific, academic aspect that conflicted with his preferred method of study was proving disconcerting:

Student P: If I have a time, I’m applying very well. But if you ask me to apply the theory in a short period of time, I’m really struggling there … when we do the tutorials … I’m not able to grasp the things he needed immediately. My negative … is that one … I need to have a look at the subjects again.

Crucially, this weakness extended into exam performance – or so he now believed, after one set of these in January. Results would not be posted until a few weeks hence, so he did not yet know the outcomes of his first attempts, but felt that he had not delivered of his best. Interestingly, in addition to the problem of exam time pressure experienced by all students, P reported a further problem of ‘some kind of overconfidence’ – less of a typical student difficulty ! By this stage, he was quite concerned that this would affect his opportunity of achieving a Distinction, confirming that his early A grades in Semester 1 assignments had motivated him to aim for the highest possible achievement in his MBA. This also seems to correspond to one of the key principles of selfefficacy theory: that levels of perceived efficacy will be partly based on past experience (Black and Mendenhall 1991). In this indeterminate stage between action and awaited outcomes, Student P’s confidence was faltering a little, but I had the impression that this could be easily restored on receipt of results that exceeded his lower expectations.

His other, primary concern in the first interview had been with his communication skills, and this was the area where he still perceived problems and less satisfying progress. It now transpired that this was partly a problem with first language. He explained that his housemates all come from the same part of India, so they had been speaking in their native language at home. Over Christmas, for example, he had not spoken any English for around thirty days. This is certainly similar to problems faced by many international students, especially from Asia. Monocultural house sharing frequently interrupts a sustained immersion into the English language. In Student P’s case, this had created concerns for him around his grammar and fluency. He described a lack of confidence, which was only just starting to be redressed after some recent English conversations with students at the School. He also spoke of further, ongoing concerns about his South Indian accent and fast pace of talking causing perceived difficulties for others in understanding him.

This communication difficulty was exacerbating his reported shyness around opening discussions with new people. In group discussions too, he related this to the need for additional time to think before being able to clearly impart his views. He believed this was keeping him out of significant involvement in the tutorials for example. So it seemed that the two productive language skills of writing and speaking represented his key challenge. Again, however, he still saw the solution in self-efficacy terms of personal control. And so this proved to be, by the time of our third interview:

 

Stage 3: Late May

Student P: Of course, my network has developed a lot now. In the first semester I didn’t have any close friends, but now I have some very close friends, we are all working together on everything. I expected this because … I’m a slow mover at the initial stages, later on I know I’ll pick up with people.

He explained how this had come about partly through being forced to work within other, less comfortable groups than the one described in Interview 1. Like many other students’ group-work experiences in Semester 1, P revealed the later challenge for him in Semester 2 of trying to gel in a new group with other personalities and working styles. Yet he goes on to report how they came to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and worked on those constructively, so that the group relationships developed into ‘a kind of friendship’. He had also detected some improvement with his English speaking skills, albeit ‘not quite drastic’. He had received reassurance at MBA voice coaching workshops that he simply needed to speak a little more slowly, and that had raised his confidence too.

He described a process of graduating into an implicitly accepted leadership role in assessed group-work, which had been his prevailing experience in previous workplace teams. Corresponding to the emphasis Bandura (1997) places on anticipatory control in self-efficacy, Student P attributes this to his exceptional ability to foresee problems and plan solutions. This only seemed to come to the fore after he had spent early meetings sitting quietly with his growing dissatisfaction with others’ contributions. In this case, he eventually felt forced to take charge and communicate the strategic direction for the team-work, which in turn meant aligning the tasks to the strengths of each member. As reported by other highly performing students, this often involves extra workload in co-ordinating the efforts of others. Such student leaders’ aspirations, however, seem to mean they are easily accepting, even welcoming, of this extra responsibility.

Student P: … I have done three group-works, and in all … I consciously led the group because mostly my skills is my planning and my time management … I took responsibilities … identified their strength … made them work on that areas. I didn’t expect [that] which they cannot do … those difficult task I take on myself … I will be the first person to walk on my ideas, so obviously we will follow that one. I could see that my maturity level is increasing … I need to accept certain things from others … everyone is not same as me … we need to make some adjustment in our life.

He also continued to show a positive, ‘can do’ attitude to the reading and writing demands of the MBA programme. He believed that the reading had become tougher for the elective, more specialised Semester 2 subjects, but he had simply adapted his approach to being more selective in the texts and sections he chose to read. He was still able to ‘go really deep into the subject at the time’. His ease with independent learning, identified in earlier interviews, had been sustained. He felt he had received ‘good inputs’ from teachers in the classes, but even more importantly, his focussed study in his own time enabled him to really understand the subjects.

He referred to rising levels of confidence with writing, where he had then noted ‘some drastic improvement in assignments’. He believed this to have been influenced by formative feedback in Semester 1 through draft assignment reviews from ELS: an example of the modelling process of learning noted by Bandura (1997) as an important element of self-efficacy development. This was complemented by his systematic approach to project work.

Interestingly, in contrast to these positive coursework developments, the one academic difficulty of concern to P was still his exam performance. By the time of this third interview he had completed two sets of exams. Some of the results had turned out to compromise higher grades from earlier courseworks. This again reflected his difficulty with managing learning within a short space of time.

However, the really serious challenge to his apparently indefatigable selfefficacy then came to light. This concerned a complaint shared by most of the MBA cohort about poor delivery and assessment of a particular Semester 2 module. A significant number, including Student P, had received fails – in his case, an E grade. This was disastrous, in his estimation, because of a perceived threat to achieving an MBA with Distinction. At that stage, the School had not yet responded to what he perceived as a gross injustice.

By the time of our fourth interview in mid-August, the School had reconsidered the results in this module, and had raised all students’ grades by one level. So he had finally received a D, which meant he would not have to automatically resit this exam, but for the first time in all of our contacts, this was the one incident I witnessed that really provoked a strongly emotive reaction from him:

Student P: I am very confident that I wrote my exam very well, and I was supposed to get a good grade in that one. I’m very much disappointed and that whole one week was very agonising moment for me, you know I lost my concentration, was totally disturbed with that one. I didn’t want to meet anyone, I just want to be in my lonely world. Because of that one result I got, I lost my entire confidence in the university. That is going to spoil my opportunity of getting into the job now … this is … a very serious issue, but … they just pushed up one grade for me, and it’s not going to help me in any way.

His frustration in this respect also relates to a potential paradox arising from many international Masters students’ socio-cultural backgrounds, particularly for those from India. The work ethic that is ingrained from an early age can inspire high achievement, but at a cost of strong attachment to that success. And when hard work does not apparently pay off with external rewards in the way that our international students have been used to, it causes great upset:

Student P: Actually, it is a part of Indian culture … we know to work … so we got used to that. Even if you take a little kid, their parents will be always asking them to study. Every mother and father will have the ambition of their student getting the first mark, they don’t want any below the first mark.

It is illuminating though that Student P then recounted he had finally, at the time of this fourth interview, turned this feeling around, and was now able to report …

Student P: … that it’s not the end of the world … you know, no one can disturb my confidence … that’ll always keep me going. My confidence and determination combined the patience keeps me undeterred of these difficulties. I have the willpower and guts to fight against anything.

MS: So you had a real shock, it pushed you down, but probably underneath you always did know that you would resurge ?

P: Yeah, but till that moment happens, it was not a guaranteed one, so that was the nagging point.

Again, this is the situation that I often observe among international Masters students over the course of the academic year. They can be greatly distressed by adverse feedback from certain modules, yet most of them somehow find reserves and motivation to raise themselves to further endeavours in other subjects. Towards the end of the year, they can then view the overall experience in a more positive light, seemingly embodying the principle, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and so reinforcing self-belief in an important way.

Student P certainly believed he had done his absolute best academically. Beyond purely acquiring knowledge, he had learned much more about how to learn. Many international Masters students do initially express their frustrations about the imposition of an alien way of critical thinking. Yet, by the end of the programme, they are often praising this as the most useful tool to take back into their home country workplaces and future lives. I think this is how Student P’s individual affective learning journey and the more generic one suggested by the U-shaped transition curve model re-converge:

Student P: I have really given my best to get the maximum out of this course. I’m very much satisfied with the academic experience. I strongly believe this is going to make a major impact on me, on my career … I know what to do when some issue is thrown on me … how to understand or learn about it, know what other resources I need to get that learning. I can confidently say that … this kind of analytical skills is part of me now you know … it will go on forever. No-one can say that … what I’m saying is wrong, so when I say confidence this is one of the reasons.

For the final stage of his MBA, Student P was able to report that his time management skills had paid off yet again, having finished his management project research well ahead of schedule. He had already submitted his final report to the host company, and this had been received very well. He believed the MBA had enabled him to conduct a ‘complete analysis’ across all the major business areas of the company for the management project and beyond. He was now expecting to complete his write-up for submission over two weeks ahead of the School’s deadline.

He was clearly very pleased with the way all this had worked out. Interestingly, he viewed the project success as important for the School’s reputation too. Again, as with the converse example of the grading controversy noted above, I observed Student P’s strong affiliation with the School of Management, and his consequent sensitivity to the quality of the student experience. International Masters students’ perceptions of School provision can harness or unhinge their goodwill rather dramatically. This is so important, not only for immediate student engagement, but for future recruitment through student networking and alumni ambassadorship.

He was still clearly committed to seeking work in the UK, even though he saw that many of his colleagues had lost confidence in this employment market. He explained that he could earn four or five times more in the UK than in India, and so pay off his loan perhaps within a year. This would also be a major advantage on his CV when subsequently applying for jobs back in India. So he would now be approaching the job market in an optimistic, determined and systematic way that reflected his successful approach to the MBA studies. His perceived efficacy seemed undiminished, and even strengthened in ways that would support his next set of endeavours.

 

Student N

Profile:

Student N was a 27 year old, married, Indian woman. In early interviews, she wore traditional Indian dress, and explained that she came from a sheltered, conservative background, having lived at home until marrying shortly before she began her MSc. Her husband was already studying on a two-year Masters degree in the US, and he accepted Student N’s long-term wish to study abroad – something that had previously been thwarted by her traditionally minded father until she had married. So, in a way, marriage had created a certain freedom for her and her husband, with both of them happy to pursue their lives separately in this way until Student N finished her degree. She had, however, also come with the understanding that she would re-join her husband after her studies, when she would be expected to resume her role as a more traditional, Indian housewife.

Student N always presented a strikingly attractive appearance with her ethnic dress, careful grooming and make-up. Yet it was her rapid and prolific speech that had the greatest impact on me in each of her interviews. This caused considerable difficulties in following her ‘chatterbox’ delivery. She was an excitable person, recounting a turbulent, emotional journey over the time spanned by her first two interviews.

It seemed that her world had been turned upside down culturally on so many different levels: homesickness; dramatic changes in the socio-cultural environment; educational demands; and, not least, the sudden unleashing of personal freedom. She was energised, but also frightened by experiences that were so far away from a familiar sense of herself and her world. This was especially troubling for her, as she had expected to cope with transition on the basis of her successful past experience, both academically and professionally:

 

Stage 1 Late October:

Student N: My confidence level should be so good, but after coming down here I have lost my confidence. I have work experience, I didn’t just do a BA in HR, I’ve actually done my MBA in HR. I was a very bright student, I was talk to everyone in my batch. So, I did pretty well in the past and even with the work that I had, I got so many certificates, and I have done very good in my job.

MS: So you’ve got a lot of very successful past experience…

N: Yeah, but … after coming down here, I just lost the confidence. I become very quiet, I don’t talk much.I’m trying to convince myself … but still somewhere I’m not feeling that great about myself. What I’d studied in the past is totally a different Indian system and education system in UK is totally different. There is no match about it.

So it was clear that N was feeling disorientated by different aspects of such extreme transition. This had impacted on her self-efficacy such that she seemed to be following the U-shaped model in quite a pronounced way at this early stage. From an initial level of reasonably high self-expectations, she had slipped considerably down the self-efficacy transition curve over those first few, disturbing weeks.

When I first spoke to her, in late October, she was seeking to somehow make sense of this new, alarming world. She was trying to instil a renewed degree of self-confidence mainly by contextualising her current experience in the longer time frame of the whole academic programme. So at the same time as she was expressing the disquiet noted above, she also asserted that she expected to be coping better perhaps by January. I recognise this attempt at self-reassurance from other students who also seem to feel severely dislocated from the familiar, and not yet adjusted to the new. They realise that they have made such a massive investment in coming here that somehow they must become successful. In the midst of the culture shock, there still seems to be a foundation of hope that all will come good in the end. Yet it is difficult for students to keep sight of this in these early stages. I certainly saw Student N as one of those suffering an especially pronounced form of this disorientation.

So it is interesting to pause at this point and reflect on how her experience compares with Student P. He too is Indian, and I have chosen to compare these two individual learning journeys partly to highlight how differently two compatriots had apparently been able to adjust to their move into UK HE. Their similarities are not only cultural, but also extend to a successful recent academic and professional history, and purportedly, an enduring commitment to Western education. Yet there seems such a startling difference in the resilience of their respective levels of self-efficacy. This attribute seemed so indefatigable in Student P, who consistently affirmed an unwavering trust in his capabilities,even with respect to building relationships with so many new strangers – one of the key aspects that exposed fragility in the self-efficacy exhibited by Student N. So it is especially interesting that whilst this latter student exemplifies the typical affective learning journey suggested by the U-shaped transition curve model, Student P – her direct peer in so many respects – quite clearly diverges from this model. It is important to bring this distinction into a sharp focus for the purpose of cautioning educators against seemingly well-intentioned, yet simplistic, approaches to dealing with new international Masters students. We should not assume that those from similar cultural and educational backgrounds will respond to transition into UK HE in the same way at all.

So, on closer examination, were there other differences between these two students which could explain such a clear divergence between their affective learning journeys ?

A simple distinction between the two students was that Student P belonged to the MBA cohort – one comprising predominantly Indian men like himself – whereas Student N was an MSc student mixed amongst many different nationalities, and with very few fellow Indians – a factor she found disconcerting in itself:

Student N: I felt homesick and kind of got into depression, and especially the culture and the people … we always look out for people like, our kind, you know so you can gel with, but you don’t find many of your kinds here. Especially with people from different countries, so I did have a very tough time coping up with them and the way they think and the way I think, it’s totally different.

She referred to ‘depression’ a number of times in the interview. She could not concentrate on studying, especially reading, and her class attendance was sporadic. This was noticeably different from Student P in relation to his singleminded focus on studying for as long as needed, day after day. He relished the School’s emphasis on independent learning, whereas Student N indicated repeatedly at this stage that she was struggling with ‘the burden’ of carrying this responsibility for managing all aspects of her new life after such a sheltered upbringing. In this individual comparative analysis, the importance of existing experience of independent living and learning does seem paramount. Student P presented himself in interviews as someone used to living independently (a boarding school education and working away from home for many years), whilst Student N had led a protected, dependent lifestyle with strict parents. Although she had experience of the worlds of work and higher education, the resilience of her self-efficacy had not yet really been tested until this major, cultural transition into UK HE. The socio-cultural influences of their respective backgrounds were evoking distinctive experiences, despite sharing the same national culture. Such a distinction can be easily lost on busy tutors in the Western education system, who might readily assume cultural similarities, such as a propensity for intense study across the whole group of Indian students. The difference here does seem to be partly dependent on self-efficacy, in terms of some students feeling incompetent to tackle these demands:

Student N: I used to find it like Greek and Latin because I don’t know how to go about so many things, I was like standing in big round lake knowing nothing looking around for help. Here it’s totally difficult because you’re asked to read article, journal, newspaper… there’s a lot of books … reading that I’ve never done in the past. So it’s been a tough time, doing so many other things. I’m kind of scared and … really don’t know how to go about writing. And the professors … didn’t much help, he or she didn’t even tell us what needs to be read or like what needs to be focussed on.

In direct contrast, as seen above, Student P expressed a consistently confident attitude towards these kind of academic skills:

Student P: Reading is not as big a task … many case studies and examples, so … made it easy to read.

Yet the thematic data analysis has identified reading as the most challenging of academic factors overall, and Student N’s observations on variations among module leaders’ guidance on this barrier to our academic discourse were insightful. She distinguished between different tutors’ expectations of students’ early capabilities of independent learning. Some, like the one mentioned in her description above, seem to assume that international Masters students should bring an existing understanding of how to conduct research appropriate to higher degree level. Yet, how will they have acquired such knowledge when, as reported to me by many Asian students each year, their undergraduate degrees still do not demand wider reading beyond each single course textbook ? Other tutors seem to recognise this difficulty, and point their students to some key authors or texts that will be most useful. This disparity in directed learning corresponds to a major proposition of Academic Literacies theory that there is no unified, single academy within which new students can identify generic, academic expectations (Lillis 2001, Lea and Street 2006).

An even more obvious distinction between these two students is that of gender, of course. This is a factor of some significance in terms of personal agency in the Indian culture, as indicated already in these individual analyses. However, two other comparisons of data that I conducted from paired individuals with shared cultural backgrounds seem to confound this idea that female students from other regions of the world may necessarily exhibit lower levels of selfefficacy than their male compatriots. In one example comparing a female (Student M) and male (Student K) from south east Asia, it was M who demonstrated strong self-confidence from the very beginning, and went on to achieve a Masters with Distinction. Her male counterpart struggled throughout the academic journey, having to ultimately extend this for a further six months before he could eventually become successful in achieving an MBA with Pass grade. So gender seems an unpredictable determinant of self-efficacy, at least within my small sample.

A further, fascinating point of divergence between Students P and N emerged around the concept of peer interaction – another key trigger of self-efficacy movements along the proposed U-shaped transition curve model. Whilst Student P expressed great enthusiasm for the value and cooperation he experienced from the beginning in working with colleagues in groups, N felt very frustrated in Semester 1 by apparent resistance from others in this respect. This could have been due to the programme: perhaps MBA students feel more instilled into a group ethos from the beginning, whereas Student N’s much larger MSc cohort may raise initial wariness of one another. Or it may simply relate to the self-efficacy principle noted earlier; ‘You’ll see it when you believe it’ – Student N could be creating a negative reaction in others because of her perceived neediness. Whatever the reason, she apparently found little support with her academic struggles during Semester 1:

Student N: I don’t mind friends from any country, as long as they share knowledge. If they’re all here to study, I don’t think so there should be a competition. I do have friends but again they don’t talk much. They don’t give me much of information.

Overall, it is quite clear that Student N’s level of self-efficacy was significantly lower than that of Student P at this stage. Unfortunately, her fears extended across her wider life in Bradford too, where she felt vulnerable, particularly walking to and from home and university. She found the local youth street behaviour frightening, and this was reinforced by friends from other university towns, who kept warning her of the dangers of crime and harassment. She was especially alert to these risks to her personal safety, and expressed considerable anxiety around this issue. Again, this contrasts with Student P, who had also expressed concern about allegedly racist harassments from young, local Asians, but he seemed to keep that in a certain, unaffected perspective. This difference may be easily explained by gender and safety in numbers – he lived with other Indian men who tended to travel together whenever possible, whereas Student N lived alone, and regularly had to walk unaccompanied.

Interestingly, in the light of all the above, N still tried to reaffirm her potential to redress these difficulties. I sometimes witnessed this reversion in students’ interviews – as if the narrative entity of that interview had worked through an unburdening, which could then allow them to attempt a more positive view of the longer-term situation:

Student N: Probably as and when I get used to it … my confidence level will increase and I will change myself. Certainly not gonna happen the first one week or two weeks. Now I’ve kind of settled down with people with me, I do have a couple of friends with me and I am with that.

However, although she did try to maintain the assertion that she would somehow get through this MSc experience, my sense overall was one of her struggling to convince herself:

Student N: At the moment I’ve lost all confidence.
At this moment if you asked me, ‘How successful are you gonna be ?’, I would be like, I don’t know, I’m scared. I don’t know where would I be after the year.
All I know is like just complete this program, and just get back.
And I’m not finding this place to be that great to be very frank.

 

Stage 2 Mid February

It was fascinating, then, to hear in the second interview that she had indeed undergone a transformation, apparently through the medium of intercultural development. She talked at length about having been pushed by a subject tutor into a multicultural group of students, with whom she had had little previous contact. Now that she was ‘forced’ to interact with others, she was able to observe more realistically how much of their talkativeness, which she had previously interpreted as evidence of their superior knowledge, was in fact exploration of different, unformed and unsure ideas. I realised that, like so many students, she had been comparing herself negatively with her perception of how well other students were doing. I believe this happens a great deal, and is often a destructive force as many students will not commonly be achieving A, or even B, grades.

However, now that Student N was experiencing a more authentic involvement with others, her confidence began to rise. With reference to the thematic data emphasis on national culture differences, it is especially interesting to hear that her positive improvement in self-efficacy stemmed directly from a new awareness of others’ openness to sharing. She described in detail how, in her home educational culture, Indian students have to compete fiercely for limited numbers of places, which are only attainable through top marks. She had assumed that others’ cultures would therefore show the same tendency towards non-cooperation with peers. Combined with an instinctive uncertainty, even mistrust, around ‘the Other’, this cultural ignorance had resulted in Student N believing that she could not learn together with her peers. Now that the tutor had given them little choice, she realised that not only were they willing to share with her, she also had something constructive to offer back. Most importantly, in terms of the academic discourse with which they were all newly grappling, this seemed to indicate a collective, multicultural gathering at the threshold concept of critical thinking, as she aptly captures:

Student N: I had all kinds of people in my group, Chinese, Malaysia … I started talking to them, then got to know they were free for others to come into their group … OK with mixing up with other country. I just had an assumption they might not like me and I can’t gel with them. I got to know I can be nice to them. I was very shy, I used to feel that they know more, and they were very confident. But though they were wrong, still they didn’t hesitate to talk. They all had one thing on their mind: why not explore the world, and why not talk to everybody. They’re like, ‘I don’t know about this and that – why should I hesitate in answering ? If I’m wrong that’s fine’.

The transformation that I observed in this student was remarkable. She was apparently participating so much more easily and openly with others. She spoke about one student coming from a finance background, who became the quasi-teacher of that group for certain peer support sessions. I thought that was a wonderful example of how much a ‘student-tutor’ could also gain through teaching the subject – usually a most effective way of consolidating one’s own learning (Strauss and Mooney 2011).

Student N: I realised we’re all sailing in the same boat … not everybody get everything, they just pretend to be like that. I used to miss on fewer sessions. We were like our own six or seven people … all of like the same types. And I started more of the reading work. He used to explain like a tutor, in our language, because you know in the lecturer it’s like he’s too fast and we’re like too scared to ask. So that’s how we learned.

If I am to now relate this student’s transformation to the self-efficacy U-shaped transition curve model generated from the thematic analysis, it can be seen that Student N is classically following that curve, perhaps in an even more pronounced way. She exhibited a rapid decline in self-efficacy after the initial excitement of achieving a lifelong dream of a foreign education had evaporated in the first two or three weeks. This dramatic downturn had been precipitated by a sense of personal vulnerability, stemming from the unfamiliar, in such a profoundly new cultural environment. By early Semester 2, this had been equally sharply reversed, primarily through intercultural peer support. So although they had not yet reached familiar territory, she was now palpably sharing her journey with like-minded others, all reaching out together for that foreign shore.

Student N: If I would have been in India, I wouldn’t have enjoyed as much. It was mixture of all people, they had different thoughts, there was lot of argument but we learnt a lot of things because the way they’ve been brought up and taught was so different. So it was like very, very nice.

However, from a purely academic perspective, this coincided with the time of receiving a number of Semester 1 results, and although she had passed the first three modules, including two at B, she expressed concern about her third result of a C grade. She devoted considerable time to describing her uncertainty about what had led to such a disappointing result. She went into great detail, conjecturing about how ‘silly mistakes’ could have occurred, and concluding with how unsure she was about how to even identify, and so rectify, these issues. This grade fixation reminded me of Student P – so these two, very different learners seemed to converge in this respect. And this characteristic is sometimes attributed by School staff to Indian students in particular, but, in my experience, this is actually shared widely by most international students, at least early in the academic year.

However, these two students’ reactions on receiving their grades diverged in self-efficacy terms. Although Student P had attained some higher grades at first, these were not all at grade A in Semester 1. Yet none of the lower grades seemed to rock his self-belief, encouraging him, if anything, to seek continuous self-improvement. Whereas Student N, despite never failing a module, appeared to be heavily burdened by negative feelings about her academic performance. It could easily be conjectured that her newly found confidence was still quite fragile, with underlying fears still imparting a self-critical focus onto negative elements of the feedback from her assignments, to the detriment of a more constructive learner identity. It could be that, again, she was simply reflecting the typically significant influence of early summative assessment grades on self-efficacy levels generally. Yet despite many international students’ apparent obsession with these academic judgements of their capabilities, it also appears that some, like Student P, can respond differently to the same grades, choosing to use these as motivational spurs rather than dispiriting defeats.

Having said that, it does seem that although Student P’s affective learning journey contrasts starkly to that of Student N during Semester 1, their two transitional curves do later converge. For example, by Semester 2, she did start proactively seeking ways into the academic discourse, with pleasing results. Whilst she recognised some variations in different tutors’ expectations, as suggested by Academic Literacies, she clearly found enough useful commonality among these, on which to base her subsequent study strategies, as advocated in the Academic Socialisation model:

Student N: Second semester … I had learnt it, I kind of got it. I met a couple of professors and asked them why I got these grades. They said this is where you have gone wrong and … with my friends I went through their assignments … I read through theirs and I read through mine … that actually helped me out … I got it OK … this is what these people look at. Without working too hard, getting Bs in all the assignments … and I’m happy, I’m glad.

It is interesting that her learning journey’s convergence with those of others, such as Student P, particularly revolves around the fundamental issue of independent learning – the theme underpinning the transitional movement depicted by the U-shaped transition curve model. This is evidenced in Student N’s volubly enthusiastic celebration of how much more assertive and adventurous she had become over the course of that journey, notably through the influence of peer encouragement. Whilst Student P was clearly much more independently resourceful from the beginning, he too did refer to how this had been consolidated by learning from others with different experience. So by the final stage of their programme, both were able to reflect positively on how far
they had progressed personally as well as academically.

Or is that really the last stage ? Perhaps this major, self-development outcome is not necessarily the end of the UK Masters learning journey. By the time of her third interview in early June, Student N was bemoaning the short duration of the programme – not from the perspective of academic pressure often cited by many of her peers, but from a more interpersonal view. Now that the taught modules had come to an end, the important bonds of her newly forged friendships seemed to be unravelling. Having invested so much of her sense of self in these relationships, it was distressing for her to discover that most of these had been found in the shared confusion of the joint academic work, but then lost through independent study necessitated by the dissertation phase of the academic year. What had seemed such a closely supportive network, now revealed itself as something apparently more fickle:

Student N: It is a strange feeling, I told you that I made friends, now we don’t even mail each other, don’t even talk to each other. I just recently have my birthday … you expect you know the Facebook thing … you have seen people once or twice and … those people managed to send me a happy birthday message. And friends whom I knew, they didn’t even wish me. So I was like OK, wishing over the phone would be too much OK, at least through Facebook … absolutely no. I just had one friend coming over and celebrating my birthday. So it is like a very different kind of a feeling, it looked like they were there on a selfish motto … for like study purpose and everything like going out together.

By the time of the fourth interview in late August, very shortly before she was due to return to her previous life in India, this sense of bereavement had deepened. She was facing a return to traditionally constricted married life, as she now saw it. The freedom that she had come to enjoy so much as a student – with very few of the responsibilities she would now have to reassume – was disappearing, and she bemoaned its loss.

Student N: I know I will go mad if I am staying at home … I’m really worried … horrible for me because I’m not used to sitting at home like that, but I don’t have a choice.It is sad because … I was so busy throughout the year, I just finished my dissertation, now I feel I have nothing to do and I’m bored already.

This seems to have been an unexpectedly disappointing twist in her story, which suggests a further downturn at the latter stage of the affective learning journey that is not depicted in the traditional U-shaped transition curve model. It could alternatively be conjectured that she was now embarking on a new journey of repatriation adjustment, which should therefore rather be described on a second, transition curve model. However, it does seem more accurate to include this final stage, characterised by confusion and trepidation, within the single model of her particular journey as the relevant data had arisen from interviews within the time span of that academic year.

This was a distinctive aspect of Student N’s learning journey, as few other students in my sample expressed such misgivings, emphasising instead the positive personal development outcomes described above. Once again, a complex affective picture emerges where, in the case of N, she had clearly gained in terms of self-efficacy through the course of a turbulent learning journey, yet this had been so heavily influenced by peer involvement that the subsequent loss of that now seemed to threaten her self-confidence for returning to her previous environment. What had once been familiar, now seemed strange. There was a significant trepidation about how well she might handle that re-adjustment.

So are improved levels of self-efficacy actually heavily contextualised, with limited transferability to other environments ? Whilst Student N’s emotional sensitivity to new circumstances supports that premise, Student P’s consistent self-belief suggests not. Such complexity offers great potential for further research.

 

Summary – the paradox of sameness and difference

It can be seen then that the thematic approach corresponding to the Academic Socialisation model can identify some common international Masters students’ challenges and supportive strategies – informing the on-going search among learning developers for the best resources needed in the ‘essential rucksack’ for students’ learning journeys. This can propose a set of generic provisions developed around some practical assumptions concerning the similar route that many of them are likely to follow to the share destination of graduation. But, equally, it is so important to recognise that some others’ learning journeys will follow quite different paths. There are examples such as those presented by Student P above and Student B earlier in this chapter that show a generally consistent level of self-satisfaction, with relatively high levels of self-efficacy and motivation sustained throughout that journey.

Clearly, the idea of a universal journey suggested by any theoretical model does not encompass the multiple realities experienced by, for example, mountaineers on the same climb. If asked to retrospectively describe a shared expedition, which for most will have been an emotionally charged mixture of fear and exhilaration bridged by a lot of hard work, two climbers are likely to relate differing accounts certainly of what they felt, and even of what they saw. So too, it is easy to see that the experiences of two international Masters students on the same programme could be markedly different. No single model of learning development can easily encompass the diversity of strategies needed for adults from such a diverse set of cultural and educational backgrounds. Hence the importance of recognising the critical contribution offered in this discipline by Academic Literacies in its emphasis on individual learner identities.

Perhaps what can therefore be drawn most carefully from these combined thematic and individualistic data is that familiarity, or lack of it, is an especially crucial factor in international Masters students’ emotional adjustment. For those students most unfamiliar with UK HE, such as Students D, L and N above, whom we see experiencing the more emotionally turbulent type of journey depicted by this model, it can be helpful for them to experience personalised, empathic support from staff, as suggested by Academic Literacies theory.

This may seem a relatively simple demand, particularly to those of us who instinctively value the quality of the students’ learning journeys as much as the eventual outcome. However, my successive interactions with Student O from the Far East, for example, illustrated how complex this can actually be. She had been quiet, self-effacing and rather difficult to understand in early interviews. Her communication confidence had developed over the year, however, and, in the course of the third interview, I realised that in spite of my earlier, best intentions, I had made some sweeping assumptions about her. A new depth was only now emerging in our conversations, and this was not simply because she was travelling along a more familiar track, but also because I was listening more openly to the sharp perceptiveness of her self-narrative. We were both, I realised, sharing a learning journey together.

Trahar (2010), too, recounts a similar experience of deepening awareness during an international students’ group-work project, and how privileged she felt to be a part of that. In Student O’s case, I started recognising compelling insights from her about the challenges she had been facing, and how she had been striving to cope with those from the perspective of her cultural values and beliefs. As in psychotherapeutic encounters, this is indicative of the primary importance of the quality of our relationship with students in the educational context, which has been shown to be more influential than any particular method of practice (Biggs and Tang 2011). The reflexive analysis of my own learning journey, explored in the following chapter, therefore seeks to go beyond even the personalised level of students’ individual narratives. This aims to reveal more of the complexity inherent in my interactions with both the research study sample group and international Masters students more generally through my professional role as a learning developer. As Trahar (2010, p.146) writes of her own research journeys:

My interactions with people from very different cultural backgrounds from
mine challenged me to engage more rigorously and fully with my own.

 

 

Chapter 8
Reflexive Analysis and Discussion

Affective learning journeys of international Masters students:
How have I applied the research findings to my own practice,
and what are the implications for other educators in this field ?

 

Reflexive analysis: My learning journey

Rather than simply claiming I can capture the world-view of international Masters students in my primary research, I believe strongly in the need to also look more carefully into how both my interactions with them (data collection) and my subsequent interpretations of those (data analysis) are influenced by my own world-view (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Trahar 2010). I can investigate the factors that influence the way I listen, how I ask questions and how I then react to the responses. Those issues direct the co-creative process in interviews and my production of a new narrative in the ‘re-telling’ of those encounters through analysis. And they also affect how I continue to construct my professional reality, day by day, with students generally (Pajares 2008).

Louie (2005) argues that the development of a reflexive awareness in research is really a process of personal growth. I share his belief that an educator can only reach those deeper levels of sensitivity through personal reflection on his perceptions of others, and how those translate into daily practice. In the context of internationalisation specifically, Dunn and Carroll (2005) discuss the necessity in faculty development for starting with participants’ own, deep beliefs about international students. Authoritative interpretations of students’ struggles with the UK HE discourse from a position of relative power within that very system could be seen, just as with Saukko’s sensitive research subjects (women being treated for eating disorders), to pass ‘merciless judgement’ on them (2005, p.351). Like her, I seek greater transparency in case study reporting on experiences where the interpreter is potentially caught up just as much as the narrator in particular socio-cultural belief systems.

This was the subject of extensive debate with my supervisors, who had expressed concern around the initial inclusion of large sections of direct transcription from narrators’ accounts in my early attempts at representing student voices more faithfully in the data analysis. Van Maanen (1988, p.96) captures the same dilemma in the different methodological context of ethnography fieldwork analysis. He notes a typical, ‘crude’ dichotomy of confessional tales, which can largely bypass the research findings, and realist writings, which rather ignore the researcher’s own influences. In my search for an analytical methodology that would embrace this paradox, it seemed evident that self-reflexivity would be crucial, even though I did come to also recognise a value to authoritative interpretation, for the reasons noted earlier in the Methodology and Thematic Analysis chapters. A willingness to combine these approaches then lessened the need for so much direct use of transcription in the data analysis.

In another example of a researcher reflecting on inter-subjective factors in a sensitive data collection context, Presser (2005) refers to her prison based study, and observes her gendered tendencies to collaborate with the narratives of male violators by not directly challenging their accounts. I do recognise my own striving to empathise with the research participants, for a variety of seemingly plausible, pedagogic reasons. It is easy for me to jump into the students’ dramas around apparently tough academic challenges, for example. These typically concern issues such as conflicting assessment deadlines across several modules, and tutor demands for high volumes of reading (Sedgley 2011). For example, in a conversation with one West African, Accelerated MBA student in May 2012, I listened attentively as she expressed strong disillusionment with this intensive programme’s approach to teaching, which did not enable management learning in the way she had originally hoped. The student was now resorting to a strategic learning approach to (only) passing assignments with no time for curiosity reading or even some of the essential research needed for high-grade assessments. She was not achieving the grades that she strongly believed would have represented her actual ability, and was already planning how to pre-empt future challenges from her parents and employers around this issue.

This student’s cohort had made an official complaint about the overloading assignment burden in Semester 2b, which had been compounded by successive block modules. They had assertively requested some flexible adjustments to be made to so many closely conflicting deadlines. This seemingly reasonable request had been refused by the programme management team. Clearly, Masters students do not have the time or power to effect practical changes of this kind in their single academic year. Even a year later, in 2013, when reflecting back on this earlier analysis, I note that the Accelerated MBA timetable remains relatively unchanged in this respect.

It is therefore questionable whether my adoption of a critical perspective of the School of Management, engendered by students’ aggravations, does ultimately benefit them or me. It is important to encourage expression of those grievances through the provision of a supportive space such as ELS, as there is an emotive value for students in knowing that they are being heard. However, in spite of my instinctive reaching out to embrace their concerns, the emerging data from this case study suggest that such apparent injustices could actually hold the seeds of important personal development, as also proposed in a study of MBA students’ experience by Elliott and Robinson (2012). It can be easy to take a short step from empathy to collusion with distressed students at low points of their learning journeys, yet it is often these same students who later assert the important learning opportunities presented by earlier setbacks. And as I reflect on my own life journey, I recognise significant parallels in my tendency for initially problematising, rather than seeing possible options, solutions, or benefits – fighting so many battles within myself against apparent adversity, only to subsequently learn the self-development value inherent within that situation.

Nowadays, when individual students access my 1-1 support for emotional issues, usually related to adjustment, I therefore aim to adopt a more ‘detached’ perspective, remembering to affirm their potential for success at least as much as I might empathise with currently perceived barriers to that. I sense that students often gain most value in such encounters from a calm reassurance, which they in turn ascribe to my greater experience of the academic system. Whilst this pastoral care is less tangible than short-term, directive guidance, it may carry far more longer-term value than is first apparent. Many texts from my metaphysical reading agree that anyone consciously seeking to learn through challenging circumstances can actually only gain from serious, reflexive consideration of the ‘hidden’ benefits of adversity (Gangaji 2011, Mitchell 2002, Tolle 2005). My role in ELS may be best fulfilled by supporting students’ safe expression of negative emotional reactions, but then leading that into a more self-aware and constructive response.

It is only by reflecting as unconditionally as possible on the nature of these interactions with students that I have reached a deeper understanding of the way that feels most appropriate for me to facilitate their learning development. Van Maanen (1988, p.76) highlights the value of sustained researcher reflexivity in identifying, ‘emotional reactions, new ways of seeing things, new things to see’. In those inter-subjective terms, and as noted in the Methodology chapter, I recognise Mitchell’s (2002) model of ‘Inquiry’ to be a very helpful framework for this kind of affective, self-reflexive analysis.

An opportunity for using Inquiry arises, for example, whenever I find myself waking in the middle of the night with my mind still churning over the day’s unresolved work issues. In one recent illustration, I had been dreaming about needing to become the ‘expert’ to fix others’ problems; specifically to advise students on time management. Through applying Mitchell’s Inquiry framework, I realised the problem lay within myself, in a lack of perceived efficacy to resolve my own time management issues.

To begin the process of Inquiry in this case, I isolated the core, anxious thought and applied Mitchell’s four questions to that:

I should fix the students’ time management problems (by providing effective strategies).

1. Is it true ?
As I run workshops on self-management generally and time management in particular, I think this is requirement for my role at the School of Management.

2. Are you absolutely sure it’s true (can I really know that) ?
No, I can’t know for sure that my intervention is necessary for their learning development in this aspect of self-management.

3. How do I react when I have that thought ? / What does it feel like to believe that story ?
I quickly recognise that I’m not at all sure what might be best for students’ time management. But because I have some knowledge, I believe that I should be helping them in practical ways to deal with the problems. But even when I try, I don’t really find out how helpful that’s been. So then I think I should be doing more follow-up evaluation. This makes me believe I’m not very competent. I feel out of my depth, anxious, and uncertain. So I
keep searching for the ‘right’ answer(s) so that I can feel confident again in my ability to support students effectively.

4. Who would I be without that thought ?
I would be relaxed, calm. I would approach conversations with them about such issues in an open-minded, exploratory way. I could expect they may contribute as much to those discussions as I do. I could look forward to
learning together with them. I could let go of being responsible for others’ learning …

5. Turn it around (possibilities) …
I shouldn’t fix the students’ time management problems.
They could fix their time management problems.
I should fix my time management problems.
They could fix my time management problems.

 

In this case, my instinct is that the first turnaround feels most ‘real’, and the second feels most uncomfortable for me to accept. So it is these that I might most usefully remember in my daily interactions with students. In doing so, I can allow greater flexibility in my practice to develop more of a coaching style in 1-1 consultations, utilising more questioning than direction, for example. I recognise the potential of this shift in my guidance practice with international Masters students for enabling greater self-efficacy in them, and less selfimposed pressure for me.

In terms of this shift towards a coaching approach in ELS, I have come to increasingly value the role of ‘senior’ students or alumni in helping other, newer students find their way into our learning community. As a result of becoming aware of the theoretical perspective of Academic Literacies concerning issues of power in teacher-student relations, I have more proactively embraced peersupported learning approaches such as PASS (Peer-Assisted Study Sessions). My instigation and development of this peer mentoring approach at the School of Management was certainly influenced by the reflexive element of my learning journey over the course of this PhD study. These developments can present new, empathic means of discourse familiarisation as alternatives to the variable levels of guidance from established academic tutor gatekeepers (Mills 2013, Sedgley 2012a). I have trialled a version of PASS with our full-time MBA students in Bradford during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years. This is explained in more detail in a later section of this chapter, which shows that the programme has been evaluated by students as a successful learning development intervention.

These reflections on my increasingly facilitative practice of learning development were prompted by the above Inquiry insights around time management. These were further reinforced by another dream shortly afterwards, in which I had been interviewing people for a learning development job. In this dream, tutors who were supposed to be helping were actually delaying interviews and generally acting unprofessionally. So I had to reorganise the scheduling, resulting in candidates all being tested together in the same room. This was not secure and provided insufficient time for the interviews. There was an overload on the system, and I had to rush students through ‘tests’ on which they collaborated, even though these were meant to be done independently.

I interpret this dream as reflecting issues about my professional practice on several levels. I feel uncomfortable, anxious, harassed about rushing things with not enough time to do them properly. At certain points of the academic year, I can experience overwhelming workload, sometimes resulting in me feeling that I am letting students down. There can be inadequate time in workshop preparation and delivery so it does not feel like I am doing enough to help them integrate into our system. On the one hand, this reflection helps me understand how my perceived efficacy can fall in the face of pressurised demands, leading to fluctuating levels over my longer learning journey in the ELS role. This in turn reflects many of the international Masters students’ struggles with similar issues relating to high work volume. As a learning developer, delving this deeply into perceived adversity in my professional life can help me more truly empathise with those students’ challenges. I am more likely be travelling with them rather than simply guiding from a position of privileged power.

This prompted me to wonder how my socio-cultural, as well as psychological, perspectives would be influencing the way that I had been developing the interpretations in my data analysis (Trahar 2010). A reflexive process might illuminate these in a way that Trahar recommends readers can then keep in mind when making their own interpretations of the findings. By using the Inquiry framework, I recognised there is a part of me that looks for students to conform – I am seeking the possibilities of that through the development of a universal self-efficacy transition curve in this case study. This is derived from others’ theoretical propositions, but also from my own anecdotal generalising from remembered encounters with past students. And there is a pragmatic, institutional expectation of conformity too – requiring international Masters students to adapt to a range of academic cultural norms, even though this discourse can be quite opaque to many of them for some time.

Notably, as I pursued the possibilities of the self-efficacy U-shaped transition curve as a relevant model for my data, this seemed to be upheld by those students who entered the School with a mind-set that problematised the challenges from the beginning. In other words, those with initially low levels of academic self-efficacy. As I looked more closely at the data, I did not find many fearful perceptions of the UK academic discourse from those students who had apparently arrived with high levels of self-efficacy. This prompted me to reflect on whether I am disposed against recognising that there is a set of international Masters students who enter UK HE with a solution-orientated belief system, and who manage to broadly hold to that in the face of new, stretching circumstances. I can see that my professional role as Effective Learning Advisor at the School has involved me in a relatively high proportion of 1-1 consultations with those students who are struggling to understand and master UK HE academic demands. It is their affective learning journeys that might be more likely to follow the proposed U-shaped transition curve model.

I also recognised that my professional, psychotherapeutic background could be influencing my predilection for this type of transition model. When I asked the 2011-12 MBA cohort to superimpose their own curve on a template of the Ushaped transition model, I was slightly disappointed when some of them showed a steadily upward or at least flat-line graph of their emotional experience. I realised I had developed an expectation that these would generally fall before they should rise. This refers back to the metaphysical proposition noted earlier – ‘I’ll see it, when I believe it’. Yet this expectation is informed by my knowledge, gleaned through many ELS consultations in Semesters 1 and 2, of international Masters students’ often painful experiences during those earlier stages of their learning journeys.

As discussed in my Methodology chapter, I have also found a further model of self-reflection, the More-to-Life process, very helpful in my personal development generally, and in relation to my professional role in ELS. A personal example occurred when I experienced a confrontation with a member of staff at my local library, in which I perceived that I was being implicitly accused of cheating the borrowing system ! The librarian seemed to be using sarcastic language, which I felt was unjustified and inappropriate. As this seemed to have a disproportionately maddening effect on me, I later conducted the More-to-Life process on that incident, from which I have taken one short extract below to capture the reflexive learning from that:

Life-shock: (his words, with what I perceived as sarcastic inflection): “Do you understand ?”

My feelings / reactions: Very angry, shaking inside, inarticulate.

Mind-talk: (Key points that had a strong emotional charge for me have been selected from the original, much longer set of narrative statements. F = False, and DK = Don’t Know were added in the subsequent process of verifying each statement):

– He should not disbelieve me. F
– He should see who I really am. F
– They should listen to me, and change their minds. F
– But they’re implacable. DK

The truth about the life-shock: He told me that the details would be noted on file. This does not have any significant implications for me.

Turnarounds: (How to act or think differently):

– I should believe me, and …
– … I should see who I really am
– I should listen to others (and to me) and change my mind.

My original reactions to this confrontation exposed a defeatist, disempowered mind-set in the face of perceived authority. Back in my professional context, this rebellious negativity could perhaps lead me to collude with students who complain of being victims of an unfair system, as noted earlier. This was pointedly the case with the librarian not recognising qualities in me that I expected him to – seriousness, responsibility, trustworthiness. And as I consider this in relation to our international students, I can understand a little more about how they would feel the need to be seen by the School of Management staff for the qualities they already bring with them as successful students from other, albeit very different, educational systems. Yet, when students are not overtly respected in that way, perhaps this could be seen as offering an opportunity for them to strengthen their own self-belief.

It hardly seems surprising then that I find myself oscillating between sympathy for students, with whom I can easily identify because of some affective similarities, and loyalty to the institutional system to which I enjoy belonging.

And so again, from this second element of my reflexive process, I see that the real challenge for me in my learning development role is not simply to empathise with students reacting against insensitivity in the UK HE system, but also to explore with them how best to respond to adversity in the context of the whole learning journey.

Travelling together in this way enables a progressively empathic relationship to develop. I believe that this gradually reveals a complex cultural picture, with individual variations between students even from the same background or country. This acknowledges the significance of educational diversity asserted by the Academic Literacies model, which moves beyond the generic assumptions of the Academic Socialisation approach (Street 2004, Wingate 2006). The potential for individual variability, or outliers, within a predictive model such as the U-shaped transition curve can be found across any of the constituent factors of the typical international Masters student’s learning journey suggested in this case study analysis. A significant example is shown in the data relating to reading issues. Volume and complexity of required texts were identified by several students in the thematic analysis as major, unfamiliar elements inhibiting their progress through the early stages of their learning journeys. Yet here again, even in this case of the most commonly cited academic skill challenge, there were still students who actually seemed to relish these opportunities for learning:

Student G: The subjects which are taught in first semester, I was able to understand them and the implications … and even after the exams I kept on reading things and things started making sense, even like economics … and I was really, really happy with that.

Student K: Yes, I’ve looked at this assessment, I know how much to read for this module.

Academic Literacies theory emphasises the importance of educators remembering to treat each student with a fresh perspective, and this converges with internationalisation researchers’ recognition that it can be tempting for tutors to resort to viewing students as a homogenous group (Montgomery 2010, Turner 2007). This resurfaces the important question of how we can proactively value the attributes that students already bring with them as successful learners in previous educational systems. In this reflexive analysis and following discussion, I believe that I am showing how a researcher may be able to usefully apply De Vita’s (2005) advice that we should start with ourselves, rather than our international students, if we are to unpick cultural assumptions that may unconsciously hold us back from truly embracing ‘the Other’.

Western educators can use this type of self-searching process to review their own beliefs and how these perhaps ‘argue with reality’ (Mitchell 2002, p.1). In my case, this could be what I think should be happening in a given situation at the School of Management, for example. I can simply Inquire (as per Mitchell’s 4 Questions), exploring how my realisations could change or at least guide my professional actions more constructively for both myself and the students with whom I work. It is only really by becoming aware of my beliefs, values and expectations that I can recognise how these limit, as much as inspire, me. Similarly, academic tutors can step back to look more objectively at the pedagogic assumptions that underpin their teaching, learning and assessment practice. This will enable them to critically evaluate the demands these place on new entrants such as international Masters students, and so more easily empathise with their struggles and confusion (Carroll 2005, Louie 2005).

Rather than needing to defend our pedagogic values against peer opposition, or the institution against aggrieved students, we can instead offer an intention of welcome, valuing and acceptance. This highlights the need for us all to accept ‘the Other’ open-heartedly, curiously and respectfully, which surely offers major potential for improving the quality of both student and staff experience at any multicultural, educational institution. Mitchell (2002, p.248) asserts that an important purpose in any, genuinely reflexive analysis of this kind could be to show the writer (and so, in turn, the reader) the possibility to ‘walk without fear, sadness or anger, ready to meet anything or anyone, in any place, at any time with my arms and heart wide open’.

 

Challenges and implications for learning development practice

I find myself struggling in this research with the paradoxical tension explored above, i.e. between acceptance, even celebration, of difference, and yet still an inclination to capture the typical profile of an international student. Brown et al (2007) agree, however, that this shows a more realistic acknowledgement of the inherent complexity of internationalisation. This seeks to understand the socially constructed reality of students, whilst still exploring their significant differences from others across that same prevailing culture. In more general terms, Flyvbjerg (2006) emphasises the nature of dense case studies as being inherently resistant to simple summary and categorisation. He asserts that a multifaceted story should be allowed to unfold in a more realistic way, even if this seems to defy easily authoritative interpretation. In the internationalisation context, this is evidenced in the case study from Elliott and Robinson (2012, p.175) in which ‘students’ international MBA motivations and experiences [have] highlighted synergies and contradictions’.

If I can allow this paradox to occupy its deserved position at the heart of my findings, what might the be key implications for learning development practice and further related research ? This is the question that I set out to address in the remainder of this final chapter.

This question reminds me of conversations I have been having, during the last year of this thesis production, with Heads of Group at the School around the pedagogic implications of staff diversity. These relate to the need for an explicit ELS policy on how we should work with tutors to support their students most effectively. There were strongly expressed feelings from several staff in one meeting around the need for a standardised learning development policy approved by an appropriate, senior management committee. I could hear that this call for a generic solution was partly aimed at establishing quite categorically what we should and should not be doing for students in certain controversial aspects of learning development, e.g. providing 1-1 formative feedback on draft essays, or running group sessions based around high-grade, exemplar assignments. Yet, in a subsequent meeting with my own Head of Group, we recognised the need for a policy that identifies some generally agreed parameters, from within which tutors can select the extent to which they feel it is appropriate to collaborate with ELS on learning interventions such as these. I do feel more in tune with such an approach founded on diversity, relating to the ‘nested hierarchy of models’ proposed by Donovan et al (2008, p.211). This presents a flexible, personalised suite of provision that is responsive to different students accessing learning resources in different ways at different times. I have therefore used this as a framework for presenting some of my findings and recommendations later in this chapter.

This all raises the issue, of course, of how to encourage as many members of university staff as possible to embrace the principle of reflexive practice. One strategy is described by Lea and Street (2006), who used action research to enable law tutors to consider students’ differing ways of meaning-making within the discipline. They had to develop case studies of typical learning challenges that exposed the epistemological basis of what constitutes academic writing within their subject, and the tutors were surprised by complexities that they had not considered before. This corresponds to a call from Dunn and Carroll (2005, p.143) to directly experience the discomfort associated with ‘not knowing the rules’ – the issue that most fundamentally marginalises international Masters students. These authors also recommend bringing international students’ views either remotely or directly into relevant staff forums, which can be a simple, powerful mechanism for enabling their experiences to be heard.

Such initiatives ascribe greater importance to the principle of tutors and students collaborating together to negotiate ways of making meaning through academic writing within a particular discipline. This discussion touches on two thorny issues for any student-centred development: staff attitudes and resourcing. With regard to the former, universities are faced with a dichotomy among staff as to how willing or not they are to see student engagement as an integral element of their academic function. In the past, the School of Management, like many other UK university departments, has insisted that all academic tutors recognise their ‘customer service’ role by taking on a personal tutoring responsibility for a group of students through their degree programme.

However, this resulted in highly variable experiences for students, dependent on their tutor’s conceptions of independent learning, and his level of comfort with a more pastoral role.

More recently, the School has experimented with an alternative approach that overtly acknowledges the other element of the above dichotomy, i.e. that some academic members of staff are naturally more inclined to be empathic and thereby constructively supportive of students experiencing difficulties. This resulted in the designation of key figures as Year Tutors and Directors of Studies with some workload provision for academic and pastoral support for larger numbers of students. However, this then raised the problematic aspect of the second issue noted above – resource constraints of staff time. With growing numbers of students, especially from non-traditional backgrounds, including those from abroad, university academics do have limited time to develop meaningful relationships with many of these. Hence the reliance on generic resources proposed through Academic Socialisation, and the constraints around providing the more customised support that is advocated by Academic Literacies theory.

The recognition of students’ transitional difficulties has certainly led to widespread acceptance and practice of socialisation approaches (Bloxham and West 2007, Creme and Lea 2008, O’Donovan et al 2008). All UK universities have developed such a provision with the aim of supporting their students’ integration into the HE learning environment. These often include academic skills workshops and generic materials, e.g. hard copy study guides and on-line learning resources. Students can also consult a wide range of study skills textbooks – Cottrell’s (2001) seminal publication, ‘The Study Skills Handbook’ triggered an array of related books from other learning development practitioners (see Burns and Sinfield 2003, Moore et al 2010, Neville 2009). International students now have their own, sizeable, dedicated range of textbooks focussing on guidance for academic transition into UK HE (see Davies 2011, Hyde 2012, Lowes et al 2004, Reinders 2008).

However, whilst these generic Academic Socialisation guidelines do have their value for international Masters students, especially early in the transition process, Academic Literacies highlights the uncomfortable likelihood of students meeting highly variable academic expectations from different university tutors. This is a very real, controversial issue for all members of the learning community, however much individual students or tutors may try to avoid it. It will often manifest, as already discussed, in ineffective, or at best strategic, learning, with all the attendant dissatisfactions of relatively limited academic performance. And it is a problem for which clear solutions are not easy to identify.

It is important that certain standards of professional practice be safeguarded by institutional, benchmarked policies, so that key aspects of student provision are not left to the vagaries of localised, even individual, conceptions of what constitutes an appropriately internationalised education system. Even where policies apply, however, students can still experience different interpretations from tutors. One current, problematical example at our School is evident in the supervision of Masters dissertations, for which there is a service level agreement that includes the following expectation:

The main role of the supervisor is to provide formative feedback through
advice on the issue or issues, the methods used, the structure of the
dissertation and to comment on drafts (Matthias 2013, p.4).

However, judging from student complaints in my 1-1 consultations, this instruction is apparently construed in different ways – with some supervisors offering timely feedback at least once on each draft chapter, but others only reviewing the whole dissertation draft at one, final stage. This seems such a simple issue for the programme management team to resolve, and yet each year, the same complaints arise.

With the aim of relating the discussion to this apparently problematic aspect of diversity – among both students and staff – I am proposing that the analysis of the preceding chapters shows that human nature intends that there will indeed be a significant variability of intention and corresponding support from academic tutors for enabling international Masters students’ learning journeys (Sedgley 2012b). This suggests that each of us can benefit from reflecting regularly on what our teaching objectives are, and how well they are translated into the actual learning experience of our students.

At the School of Management, our new Dean, who was appointed in the summer of 2013, has publicly expressed a determination to bring the student back into the heart of teaching and learning. He has instigated a new programme of faculty seminars, which I have been tasked to co-ordinate, to share good pedagogic practice examples among interested tutors, for subsequent, wider dissemination across the School. With two seminars having run at the end of the 2012-13 academic year, this is the beginning of a collaborative process that I hope will bring to light many examples of productive teaching practices at the School from which we can all learn, and so develop our skills more holistically. However, it is still important to note that these first two Learning and Teaching Seminars were attended by an average of 20 from the body of around 100 academic and academic-related staff currently working at the School. Clearly, whilst these tutors who are already keen to improve their professional practice are more likely to engage in constructive self-reflection, there are inevitably those others who will continue to resist such professional development initiatives.

I believe that UK HE institutions need to grasp this nettle of staff diversity by utilising a nested hierarchy of learning development strategies that accommodates a range of tutors’ differing pedagogic epistemologies. This suggests that students should not be over-protected (as I am sometimes guilty of trying to do) from this harsher reality of tutors’ varied levels of sensitivity to their learning challenges. As discussed in the preceding thematic and individual analyses, students in my sample indicated by the end of the journey how much they had gained at an emotional level, usually in terms of self-belief, from that kind of educational adversity, (Sedgley 2012b). I wonder if this is due, in part, to the single-mindedness they have to employ during that time; a kind of tunnel vision focussed only on successfully steering their own course through such new territory. Whilst this has evidently been exacting, tiring, frustrating and stressful for almost all of them at certain times, perhaps it is only such journeys away from our familiar selves that show any of us another world that can also become part of who we are. I believe this represents a common ‘destination’ for many of our students, and one depicted by the higher ground of the last stage of the U-shaped self-efficacy model.

My reflexive analysis has been instrumental in changing my pedagogic beliefs around issues such as these. I am learning to be more tolerant of the School of Management tutors’ differing views across this spectrum of attitudes to learning support. As the Effective Learning Advisor, I consider myself fortunate that I work in a dedicated situation within one department. This has allowed me to develop close working relationships with many of my academic colleagues at the School, leading to appropriate interventions around specific modules for supporting the students towards academic success. However, rather than pressing all tutors to respond in certain ways based on current learning development theory, I have approached those discussions more openmindedly. So when a colleague has rejected a suggestion of providing model essays, or has requested that I do not provide formative feedback on their module assignment drafts, I have been able to accept those views as their prerogative.

It can, of course, be argued that institutions should use a top-down approach to standardise benchmarked levels of teaching and learning development practice in terms of what Robson (2011, p.626) calls ‘transformative internationalisation’. This argues that an internationalised culture needs to be engendered at institutional level with policies that all staff are encouraged and enabled to buy into. That vast, strategic topic lies beyond the remit of this study’s research objectives. However, it does seem to me that it may be just such an attempted standardisation that can paradoxically, but easily, result in incongruent responses among some members of staff, which will then be readily apparent to students.

My inclination towards less confrontational, bottom-up approaches at my operational level stems from a fundamental principle of the self-reflective practices I have described above, i.e. if I seek to advocate greater openness and acceptance to diversity, then I must be that change. I must be willing to demonstrably accept the challenges that ‘the Other’ brings my way, however culturally close or distant they may be, i.e. among colleagues as well as students within my own sphere of influence. I need to ‘walk the talk’ if I am to genuinely establish the mutual understanding and respect that Ryan (2011) suggests need to underpin our new ways of working together beneficially in increasingly intercultural learning communities.

I hope that a sense of personal responsibility for change does encourage educators to be reflective and flexible. Recognising the dynamic complexity of the teacher-learner relationship, what works for some students at certain times will not always work in the same way for others. Diversity, among both students and tutors, demands a range of different, yet complementary, approaches (Robson 2011, Ryan 2005a).

It was the change in my attitude to diversity among tutors as much as students that resulted in me compiling a full spectrum of options of collaborative working across modules at the School of Management, as illustrated in Figure 6 below (Sedgley 2012b). This has enabled us to highlight current examples within each of these levels, and more explicitly encourage best learning development practice among our students through a variety of channels. I have turned this challenge around, as Mitchell’s (2002) model recommends, in ways that feel less confrontational for me, and which still provide opportunities for significant learning development to occur in different academic subject areas.

Firstly, in general terms, I have created a model in Figure 5 to depict the overall range of practical learning development interventions that can address the inherent diversity of students’ learning development needs and tutors’ pedagogic epistemologies at any university:

This shows the breadth of possibilities encompassed by both Academic Socialisation and Academic Literacies theories of learning development. Inspired by the proposition for a nested hierarchy of such approaches (O’Donovan et al 2008), I have represented those as a series of circles enfolding one another. This shows that the embedded curriculum approach advocated by Academic Literacies theorists does not simply supersede Skills and Socialisation interventions, but rather acknowledges a certain value to those generic approaches, whilst also acclaiming the importance of reaching out to students in more direct and personalised ways too. I find a particularly interesting correspondence here to Flyvbjerg’s view of a higher value to individual case studies’ findings over more generalised principles:

Well-chosen case studies can help the student achieve competence,
whereas context-independent facts and rules will bring the student just to
the beginner’s level (2006, p.222).

In his depiction of a hierarchy of learning processes, I see an analogy to my chosen theories of learning development: the former relates to the potential of Academic Literacies to develop a truer, Masters-level understanding, whilst the latter in the form of Academic Socialisation represents a fundamental, yet earlier and lower-level stage in international Masters students’ transition. This generic strategy should therefore ideally be subsumed within the more personalised philosophy of Academic Literacies.

This then provides a way of holding the paradox forefronted in my data analysis, i.e. the need for some generic provision to cater for common needs identified by thematic analysis, whilst also responding to the diversity of both students and staff at a more individualised level, wherever possible. However, as the preceding discussion has explored in depth, this can be more complex to manifest in practice, so Figure 6 shows how I have been applying a nested hierarchical approach over the last two years at the School of Management in response to the on-going findings from secondary and primary research in this case study. This illustrates the four circular elements of the general model in Figure 5 (correspondingly colour-coded) with specific examples of successful student support strategies developed by ELS.

On the one hand, we have continued to employ the Academic Socialisation principle of running workshops for large groups of international Masters students that are designed to induct them into some general academic skills principles such as effective reading strategies or referencing (Sedgley 2010b). There is a hope here that this type of guidance can then be usefully applied by the students across a range of modular requirements. However, as discussed in the Literature Review chapter, Academic Literacies as a field of enquiry is questioning this idea of a unified curriculum where transferable reading and writing skills can be taught in such a way that students can then apply them effectively across all their assignments (Lillis 2001). In her study of international management Masters students’ learning journeys in UK HE, Turner (2006) recognises that a major source of these students’ frustrations were because the institution did not facilitate explicit discussion of the epistemological expectations across the management curriculum.

Whilst the examples given in Figure 6 show ELS interventions with international Masters students, many of these are also replicated at undergraduate level, where 75% are home students. As discussed in the Introduction chapter, this case study has focused on international students as an identified group primarily because over 95% of our Masters students belong to that category. However, there is an implicit, yet important, statement inherent in this illustration of a nested hierarchy approach to learning development that all students can benefit from such guidance on their learning journey into what will somehow be, for each of them, unexplored territory.

The Semester 1 ELS Assignment Success workshop series attempts to directly address the need for more explicit clarification of academic expectations, and is thereby moving towards the idea of an embedded curriculum proposed by Academic Literacies. I often now co-present workshops with tutors who explain the assessment requirements within their module, usually with reference to past students’ successful assignments, in order to demystify the specific discourse within their own approach to that particular discipline. One example is for the MSc HRM module, Employment Law, in which I facilitate an exercise around analysing a past student essay. Students are directed to explore sections of critical analysis, particularly seeking to identify instances, or absences, of student voice. Their findings are then compared with the tutor’s explanations of why and how she is seeking representation of the student’s own ideas amongst the synthesis of others.

This seems to take us beyond a simple recognition of gaps in student understanding into a more complex exploration of how students’ existing learner identities can interact productively with other, apparently ‘expert’, ideas (Sedgley 2010b). Students are encouraged to foreground their own views at certain points in their coursework, in the way suggested by Academic Literacies as being so important to maintaining a sense of continuity of learner identity (Lea and Street 1998). It could be argued that this constitutes a vital element of the affective learning process that in turn influences on-going academic engagement in the new discourse. This practice is well-supported in the educational literature (Bloxham and West 2007, O’Doherty 2009, Sedgley 2012b) and in pedagogic practice (Beetham 2012, Hilsdon 2012, Keenan 2012, O’Rourke 2012).

Students attending the Assignment Success series of workshops certainly report improvements in their academic understanding, and with that, greater self-belief. Mills (2013) highlights the value of using self-efficacy as a dependent variable in assessing how well our curricular plans are meeting the affective and cognitive needs of students. Their feedback often confirms that these ELS learning interventions have really made a difference to them in terms of self-belief or academic performance, and often both.

 

1-1 support for affective learning journeys

That progress can be reinforced by ELS draft essay reviews, which consolidate an individualised approach to learning development advocated by Academic Literacies. This addresses an expressed concern from international Masters students that tutors do not live up to expectations of accessibility established in the students’ previous educational cultures, where 1-1 guidance was a much more regular feature of the teacher-student relationship (Brown et al 2007). Ottewill (2007) highlights the nature of the tutor-student relationship, and levels of support pertaining to that, as one of the major educational concerns expressed by international students. In his study from south east Asia, they particularly express expectations of high levels of support, which may belie some stereotypical assumptions in the literature that Chinese undergraduate education, for example, is primarily one-way with students having little access to more personal tutor guidance and interaction (Louie 2005).

The potential value of these relationships for developing positive emotional states, and thereby increasing self-efficacy among students, has been highlighted by educational researchers (Miller 2011, Mills 2013). In relation to academic writing development, recognising the Academic Literacies contention that this is a social practice requiring active and progressive participation, 1-1 feedback is critical to showing that we are trying to personally integrate each student into our community of practice. These proactive interventions should aim to optimise the potential for them finding their way increasingly independently towards academic and personal success.

The data in this case study have shown that self-efficacy will often foster that growing independence, and can in turn be strengthened by the positive outcomes of successful adaptation to a more independent style of learning (Pajares 2008). Bandura (1997) emphasises that feedback affirming personal capabilities has a major, positive impact on self-efficacy. This, in turn, is likely to then enhance accomplishments such as academic performance. He asserts that this is even more powerful than feedback rewarding evidence of hard work, or even increasing levels of skills development. So again, this seems to emphasise the value of interactions with tutors who can demonstrate genuine interest and faith in the potential of students to succeed, in spite of the differences in academic expectations of UK HE, or initially ‘poor’ performance. As Ouwenell et al (2011, p.10) summarise, clarity of understanding will enhance students’ positive emotions, which derive from greater self-efficacy, and which, in turn, reinforce engagement – leading to an on-going ‘gain cycle’. Tutors therefore need to become explicit as to their expectations, which could easily remain implicit for much of the international Masters students’ short-term UK HE experience.

Overall then, I am suggesting that students are striving to master UK HE academic literacy, and that, as a whole cohort, they need a range of approaches both within and outside the taught curriculum to support that transition. We need to explain our expectations generally, within the disciplines and, ideally, within the specific subjects. I believe that this then addresses a major finding of current research into the transitional challenges of international students entering UK HE, i.e. institutions need to develop a flexible suite of learning development provision to ensure that each student is well supported in choosing his or her best forms of learning development (Biggs and Tang 2011, Scudamore 2013).

 

Improvements in teaching

Chronologically, the shift at the School of Management towards embedding more learning development into the curriculum delivery reflects a broader, albeit incremental, trend in UK HE. One outcome of this gradual development is to focus more attention on what is happening for all learners inside the physical classroom. More specifically, how can tutors enhance students’ understanding of traditional lectures ?

Ryan (2005a, p.97) suggests a number of simple tactics that can better engage international students in this aspect of the current academic discourse. These include:

•  The provision of content frameworks and summaries before and during the lecture.
•  Deliberate emphasis on key points to provide cues for students’ attention.
•  Providing opportunities for questions. (I especially like the idea of a ‘question box’ for anonymous requests that can then be explored later in class.)

She also notes the importance of teachers paying attention to their language delivery in lectures, by:

• Not talking too fast.
•  Restricting use of idioms.
• Pre-teaching key vocabulary.

I support these recommendations, which reflect my earlier training and experience in teaching English as a foreign language. The twin practices of deliberate delivery at a slower pace and conscious stress on key words make an enormous difference to international students’ comprehension – as they often report themselves. This may feel artificial, as well as uncomfortable, for tutors struggling to cover large quantities of curriculum content, but as with all transformative learning, this can become a satisfying, integrated facet of one’s teacher identity.

 

Developing more effective reading strategies

With regard to research skills – a critical, first-level issue for new, international students – different authors agree that there is a range of straightforward ways for tutors to enable growing competencies. These deal explicitly with the core problem of international Masters students’ reading challenges by offering practical strategies for progressive development of academic reading capabilities to match the specific epistemological expectations of tutors within their modules (Brown et al 2007, McLean and Ransom 2005, Ryan 2005a). Suggestions from these authors have been aggregated as follows:

• Selected, short texts annotated by the tutor, or with questions that target the required type of analysis.
•  Prioritized or incremental reading lists to show relative importance of different texts at different stages.
•  Guidance on critical criteria against which to evaluate texts.
•  Tutor checking of texts against international students’ language capabilities.
•  Tutors’ modelling of desired practice in class through critical discussion of key readings.

Again, I strongly support this composite summary of learning development suggestions that can be especially useful at early stages of modular teaching.

 

Engendering a sense of belonging: The socio-cultural context of UK HE

Recommendations for institutional interventions have so far related to teaching and learning issues – the first dimension within the framework utilised in the Literature Review. In terms of the second dimension – socio-cultural issues – several commentators argue persuasively that institutions do have an essential role to play in harnessing international students’ rich potential for building a synergy of positive values from different cultures (McLean and Ransom 2005, Osmond and Roed 2010, Thom 2010, Turner 2007). Stier (2002) asserts that our support for intercultural initiatives with students in Western education can develop understanding and tolerance among these increasingly globalised citizens.

Others observe that students, too, recognise a higher-level aspiration to intercultural education in terms of overcoming their fears of ‘the Other’ – developing deeper awareness of their own cultural assumptions, as well as the more pragmatic benefits of expanded career opportunities afforded by international networking (Elliott and Robinson 2012, Leask 2010). Pritchard and Skinner (2002) report positive communication outcomes from university intercultural interventions, and international students themselves recognising a consequent maturity in their tolerance and engagement with those from other cultures.

Yet, how much should we, as educators, ultimately take responsibility for that process ? This question seems central to how Kelly and Moogan (2012, p.41) reflect on the extent to which students should adapt to our Western education system or vice versa,

International Masters students can be seen to be “problematic” by the
higher education institution but the institution is also problematic to the
international Masters students.

They tentatively conclude that the answer is, again, paradoxical – whilst students do need some help to adapt to our academic expectations, we should also be questioning our assumptions about the nature of a multicultural institution. We could strive to not simply accommodate this diversity of students from a widening range of socio-cultural backgrounds, but to more proactively embrace the possibilities these bring for enriching the whole university experience.

Despite the intricate complexity of this current UK HE reality, first steps can still be simple. For a start, we can deliberately remind ourselves each year of the importance of overtly presenting a friendly face of the university to the new students, perhaps by displaying an effort to remember individuals’ names in conjunction with a personal characteristic, for example. Such straightforward actions may, at first, require embarrassing persistence on our part, yet, coming from an established member of the learning community, these can go such a disproportionately long way towards engendering a tentative sense of acceptance and belonging. As Ramachandran (2011) emphasises, international students place a high value on perceived sincerity in university staff seeking to understand their transitional difficulties and make them feel welcome. Snee (2013) reports on a proactive initiative at a US university department where around 50 members of the faculty have been trained in how to pronounce Chinese names by a native Chinese-speaking colleague. At campus level too, Jiang (2008) points out that universities can adopt meaningful signs of welcome – the University of Auckland, for example, has chosen to show deliberate acknowledgement of the basic needs of Chinese students by installing Asian food outlets on site. And at Bradford University, our student union organises very popular events where different nationalities cook their traditional dishes for everyone to try.

In terms of multicultural engagement within the classroom, Caruana (2010, p.37) recommends a range of pedagogic activities that revolve around the principle of relating to the international students’ cultural backgrounds. These can include:

•  Setting problems that call for different international perspectives.
•  Bringing those views directly into teaching delivery.
•  Using different cultural illustrations or applications of theoretical views

This internationalised approach can then be extended into assessment (Kelly and Moogan 2012). Intercultural skills criteria could be explicitly incorporated within tasks that might involve simulated international contexts or analysis of real-life scenarios in other cultures. Slee (2010, p.256) goes further in suggesting that,

Assessment should accommodate individual learning differences in
students … and allow students to demonstrate outcomes in appropriately
diverse ways.

Caruana (2010) refers to a need for UK-based academics to move beyond ethnocentric examples by involving students’ own real-life experiences more. It is interesting that she bases this observation on data from her own study with business and management students. I feel this is significant in its correspondence to some of my research participants’ comments around their frustrations with this aspect of the unfamiliar discourse of UK HE that seems to ignore their own, often greater reality of globalisation. I therefore endorse the above authors’ recommendations in terms of their capacity to address students’ concerns around internationalisation raised in this case study.

This brings me back to the preceding discussion around the contribution we can make in UK HE to fostering intercultural awareness and understanding. Paradoxically, it may actually be the culture shock stage of transition, which, although depicted on the transition curve as unwelcome during the early stages of unfamiliarity, can later lead to an expanding, intercultural comfort zone. The crucible of a UK Masters programme can meld students together, particularly through the fierce intensity of assessed group-work assignments. When they have been ‘forced’ into multicultural tutorial groups, some students do sometimes report that these classroom contacts build into on-going, extracurricular friendships (Osmond and Roed 2010). Several interviewees noted how the group-mates that they met on Semester 1 group assignments continued to be some of their significant, personal contacts through the year.

 

Challenges and strategies for effective intercultural group-work

Some evidence does suggest that group cultural diversity often enhances academic performance (Summers and Volet 2008). Whilst it can therefore be argued that the School is actively encouraging positive, intercultural development through tutorials and assessed group-work, this is still clearly one of the main factors that cause such frustration and resentment in Semester 1 at the School of Management (Sedgley 2010a). So it is ironic that the data also show a number of these students agreeing, when asked directly in interviews, that the university should be doing more to stimulate cross-cultural learning. Unfortunately, other than advocating more multicultural recruitment, most of these students were unable to offer strategies for improving this. But the presence of different nationalities in a group does not of itself guarantee the development of intercultural skills – sometimes the opposite in fact, as evidenced earlier (Elliott and Robinson 2012). Ippolito (2007) reports on the complexity of such challenges identified in the evaluation of a module aimed at developing intercultural learning. A paradox emerged from students commenting on the anticipated value of such a programme at the same time as they recognised obstacles of power relationships, academic pressures and student differences. This corresponds to MBA students’ ambivalent feelings towards building social capital, reported in the case study conducted by Elliott and Robinson (2012).

The latter point is, of course, a major aim of such programmes in the first place, so authors therefore recommend deliberate tutor interventions to facilitate productive learning outcomes to intercultural group-work, e.g. negotiating constructive mixes of friends and strangers, setting ground rules such as turntaking, pre-teaching principles around handling typical conflicts (Ryan 2005a, Thom 2010, Trahar 2010). Summers and Volet (2008) argue that such measures, designed to empathically support student participation in multicultural groups, would encourage more positive student attitudes towards even summative assessments in this format. However, these authors base this claim on data from a study that actually showed that international students did not change their attitudes towards multicultural group-work over the duration of an assessed project. Summers and Volet argue that this was a more favourable response than that shown by a ‘control’ non-mixed group whose attitudes did become more negative over the same process, suggesting that the ‘neutral’ position of the mixed group means that its members did not perceive the multicultural group-work as problematic. This seems somewhat unconvincing, especially when the authors recognise that the first group still did not tend towards deliberately choosing another multicultural group for assessed work in the future. And, unfortunately, this does correspond with predominant data from my own research participants, which show their dissatisfaction to such a degree that several of the sample participants deliberately chose Semester 2 electives that avoided further, assessed, multicultural group-work.

A study by Kimmel and Volet (2012) observes the paradox of students instinctively preferring non-diverse groups for ease of communication, yet also expressing frustration with the intercultural limitations of those. This was borne out by a number of students within my own research, exemplified by Student P. Although he was enjoying the interpersonal elements of peer work, he did recognise that the high proportion of Indian MBA students caused some practical, intercultural barriers for isolated group members from other countries. He cited in particular the language difficulties experienced by a German woman and a Japanese man struggling to understand the English expression of the remaining group, all of whom were Indian. When pressed further on the discursive process of their group meetings, he acknowledged that this latter group did not make any extra effort to directly help the other nationals with the language issue. However, he still claimed that diversity was a contributory factor in disciplining the group to co-operate and succeed, citing the example of German and Japanese expectations of punctuality and exactitude galvanising the more laid-back Indians into action.

Although this issue of multiculturalism may not appear to be obviously related to self-efficacy, it has been argued in the thematic analysis that the culture shock depicted in the decline of the proposed U-shaped transition curve model is due in large part to the unfamiliar, academic expectations encountered in UK HE. Their tacit nature, like that of many other hidden values in wider UK society, is compounded by a lack of ‘interpreters’ who might introduce new international Masters students to these cultural norms. It is understandable then that foreign students, whilst espousing the rhetoric of internationalisation, will be less inclined to embrace the reality of a multicultural, postgraduate community that is patently lacking a significant British student contingent or British tutors to whom they have easy, direct access. As noted in the thematic analysis, MSc students also express a disappointment with the predominantly international, i.e. non-UK, composition of their programmes – even with their much larger contingent of 262 students in 2009-10, only 10 of those were British.

Despite his own, early avowal of the importance and attraction of multicultural student cohorts, I believe that Student P is unwittingly acknowledging a cultural paradox that seems to lie at the heart of internationalisation in HE. There certainly is an extremely rich variety of ethnic identities from all around the world evident at the School of Management. Many different nationalities and religions of Asia and Africa are particularly well represented. As described above, Bradford University does attempt to harness this mix as a learning opportunity within the curriculum. Yet in the university’s public spaces, this exceptional opportunity for multicultural and inter-faith involvement rarely seems to be actualised.

From my own observations as I move around both the school and the main university campuses, I see that, once they are freed from forced interactions within the classroom, many students quickly revert to the comfort zone of familiar faces and voices from their own culture (Kimmel and Volet 2012). Leask (2010, p.3) captures this concept most aptly in the title of her book chapter, ‘Beside Me Is an Empty Chair’, explaining the instinctive tendency of students to pass by available seats at other nationalities’ tables to seek the sanctuary of their own cultural group. She is referring to home students in that case, but this is replicated among different student nationalities at the School of Management. Traditional food, the nuanced depth of one’s own language, and the security of implicit understanding draws many students back to their own cultural groups and pulls them away from ‘the Other’.

This should not necessarily be interpreted simply as a facet of homesickness, although that can be a great concern for some students. This phenomenon of cultural grouping can be viewed more widely in the context of our School’s academic community of practice. New students inevitably find themselves on the periphery of such a community, and Kimmel and Volet (2012) observe how such disorientated students will latch onto any immediately available support – especially where that entails the naturally mutual sympathy of their compatriots.

We need to enable group situations in which international Masters students can genuinely feel safe enough to openly explore issues of mutual interest in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. Therein lies so much potentially valuable learning in broader citizenship terms. The tutor may need to be involved in a hands-on way to begin with, but this could well taper off to a more facilitative role later on. Authors recognise the difficulties of achieving this aim within existing multicultural contexts, and advocate useful guidelines for more productive, independent group-work away from the classroom, including:

• Establishing clear ground rules.
•  A rotating chair from within the group.
•  Overt acknowledgement of different cultural values pertaining to groupwork.
•  Reflective learning, encouraging students to have time to look back on what worked, why, and how to improve in future.

(See Carroll 2005, De Vita 2005, McLean and Ransom 2005, Scudamore 2013)

Assessed group-work specifically was identified as an especially frustrating issue among a majority of my research sample, and this is also reflected more widely in my professional contact with students at the School of Management. The above authors argue for a much more transparent approach to the appropriate setting of group tasks that have been clearly designed around harnessing different cultural contributions. This can encourage active engagement from all members and progressively develop their group-work skills. A summary of their suggestions include:

•  Setting complex tasks that explicitly demand group research.
•  Identifying members’ skills and allocating roles accordingly to maximise contribution.
• Requiring reflective recording of group processes and members’ inputs.
•  Attributing some marks to conflict management, and planning for easy recourse to tutor support with this when necessary.

In relation to the last point, De Vita (2005) suggests explicit invitations for each student to critically review perceived stereotypes of their own culture in discussion with the wider group, to make explicit any tacit assumptions that may have otherwise prevailed and cause group conflicts.

It has been observed that international students prefer to choose their own groups, typically monoculturally, especially among Asian students (Osmond and Roed 2010, Volet and Ang 1998). Carroll (2005b) qualifies this by suggesting more purposefully that the composition of work groups should be determined by the nature of the given task(s). She suggests that tutor allocation (usually on a more multicultural basis) may be best justified when the assessment process overtly includes attributes of team-working and intercultural communication. However, where the assessment has a short time-scale, and is focussed mainly on a subject-based outcome rather than the group process, Carroll argues that educators should recognise international students’ need for some degree of familiarity, and allow them to self-select group members.

 

Fostering peer support

It is significant to note that the learning development strategies discussed so far in this section predominantly involve delivery by staff. But, as noted earlier, my secondary research and primary data also raised the critical importance of peer support for international Masters students’ successful adjustment in UK HE. And if anyone might be expected to empathise effectively with their problems and suggest potential solutions, it is likely to be other students who have already successfully undertaken similar learning journeys (the more recently the better). As noted earlier, I began exploring the potential for implementing a peer-mentoring programme at the School of Management in the 2010-11 academic year. Peer-Assisted Learning is becoming well recognised as an important element of learning development support that allows new students’ existing learner identities to be valued by others who have shared similar backgrounds and transitional experience. Educators who have facilitated such programmes at universities around the UK report that these have been successful, both affectively and academically (Bamford 2008, Polito 2013, Sedgley 2012a).

Being conscious of the overwhelming nature of academic challenges raised by the intense one-year Masters programme, I deliberately sought a proven, studyfocussed scheme that could harness the experience of ‘senior’ students or alumni for the early acceleration of international Masters students’ transition into the UK HE discourse. The Peer-Assisted Study Sessions scheme (PASS), a US initiative later launched in the UK by Manchester University, seemed to directly address these requirements. This scheme has been successfully adopted over the last 15 years at undergraduate level at many British universities. However, due to an apparent lack of senior mentors on one-year Masters programmes, PASS had not been tried at postgraduate level in UK HE. In 2011, ELS was able to pioneer the first UK programme of this kind at Masters level by identifying a sufficient number of student leaders from interested alumni, recent graduands and part-time MBA students. After the initial success of this pilot, we have established this as a regular feature of our full-time MBA programme in Bradford, and are now extending a similar model to our Executive MBA students in Dubai for 2013-14.

In our version of PASS at the School of Management, my ELS colleague and I have adapted the original Manchester University undergraduate PASS model to more appropriately harness the skills of our experienced, mature MBA student leaders. This currently takes the form of one-hour, interactive workshops run within the timetable by two leaders facilitating group questioning, discussion and planning around forthcoming assignments and other academic challenges. It is important to note that PASS is not designed to provide additional subject tutoring, but rather to utilise a range of well-proven, group-work resources and activities to facilitate newer students’ engagement with academic challenges. The students who have attended PASS sessions comment that the programme enables a clearer view of assignments and assessment, helps in deepening understanding of complex topics, and develops effective, independent reading and writing strategies. Some also observe that the interactive approach helps to improve English communication and group-working skills, especially in a cross-cultural context (Sedgley 2010a, 2012a).

I recognise that I have found students’ affirmative evaluations especially satisfying as a vindication of my willingness to instigate a form of Peer-Assisted Learning at the School of Management. Yet, I still notice, when I reflect carefully within myself, some level of discomfort with what is still a relatively peripheral position of PASS in relation to the formal curriculum. Its continued development into a third year in 2013-14 is an indication, though, of my personal determination to establish effective learning interventions from innovative pilot schemes of this kind. And I do think this kind of perseverance is an important, personal attribute for learning developers, who often find themselves in the position of ‘pedagogic pioneers’ – conducting small action research projects to then attempt wider dissemination among academic colleagues.

The above discussion identifies a potential synergy among ‘senior students’, alumni, learning developers and academic tutors that provides some possible answers to the challenge posed in the middle circle of my first model of effective learning journeys in UK HE (see Figure 4 earlier). This asked how we can enable students to move from the peripheral position of UK HE novices to become active and successful participants of our learning community.

 

Major contributions of the thesis

Like Flyvbjerg (2006, p.239), I am keen to allow the reader’s own interpretation of the ‘phenomenological detail’ of my case to remain an important outcome of this research. Flyvbjerg goes so far as to suggest that ‘the narrative itself is the answer’, and that addressing the “So what ?” question usually demanded of research data analysis becomes unnecessary. However, whilst acknowledging the capability of the reader to create a personally useful narrative from the process of interpreting my research findings, I also recognise how that can be helped by clarifying my understanding of how these findings address the original research questions or objectives. I therefore summarise the contributions that I perceive this case study to have made, as follows:

 

Contribution to knowledge

The application of different contemporary models of learning development – Academic Socialisation and Academic Literacies – to international Masters students’ learning journeys does not seem to have been directly undertaken in educational research before. This innovative, theoretical approach has captured one of the key paradoxes of the thesis. On the one hand, thematic analysis of the students’ data has shown where sufficient common ground is likely to exist across their experiences to justify the implementation of Academic Socialisation interventions to support these students’ learning development. At the same time, the individual analyses recognise the more critical position offered by Academic Literacies to emphasise the fundamental importance of Western educators not resorting to lazy categorisations that too easily overlook the uniquely evolving identities of learners. This latter perspective also overtly acknowledges the diversity present among the epistemological positions of tutors even within a single discipline such as management. The thesis is able to contend that such differing pedagogic beliefs can be accommodated productively in a nested hierarchy of these models’ components.

The nested hierarchy approach combining the application of Academic Socialisation and Literacies models is explained in extensive detail earlier in this chapter. This clarifies distinctions and connections between these two models, which can seem rather blurred in some of the literature reviewed in Chapter 2. It does this by creating an original depiction of four levels within a nested hierarchy which show gradations from a classic Academic Socialisation approach to that of a purer form of Academic Literacies. These four levels are clearly illustrated with different types of learning development delivery assigned to each level, and sets of multiple, specific practice examples within each of those. This detailed description can enable a fuller understanding of the relative value and applicability of complementary approaches available with an extensive nested hierarchy of learning development.

Several researchers have highlighted the emotional nature of students’ transition into UK HE, with some even focussing in particular on international Masters students. However, this case study seems to be the first of its kind to use a thematic analysis to model these affective learning journeys against a Ushaped curve related to self-efficacy. The discussion in Chapter 4 explained the existing theoretical understanding of close links between this variable and emotional reactions such as stress. The case study has also then taken a further, important step in determining distinctive, external trigger points along this curve, which have enabled substantial exploration of why emotional downturns and then upturns occur for students through the academic year.

This analysis has thereby addressed the first two research objectives concerning the challenges and coping strategies of international Masters students. The generated model also signals key stages of the learning journey that may well benefit from different types of academic and pastoral support – addressing the third research objective of exploring potentially useful learning development interventions, and these are discussed further in the Contribution to practice section below.

The U-shaped model of an affective transition curve for international Masters students is in itself an original, theoretical contribution from this thesis. This has taken a generic model, which has already been related to self-efficacy in a number of educational studies, but has then gone a stage further to address a significant critique within the subsequent literature review of these earlier studies. This highlighted the tendency of other studies to focus on what was happening with students’ levels of self-efficacy, rather than how or why. So, in addition to showing how students can move through a series of emotive and cognitive states over the chronological progress of the model, the data analysis in this research study has also identified nine key (external) challenges that can trigger these personal (internal) changes, and so offer explanation as to why they may occur.

An important context to these nine major trigger points is that of movement from unfamiliarity with the academic discourse through to a growing familiarity. The theoretical model also proposes from the generated data that the extent of this movement is underpinned by levels of personal determination in response to facing the challenges encountered at various (usually earlier) stages of the learning journey. The first two of the nine challenges identified in the model at the onset stage of unfamiliarity relate to the new academic discourse compounded by growing academic pressures, which have not usually been experienced before by international Masters students from most catchment educational cultures.

These categories of challenges do, of course, cover a range of more specific, academic issues encountered by students in their new learning community. A particularly insightful outcome from the analytical exploration within these first two categories noted above has been to identify reading challenges as the major obstacle to academic progress in the early part of the Masters programme. This issue has received relatively little coverage in learning development literature, and yet clearly causes significant discomfort for international Masters students. They are especially concerned about: high volumes of reading across six different modules; lack of direction from tutors regarding purposes or prioritisation of reading tasks; uncertainty around selective and efficient reading strategies. Whilst the chosen models of learning development focus predominantly on academic writing, students’ progress in that respect is severely constrained by antecedent reading difficulties. This element of the case study brings the interdependent nature of those two academic skills into a clearer, and more balanced, theoretical perspective. This achieves two important contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it challenges the deficit model of learning development which too readily assumes unrealistic expectations of international students’ early reading capabilities, either ignoring difficulties with that, or attributing those to limited intelligence or application. Secondly, the focus on students’ bewilderment with reading tasks contributes an important understanding to how western educators may address one of the key challenges of Academic Literacies theory – that the often tacit nature of our academic expectations need to made much more explicit.

Another external trigger related to unfamiliarity and potentially declining selfefficacy, and identified by the model as often chronologically following the two noted above, has been that of assessed group-work. This proved especially contentious from the emerging data, which supports findings already quite well documented in educational literature, notably. This case study does therefore lend further support to the call from internationalisation researchers considering the issue of cross-cultural group-working in particular for more explicit integration of intercultural communication tasks and objectives into the assessment process. More distinctively then, the data show that these learning outcomes are generally non-existent in most postgraduate management modules considered in this case study, and this omission raises significant implications for pedagogic practice as discussed further below.

Finally on the ‘downside’ of the affective transition curve, the model proposes from consistent evidence across a strong majority of students in the sample that assessment grades are closely linked to at least temporary changes in selfefficacy specifically, and emotional state generally. Notably, this was the most frequently mentioned issue in the data collected within the affective analysis codes. This significant relationship seems surprisingly underplayed in much of the reviewed literature on learning development approaches which have been designed at least partly with a definite intention to enable students to improve academic performance. This thesis therefore also makes an important contribution in foregrounding the crucial nature of assessment grades specifically, and feedback more generally, in the context of students’ affective learning journeys.

In summary, the U-shaped curve generated in this thesis shows key impact points potentially affecting self-efficacy. The downward section of the curve shows how and why these factors encountered especially in the early stages of the one-year Masters programme can lower self-efficacy. The data from the range of students in the case study supports the propositions from social learning theory (described in Chapter 4) concerning a continuously reciprocal relationship between people and their environment. Lower levels of selfefficacy exhibited by some student participants rendered them more vulnerable to debilitating effects of apparently unsuccessful experiences, which did seem in turn to produce greater stress and negatively affect future performance.

This is a crucial insight in respect of students’ own management of their emotional states and cognitive self-beliefs over the academic year, as well as for pastoral and learning development interventions by their institution. International Masters students need to be aware of the vital importance of safeguarding positive, strong learner identities in the face of almost inevitable challenges and uncertainties of the new academic discourse. This explicitly recognises the direct relationship between self-efficacy, stress and performance suggested generally in the literature, and illustrated by this case study in relation to international Masters students specifically.

The returning ‘upside’ of the proposed U-shaped model identifies those external and internal factors involved in international Masters students’ growing familiarity with our educational discourse. These relate to both their personal coping strategies and institutional support for those, again providing more theoretical understanding about how and why students can regain or increase levels of self-efficacy over especially the later stages of a one-year learning journey. This affirms general ideas from social learning theory in this specific, educational context, not only that lower self-efficacy produces greater affective vulnerability to perceived adverse circumstances, but conversely that as selfefficacy is strengthened, an increasing resilience to such situations is established.

This is perhaps most pointedly illustrated in the case study by the majority of students evidencing new levels of self-belief by the end of the learning journey depicted on the U-shaped model. Furthermore, that they also often ascribed this personal growth primarly to the testing nature of those earlier challenges. This seems an especially important understanding for western learning developers in their interactions with international Masters students. As much as we might usefully empathise when we interact with students undergoing stressful experiences during the unfamiliar stages of their learning journeys, we could also retain an important, longitudinal perspective of the potentially uplifting and successful nature of the vast majority of those journeys. This Ushaped model’s employment of self-efficacy as a dependent variable in its depiction of the one-year Masters programme contributes a vital context to how students and tutors can enable that kind of successful experience. These issues are therefore also covered in further detail in the Contribution to practice section below.

The above points relating to students’ development signal the corresponding importance, established by the thesis, of the tutors’ role in learning journeys. Much is written in the literature reviewed earlier about the importance of western educators’ reflexivity in exposing the rhetoric of internationalisation, and thus responding more proactively and positively to the richness deriving from cultural diversity presented by international students. Yet, very little has been found within that educational literature concerning how exactly individual tutors can personally reflect, and develop themselves, through their experiences both with international students directly, and with their colleagues in the teaching and assessment of those students.

The case study analysis shows that tutors need ways to reflect on how their different, often unexamined, epistemological positions on learning, reading and writing impact on the experiences of their international Masters students. This is especially the case during that early stage of the year when their self-efficacy can so easily be undermined by unfamiliar teaching practices, notably assessment. Examiners need to reflect on what it is exactly that they expect students to do, and why they should demonstrate their knowledge in those ways. The data have confirmed a situation within this business school at least, and suggested by Academic Literacies theory more generally, that tutors will adopt different stances and criteria for teaching and assessing so it will be difficult for most students to manage those expectations consistently across even a small academy.

The cognitive-behavioural techniques explicitly demonstrated in the reflexive analysis of this study can enable western educators to recognise which of their expectations of others are intra-disciplinary, but also which are more personal, i.e. revealing unconscious influences, an awareness of which would enable tutors to be more open to different ways of thinking and acting in relation to culturally diverse students. It is important here, as emphasised throughout the data analysis, to realise that these reflexive insights concern a much wider spectrum of life than just academic expectations. The data explored through the affective themes of the analysis highlight a most significant contribution of the case study in showing that students in unfamiliar environments instinctively seek a sense of belonging as much as any knowledge capabilities. This absorption into a new learning community develops through human relationships, and students need positive experiences of those with staff as well as with other students.

The analysis identifies a range of actions by staff that are generally likely to at first warmly welcome new students, and then progressively integrate them into our academic discourse. Even more importantly though, the distinctive reflexive emphasis within the analysis shows readers how and why they can become aware of, and challenge, their own assumptions about interactions with ‘the Other’. This can then expand the capacity for personal learning from others for all of us because until we recognise our own limiting beliefs, our minds can be too saturated to absorb the opportunities that others bring us for new, personally satisfying ways of feeling, thinking and acting.

 

Contribution to research methodology

This study’s adoption of a mixed methods approach to narrative analysis provides a more in-depth understanding of the complexity inherent within a group of students’ learning journeys. There are important similarities across the experiences of that group, which can be usefully captured by thematic analysis, yet there are also distinctive exceptions to any of these common themes. Those differences, best explored through more detailed investigations of individual narratives, provide salutary reminders about the reality of diversity in UK HE today. Rather than being defensive about the paradoxical nature of such research, this case study has instead foregrounded the contribution to be made by such a qualitative mixed methods design.

This methodological approach has been further deepened by the inclusion of a third element – that of reflexive analysis. Exploring data from the researcher’s own learning journey is still a comparatively unusual approach in case study research, yet this effectively illustrates the significant influences of theoretical orientation, data collection and narrative analysis that derive from the researcher’s world view. From the social constructionist viewpoint adopted in my methodology, this shows quite clearly how one’s professional interactions with others must also be a product of socio-cultural influences – with inevitable implications for practice, which are again discussed in the relevant section below.

A notable contribution of this reflexive analysis is the demonstrated application of two simple techniques for researchers and practitioners to adopt for this purpose. These are both based on the well-established principle of cognitivebehavioural therapy (CBT), and which I can personally endorse from extensive, direct experience over several years. These easily facilitate reflection on everyday occurrences that provoke an emotive reaction, thereby developing self-awareness that enables not only greater personal wellbeing, but also more considered professional behaviour. This in turn is likely to lead to increased empathy for others – enhancing one’s understanding and tolerance for their behaviour. These are important attributes to model for students, and so lead into the next section concerning implications for professional practice.

 

Contribution to practice

The development of the affective transition curve model for international Masters students highlights important learning development interventions for educators at key stages of the students’ transition into UK HE. Following the model chronologically, these include:

• Taking time to extend a warm welcome in first encounters.
• Explaining key academic expectations at an early stage of Semester 1.
•  Providing assignment exemplars during the build-up to first submissions later in Semester 1.
•  Discussing intercultural communication objectives and challenges at an early stage of group-work assessments in Semester 1.
•  Providing on-going tutor access and support through those group-work processes.
• Offering pastoral consultations especially after summative assessment feedback in early Semester 2.
•  Proactively checking and following up failing students’ performance in Semester 2.
• Monitoring supervisory relationships for final, individual dissertations and projects.
• Offering 1-1 support for supplementary assessments at the end of the academic year.

As noted above, the theoretical basis of the case study has enabled the concurrent application of a nested hierarchy of learning development models at the School of Management over the last three years of the research. This is still a relatively unusual approach across British universities, certainly within a single department, and yet it is one that has already proved successful at the School in terms of international Masters students’ adjustment and achievement in UK HE. Furthermore, this flexible approach works with rather than against tutors’ differing epistemological positions. This thesis argues that this style of accommodation rather than confrontation is a more realistic way to support students’ success amidst their experience of varying pedagogy from different tutors. This is, of course, a debatable proposition, although well supported by the data of this case study, and is therefore explored further in the Directions for future research section below.

The theoretical insights explored above highlighted two key academic skills areas especially needing better support at the School of Management, i.e. reading and group-working. With regard to the latter issue, the earlier discussion confirmed that this is a widespread, controversial problem at UK institutions, and the thesis discussion has strongly supported other authors’ recommendations for more constructive interventions by tutors. In the case of reading challenges – an issue which has been less well recognised in internationalised education research – this thesis has been able to foreground the necessity for tutors to become far more explicit, directive and sensitive to students’ difficulties. This clearly has particular significance for those students who do not have English as their first language, and who have arrived from educational cultures with dramatically different reading expectations.

The need for reflexive practice by individual tutors has already been covered in the Contribution to research section above. This bears reiteration here, as my own learning journey has revealed how valuable the process of self-reflection can be for improving professional practice. The thesis has consistently reaffirmed the necessity for tutors, learning developers and programme managers to step away from their assumptions about pedagogic practice, and consider these, as far as possible, from the perspectives of ‘the Other’. International Masters students offer wonderful opportunities to extend our horizons educationally as well as personally. Although the third research objective was originally stated in terms of learning how to enable these students’ learning journeys more effectively, a major outcome of this case study has also been to reveal how much Western educators can learn from international students in a more proactively reciprocal process.

 

Directions for future research

This case study appears to be one of very few, if any, research studies applying a nested hierarchy of learning development models specifically to international Masters students’ progress in UK HE. Most learning development studies have considered these models in relation to undergraduate students generally, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds, and the majority of these being home students. Concurrently, educational researchers exploring internationalisation have observed the importance of interactions between home and international students, often arguing that these should not therefore be treated as distinct groups. Yet postgraduate recruitment at many UK university departments, like the School of Management, is dominated by international students, resulting in the widespread reality of an almost exclusively international postgraduate culture. This case study has illustrated the usefulness of viewing these students’ particular transitional challenges through the twin lenses of Academic Socialisation and Academic Literacies theories. There is a definite value to further research into what kind of synergy of learning development interventions deriving from these different models will best enable the academic progress of this distinct student group.

These two models have also been primarily concerned with academic writing. Whilst development of this skill to the level required is a significant aspect of students’ adjustment to HE, this case study has identified reading as a more prominent challenge for the sample group, and their peers more generally. Further research into the effectiveness of applying these models to develop strategies for supporting international Masters’ students’ reading skills would be valuable for their early stage integration into a UK HE learning community.

In addition to recognising various implications of student diversity, this study has also emphasised the ubiquitous impact of tutor diversity on student experience. This is a key principle of Academic Literacies theory – challenging the myth of a single academy by contending that academics actually have different epistemological approaches to learning, teaching and assessment, even within a single discipline such as management. This has been used as an argument in some Academic Literacies research for the necessity of ‘top-down’ policies for standardising elements of pedagogic practice. However, this study argues that the persistent reality of a diversity of academic beliefs and practice can be constructively accommodated by a flexible, nested set of learning development approaches. As noted above, this proposition is controversial among tutors even within the School of Management, yet students’ successes have been positively supported here by this approach. Further research focussing more on the tutors’ perceptions of this ‘bottom-up’ strategy, perhaps at different university departments, could be most informative in expanding our understanding of the potential for translating Academic Literacies theory more effectively into practice.

The other, major, theoretical development of this research has been the creation of a U-shaped model of international Masters’ students’ learning journeys related to self-efficacy. This new development, arising from a small case study, clearly calls for other research studies to explore how their students’ experiences may map onto this model. Although there are bound to be limitations to applying this kind of universal model, which has been developed from a thematic analysis, this could still be helpful in recognising key stages at which different learning and pastoral interventions may be especially useful in facilitating many international postgraduate students’ progress in UK HE.

As a variable in the educational context, self-efficacy can be used synonymously with more widely recognised constructs such as self-belief or self-confidence in the sense of students’ perceived capability to be successful. International Masters students’ collision with the new educational and social cultures of UK HE clearly has a significant emotional impact. This often has a knock-on effect for their self-efficacy. Conversely, the students’ emotional stability and personal effectiveness may be mediated by their existing levels of self-efficacy. These relationships are under-researched for this student group, and deserve further attention to explore how self-efficacy may be fostered and harnessed for student success in the intensely challenging context of a UK Masters programme.

Finally, the case study has recognised the limitations of the U-shaped thematic model by also investigating individual students’ narratives in more depth. In highlighting the personal nature of those journeys, it has been impossible to ignore the significant influence of my own learning journey – both on my research encounters with the sample group, and on my evolving professional practice in supporting international Masters students more generally. Whilst qualitative researchers will often write about the importance of reflexivity in research and in practice, there are different constructions as to what this means. I have found very few illustrations of educational researchers or practitioners utilising processes such as cognitive-behavioural techniques to deliberately bring to light and challenge their own unconscious values and beliefs at an immediate, personal level. Yet these drivers are directing our attitudes, perceptions and actions in relation to students every day.

Perhaps more than anything then, this case study is foregrounding the need for us to look to ourselves, before we are tempted to judge or dismiss ‘the Other’. My self-reflective practice exemplified by the two models in the reflexive analysis has been recurrently and startlingly insightful for my interactions with students. This element of the study chooses not to recognise a simple, unconscious divide between personal and professional life. Instead it contends that there is immense potential for a more considered, open-hearted experience of internationalisation on Western university campuses if educators research holistically into themselves.

 

Key recommendations

Overall, I can summarise some recommendations that I believe emerge from the conjunction of major findings in my primary and secondary research. These draw firstly on the insights gained from the data collection and analysis, which confirmed three, major, institutional factors for enabling international Masters students’ transition:

•  Explication of discipline-specific academic expectations.
• Formative 1-1 feedback.
• Peer guidance.

These interpretations have then been related to two, major, theoretical positions on learning development established in the Literature Review, i.e. Academic Socialisation and Academic Literacies. This summary now proposes that students’ progression into our learning community can be best facilitated by a co-ordinated integration of the following learning development strategies advocated by these two models:

•  Peer-assisted study support (Academic Literacies and Socialisation).
•  Academic skills development embedded within module delivery from academic tutors, e.g. subject-specific critical analysis (Academic Literacies).
•  Formative, 1-1 feedback on draft assignment writing from tutors or learning developers (Academic Literacies).
•  Parallel workshops from learning developers, sometimes with academic tutor input on more generic academic skills, e.g. reading strategies (Academic Socialisation).

Such a nested hierarchy of academic support processes will certainly go some way to enabling students’ enjoyment of a successful learning journey. However, to return to my own learning journey metaphor; when I climb a mountain, no-one else can do that for me. At most, a guide might occasionally hold out a hand to help me over some early, tricky steps. Success will primarily depend on persistent application and managing my own fears as I attempt to follow in her footsteps. My faith in my own capabilities, i.e self-efficacy, is crucial to that success. Just as with international Masters students’ learning journeys, the anticipation at the beginning can feel exciting, and reaching the final goal is immensely satisfying, of course. But a lot of what goes on in between is about repeated self-motivation. To what extent can anyone else really enable, or even understand, that journey ?

On reading back over that last paragraph, it is quite apparent from the instinctive language I have used that the journey is an emotional one. Storrs (2012) asserts that the experience of learning and teaching benefits from overt acknowledgement of the emotions that inevitably arise through that process. And she does believe that this overt recognition of an affective learning journey can enable educators to adapt curricula in ways that respond more empathically to both students’ and teachers’ emotional needs. It is for this reason, that I also now add two further dimensions to the nested framework above:

• Peer-assisted mentoring around personal issues (Academic Literacies and Socialisation).
•  Pastoral support from learning developers and personal tutors (Academic Literacies).

These two, final elements advocate proactive recognition of the affective nature of students’ learning journeys being intricately bound up with academic progression. A lack of self-confidence seems to be a major barrier to participation, and institutional programmes deliberately designed to foster that adaptive quality are a vital element of successful transition (Guo and Chase 2011). These should recognise that integration into a new, alien academy is a complex process of interactions between social and academic factors with shifting emphases on these at different times (Bamford 2006, Gu et al 2010, Ryan 2005b).

 

Potential value and limitations of my U-shaped curve model of international Masters students’ affective learning journeys

 

It is important to recognise in my modelling of students’ affective learning journeys along the self-efficacy transition curve that the criteria used are not emotional states in themselves, but rather the external triggers for those, e.g. assessment grades, peer support (Mills 2013). It is at those identified points that learning developers, academic tutors or programme managers are capable of making better or worse interventions in terms of how well supported students feel throughout their time in UK HE. As my individual narrative analyses have demonstrated, we cannot reliably predict how someone will react emotionally and then respond behaviourally, however studious she might seem to be. So whilst my proposed model might be a reasonable predictor of significant extrinsic factors that affect my students’ self-efficacy, the severity and duration of their emotional reactions to these (the oscillations in the curve), and the nature of their consequent self-efficacy may vary widely.

The pragmatist in me is still drawn to the potential utility of such an affective model of learning journeys. Overall, the thematic data analysis of this study, combined with my broader professional experience, suggest that many international Masters students’ learning journeys could follow the broadly Ushaped self-efficacy transition curve, to some degree at least. There are some tempting trends across several participants’ reported experiences, and my wider 1-1 consultations, that seem to follow a downturn in reported self-belief during Semester 1 or early Semester 2. When I also allow for the factor in my data that a majority of this small sample achieved unusually high academic performance in relation to the student population, then it seems reasonable to suggest that a significant proportion of learning journeys of those students who most need our help are likely to follow the U-shaped transition curve model proposed in this discussion.

This model could help then to theorise what may be quite commonly shared experiences of challenges and coping strategies among international Masters students on their UK HE learning journey, and so enable us to move towards an affirmative learning community that harnesses and develops the positive contributions from all its members. Researchers in the two fields that repeatedly inspire my own self-development – education and metaphysics – concur that we can easily, and unconsciously, become slaves to self-beliefs originally absorbed from others. Positive, consistent affirmation of our students and our colleagues is crucial to a healthy academy, and I believe strongly in this primary role of education. I hope that the above discussion can point the way for useful action research into collaborative approaches to learning development that involve us all in gaining from each other’s knowledge and experience.

 

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Appendix 1: Initial informed consent information and form

 

CONSENT/INFORMATION SHEET

My name is Martin Sedgley. I am a lecturer here at the School of Management. Like you, I am studying. I am carrying out a piece of research for my PhD, and I am very interested in understanding more about the experiences of international Masters students as they go through a programme of study. I am seeking willing volunteers to help me with this during this academic session. I have addressed the main questions here, but if you want to ask me anything else, please just talk to me, email me or phone me, and I will be happy to discuss this further with you.

What is the research?

It’s for my PhD. I’m looking at how students feel before, during and at the end of a course of postgraduate study. I want to better understand the issues facing students so that we can provide better programme delivery, content and support in the future. I’m interested in all sorts of student life and background, because all of our life experiences affect how we learn. I’m hoping to recruit a cross-section of students from a range of backgrounds, ages, nationalities and gender. I’m hoping to better understand how our personal experiences in work, family and academic life before, during and after studying affect our outcomes as postgraduate students.

What will I be letting myself in for?

I want to carry out three interviews with you – one at the beginning of the year, one in the middle of the year, and one at the end. This is so that I can get to know you better, and to identify and track your feelings, expectations, thoughts, experiences and so on through the year. These may be good or bad, and I hope you will feel free to talk to me openly about any issue around the course and your progress through it. Interviews will last around an hour, but may be shorter or longer as you prefer.

I may also be taking notes occasionally from other conversations or meetings with you, but if I do this, I will explicitly ask at that time if you are agreeable to me doing that. If you do not wish me to do that, I won’t. All the information I gather from you will be anonymous. This means that I will not keep your name with your files, but only identify your files with a code name. A key list linking the code names and the real names will be kept in a locked cabinet for security in my office. This is so that I can match names and files for repeat interviews during the year. Once the research is complete, the key list will be destroyed. Your name will not be published or otherwise publicised in any way. I will not discuss your answers with anyone else by name.

Can I ask questions as we go through the year?

Of course. You will all be given my email and office phone numbers. You can also make appointments to see me to discuss any issues.

Can I change my mind and leave the research project when I like?

Yes! This will not have any effect on your progress through the course. Just let me know that you don’t want to continue participating either when you make the decision, or when I approach you for a follow-up interview. You can let me know by email, phone or in person. I won’t ask you to explain why you wish to leave, but you can tell me if you wish. The decision is yours.

What will happen to my answers to you?

I will make audio tapes of our interviews and transcribe these, anonymously. Your name will not be recorded on the tapes or the transcripts. It is likely that I will store the transcripts on Nvivo or some similar qualitative software programme to help me analyse them. My computer files will be password protected and encrypted. This will include audio and written transcript files, which I will keep for the foreseeable future because of the longitudinal nature of my research. Any paper copies will be held in a locked cabinet in my locked office. No one else will have access to them except my PhD supervisors when working with me. They will not know your names (apart from my senior supervisor who holds the key list). The work will be described and discussed in my PhD thesis here at Bradford. The audio files will be kept

Eventually I will publish my findings from this research in at least one appropriate academic journal. I may produce a working paper on it. It may appear on an academic journal’s website. In no case will your name or other identifier be published or made public in any way. If any of you would like to keep in touch with me after you have left, I would be happy keep your contact details so I can send you links to publications about the research. In this way you can see the results of our efforts together and see the outcomes of the research.

Will anyone else see my answers to you?

Only my PhD supervisors. They will not know whose transcript is whose.

Will my participation, or leaving, affect my grades or my progress on the programme here?

Absolutely not. For most of you I will not be involved in marking your work. There may be a case in which a small number of you who agree to participate turn up as one of my MBA PDP tutees, or on my MSc Skills for Success programme. If this arises, we will discuss consent and participation again at that time. We will clarify my two roles of tutor and researcher so that you know what is involved. If you do not wish to participate in the research at that point but would like to return later, that is fine. I can give an absolute guarantee that the research is a completely separate issue to your studies and that nothing you say or do as part of the research will have any impact on your grades, classes or other outcomes from the course.

Any questions ?

If have any queries, you can email me, phone me or come and see me.
Email: m.t.sedgley@bradford.ac.uk
Phone: 01274 234414 Office location: AB 0.10, School of Management

Want to go ahead and join me?

Please now complete the attached form showing three possible times you could attend for interview, and I will contact you back to confirm a time for this first meeting.

Yes, I would like to join the research project.

I confirm that I have read and understood the information given above. I confirm that I understand that I can contact Martin Sedgley to ask any questions or raise any concerns about my participation in the project using the above contact points at reasonable times during my time with the project.

I confirm that I understand that I can leave the project at any time and that my participation, and early leaving, should that occur, will not affect my grades or any aspect of my progress through my course of study at the School of Management.

I understand the arrangements for anonymity and confirm that I understand that I can ask Martin to clarify this for me at any reasonable time. I understand that this research project is undertaken under the supervision of Prof Jackie Ford, Dr Myfanwy Trueman and Dr Judi Sture, and that these staff members will have access to anonymised information I provide to Martin Sedgley.

I would like to stay in contact with Martin after my participation is complete, so that I can be informed of the outcomes of the study: YES / NO

 

Signed…………                                                                                                                        Date…………..
Printed name………………..

Signed…………………….(Martin Sedgley)
Date……………..

 

Copy to student
Copy to Sedgley files
Copy to supervisor files (Prof Jackie Ford)

 

Appendix 2: Original data categories from first coding process

 

Appendix 3: Codes emerging from the second, affective analysis process