Navigating the normative terrain of the internationalised Higher Education environment

: an investigation of international students’ and tutors’ negotiation of the common-sense “rules”

Abstract

Knight’s (2015, p2) frequently cited definition of the internationalisation of higher education as that of “the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education” promotes a framework in which the culture of teaching and learning is conducive to the different backgrounds of the students and academics comprising this environment. However, it can be argued that this culture continues to be biased towards that of a traditionally hegemonic Westernised approach to teaching and learning, in particular those of Anglophone countries. Within this framing, international students are expected to adhere to the accepted normative patterns constituting that approach as they study, lest they be viewed as deficient. However, discrepancies may emerge between the competencies and expectations which these students possess and the practices they are required to undertake or interpret in their interactions. Similarly, such discrepancies may also affect tutors in their interactions with their students. In these situations, it is necessary for these individuals to engage in extra-ordinary sense-making of these patterns, relabelled here as negotiating the “rules” (ten Have, 2004).
This type of sense-making is the focus of this research, where the phenomenon of negotiation is informed by the theoretical perspective of ethnomethodology. In order to study the process of negotiation, interactional events of interest have been positioned conceptually within an interactional space, where time and space merge to give meaning to the actions occurring within it (Blommaert et al., 2005; Pennycook, 2010). Data was collected from dairies and interviews from five non-native English-speaking Master’s international students over their year of study and interviews from thirteen tutors at a UK-based university; this data was analysed both thematically and longitudinally. Results of the research show that the student participants were both enabled and restricted in their negotiation depending on the type of space in which their negotiation occurred. As regards the tutor participants, results showed that they perceived their students as deficient when they believed their students would not meet their expectations of adhering to the more widely recognised higher scale-level “rules” of their interactional spaces. However, such evaluation helped the tutors become more aware of their own negotiation, which they managed more easily when interacting with their students in more local spaces.
While recognising the tensions existing in universities’ accommodating effective negotiation, this study highlights the need for the relevant stakeholders to acknowledge this practice at different levels of the academic environment so that there is sufficient flexibility in their managing different student expectations, competencies and needs.

Date of Award	24 Jan 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Frances Giampapa (Supervisor) & Matt A Kedzierski (Supervisor)