This week we have a guest contribution from Dr Kevin Haines, Deputy Director of the Centre for Academic Language & Development. Kevin formed part of a research group exploring international student experiences in 2023/24 with colleagues from across the University.
Respecting & Responding to the International Student Experience (RISE)
We’re at Langford Campus, home of Bristol Veterinary School, sampling the country air. It’s one of the programmes we’ve been studying as part of a project, supported by BILT, with the aim of Researching the International Student Experience (RISE). This has involved talking with academics, observing classes and then running focus groups with the students we observed. Langford seems a long way from the crowds of Clifton campus – three of us have made it out here and two join online – but it is quite a lot closer to home for us than for the international students. And it’s the students’ voices we really want to hear and share. One student expressed this more clearly than me:
“It’s good to break some misconceptions about the country you come from. Making other people aware that people like you exist breaks some of the misconceptions.”
I believe that diversity is an asset, a resource that can enlighten us. But for it to become a positive factor in our classrooms demands work and attention to detail. How, in our teaching, in our everyday interactions with students, often in small ways, can we break those misconceptions? Clearly, we should not stop at researching the international student experience; we also need to respect that experience and respond to it. Hence my title, which emerged from that session at Langford, and in which spirit we have now produced a BILT guide with 5 Tips for lecturers. Using the voices of international students, we have also produced RISE posters illustrating how to respect and respond, which will hopefully inspire academics in their pursuit of quality learning and teaching experiences for all students in our international university.
This takes me back to an experience at my previous institution in the Netherlands, which I share during workshops titled Learning & Teaching in the International Classroom run in partnership by BILT and CALD as part of the CREATE scheme. ‘Dian’ introduced herself to me as an international student from China who was about to graduate with a Master’s, and she offered to help myself and my colleagues provide insights to lecturers on the experiences of ‘students from elsewhere’. Here was a student who had learned how to navigate the waters of international higher education once she had worked out what was expected of her, and who had learned how to meet those expectations without losing herself in the process. She explained how it was in the beginning; everything was unfamiliar and nobody had the time to explain: and “after having done their best, students may find it disappointing, even ‘heart-breaking’, to get just an average grade” (Haines et al, 2020, p.184). We agreed that while it was wonderful that she had eventually succeeded, it was disappointing that she had been through all the ‘heart-break’. The RISE project has been an opportunity to add the voices of Bristol students to Dian’s voice during our workshops.
It is important at this stage to recognise that Bristol is far from alone in its quest to improve the experience of international students. We can learn much from what has gone before, adjusting available resources to our context. The CREATE Learning & Teaching in the International Classroom workshop draws on a significant body of work produced over the past 15 years. Inspired by the work of experts such as Jude Carroll, Betty Leask and Karen Lauridsen, European projects produced resources for educational developers to support university lecturers in their work in international classrooms. These resources are available on open access websites like IntlUni (intluni.eu) and EQUiiP (equip.eu). The materials address issues such as the impact of language diversity on learning and stimulating intercultural learning through group dynamics (for more detail see for example Lauridsen & Gregersen, 2023).
The questions raised by those projects are essentially the same as those addressed in the Learning & Teaching in the International Classroom workshop; sure, the context shifts, but the issues remain. During the workshop sessions, academics from diverse disciplines exchange experiences of working with diverse groups of international and home students with the aim of finding practical solutions that foster the inclusion of all students in our academic and disciplinary communities. For example, in the task below, academics discuss steps that can be taken to improve the student learning experience, charting learner gains against teacher investment. We regularly discover that many of the solutions that emerge during the workshop relate to commonsense pedagogy, and there are plenty of opportunities to make small changes with impactful results.
For instance, you could make a glossary of key terms and supply it to your students so that the materials are more accessible to students with English as a Second Language. OK, but then why not get the students to make the glossary themselves, in which case they would be more likely to retain the knowledge and take ownership of the vocabulary? Sure, the glossaries would need checking, but you might involve Teaching Assistants in that process. Incidentally, one of the tips emerging from RISE was to make more consistent use of Teaching Assistants; students may be less shy to ask questions to people of a similar age (I’m allowed to say this now I’m over 60), and the Teaching Assistants can remember what it was like to be an undergraduate new to the university.
“It was better in Year 1 when we had an assigned Teaching Assistant. We would have meetings every two weeks with them and they would check on the project progress.”
So next time you are designing an activity or preparing course materials, take a look at the 5 Tips that we derived from the international students during the RISE project. One small change may increase interaction in the class, which in turn will lead to greater communication and more understanding. Leask has pointed out that in the international classroom, individuals “bring different ways of knowing and other resources for learning but they will not necessarily be recognized as valuable” (Leask, 2015, p.98). If you draw whenever possible on these diverse experiences and ways of knowing, I do believe you will find the misconceptions breaking down.
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to all student and staff participants in the RISE project, and to our team: Maxine Gillway, Maggie Boswell, Catriona Johnson, Sue Horseman, & Maria Tsapali. Thanks to all colleagues at BILT, especially Amy Palmer for her support in finalising our project and Julian Kendell for all his invaluable work on the International Classroom workshops. Thanks also to Catherine Meissner (University of Groningen, NL) for her continuing cooperation with the EQUiiP resources, and to Dian for telling it like it is.
References:
Haines, K., Kroese, M., & Guo, D. (2020). Language usage and learning communities in the informal curriculum: The student as protagonist in EMI? In H. Bowles & A. C. Murphy (Eds.), English‐medium instruction and the internationalization of universities (pp. 181–203). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lauridsen, K. M., & Gregersen-Hermans, J. (2023). Change Happens Through People: Evidencing the Value of Professional Development for Educators Involved in Internationalised Programmes. Journal of Studies in International Education, 27(5), 760-778.
Leask, B. (2015). Internationalizing the Curriculum. Abingdon: Routledge.
