Transcript My Door is always open’: interpreting conversations with

‘Drop in for a cup of tea’Talking with BME and
international students
Judy Ling Wong
(Black Environment Network),
Carolyn Roberts
& Kenny Lynch
(University of Gloucestershire)
Many Voices Conference,
Leicester, 23rd June 2009
el patojo and markhassize11feet on FlickrCC
Structure
• What’s the issue about I & BME
students?
• Research methodology
• Key emergent themes
• Good practice examples
• Conclusions
‘Culture is not just a matter of overt
behaviour, it is also the (social) rules,
beliefs, attitudes and values that govern how
people act and how they define themselves’
(Kennedy, 2002)
‘Traditional’ issues
• Access and transition to HE (Sovic, 2008)
• Equality and law (Madood and Acland, 1998)
• Language and cultural challenges (Cho et al,
2008) including around assessment
• All students engaging with appropriate
curriculum ‘content’ (Bird, 1996)
• Individual learning styles e.g. ‘The Chinese
Learner’, ‘orientalism’ (Said, 1978; Dunbar,
1988; Reid, 1989; Saravanamuthu, 2008)
• Loss of ‘identity’ (Chow and Healey, 2008)
• Achievement of BME groups (HEA, 2008)
st
21
Changing nature of
C
Higher Education pedagogy
• More interactive, inquiry-based,
experiential styles of learning
• Less structured classes, with fewer
boundaries and more learner autonomy
• More interactions and collaborative
working with staff and fellow students
• More projects, including communitybased and off-campus activity, placements
• More expression of personal opinion in
class, sometimes confrontational
• Staff act as facilitators or coordinators
Research Focus
• To evaluate the experiences of I & BME
students
(particularly as they integrate and adapt to
student-centred styles of teaching & learning)
• To identify any obstacles they face
• To suggest good policy and practice for
institutions, and for students themselves
• Caution! Provisional survey only
• Theoretical frameworks?
– Said’s concept of the ‘other’
– Luke’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ plus other theories of
learning and conceptual difficulty in studentcentred learning (Perkins, 2007)
Research methodology
• Thee universities: one redbrick, one post1992 with low ethnic diversity, one post1992 with high ethnic diversity
• Geography, environmental and related
disciplines (relatively high levels of AL)
• Short written questionnaire
• In-depth interviews and dialogue group
conversations with students and staff –
relaxed/participatory, and student-centred
• Interviews recorded and transcribed
• Impressions recorded immediately, then
transcripts read for themes by two
researchers
Interviewee characteristics
• 8 international students (Greece,
Israel, Iran, Japan, Nigeria,
Zimbabwe, dual nationality). Mostly
full time undergraduates, 20s, M/F,
all levels
• 8 UK BME students (British Black
African, British Asian, Mixed WhiteAsian, Afro-Caribbean), mostly born
in UK or 6-8 years+ residence.
Mostly with family in UK. Mostly full
time undergraduates, 20s, M/F, all
levels.
• 20 academic and support staff
General themes
‘If that’s what you call integration, I’m
never going to integrate. I’m never going
to drop my cultural heritage and be
like…I can’t, I’m brown on the outside. I
can’t do that no matter how Western I
dress, I can’t be like you…it’s better you
start accepting and understanding us
than vice versa’
General themes
‘Over here everyone calls their lecturers
by their first name, whereas in Japan
you would never do that and you would
refer to them as Professor Somebody.
Even if I wanted to ask a question I knew
it would feel weird if I called them by
their surname so I couldn’t actually say
anything and I think that made me a bit
hesitant about asking questions…It took
me about a year to get over that.’
Key emergent themes
• Differences in learning styles and
orientations
• Collaboration, groups and idiomatic
language
• Fieldwork and related off-campus
community-based activities, residence
• Family (or home) expectations, religion
and culture
• Time demands, stresses and
workloads, isolation, closed doors
Differences in learning and
study styles
‘And again if you read something then one
day you might forget it, but when you have
done it you have practiced it and you will
always remember it.’
‘We have done very general and theoretical
things about air pollution, but...I am a more
practical person. I prefer taking samples
and microscopy and water analysis rather
than reading and writing things….you need
to see the proper thing of that to have an
idea.’
Differences in learning and
study styles
‘At university what they promote is self learning,
self teaching, self everything. I don’t know what
I’m paying my fees for! They run English
courses…but they expect you to take your own
initiative to do things. Partly I think, yeah, that
does work, it’s good, and partly I think it’s not
promoted enough…’
‘Group work comes from reading from lectures, so
what you’re doing in the group work is just
gathering information that you have read, from the
lectures or from the books, so in your group work
you are sort of letting out what you have learned’
Collaboration, groups and
idiomatic language
‘People who weren’t very confident with
English…- I wouldn’t say they kept themselves
to themselves but…when you’ve got a group
full of people spitting out English and you may
be wanting to say something relevant, but you
speak a bit slower, but they didn’t contribute
and we had a stalemate, like. I never saw
anyone…interact. I mean they were quite
happy, there was three of them not just one, but
they never spoke English and none of our
group interacted…’
Collaboration, groups and
idiomatic language
‘If they’re completely different to you it takes
longer. Stupid things, like little bits in their
own language when you talk to them and
you get a bit friendly.’
‘It’s very difficult, very very difficult to find
the right group, working with the right
person. Sometimes you get back ups from
them, some helps because you are always
behind or if they are attending…I just found
it very difficult.’
Fieldwork & related offcampus activities
‘I went on an international field trip to America
last year and that was very helpful because
obviously you weren’t only just learning in the
classroom…I <also> found the placement is
such a good idea.’
‘We had this field trip to Amsterdam this March
and I found it very interesting. I learnt so much
when I was on the field trip than when I was
looking at things by my studying them in my
head… It was much brighter, it was a very good
example, it was a very, very good trip for me.’
Fieldwork and related offcampus activities
‘The University is a civilised society, there’s no
name calling, no rudeness, no that sort of stuff
but outside of university obviously you’re going
to get issues.’
‘I went on a course to Malta for a week and I
was lucky because in Geography third year
there’s two or three ethnic people…so it was
cool…’
‘When we went on fieldtrips the lecturer would
say stuff and <the international student>’d say,
what does it mean? What are we doing?’
Family expectations,
religion and culture
‘I live here, I have my daughter and I have to take
care of her. I have to look after myself, have to look
after her, have to give her the best and on top of it I
don’t have my family here. My parents back
home…sometimes I have to think about them…I
have to help them in any way, so it is just lots. As a
student you don’t really have time to concentrate on
your study, living that sort of life. Everything you
have to give time for, everything.’
‘I’ve always said British students have a lot more
pressure whereas my parents are paying for
everything. I don’t have a loan to pay off.’
Family expectations,
religion and culture
‘Some people fall behind in their studies
because they’ve got responsibilities…There’s
other siblings and both your parents work or
your parents don’t work, or your parents can’t
speak English and they don’t cater for that.
They just assume you’ve got all the time in the
world to sit and study… but I know every single
ethnic minority person has 101
responsibilities…Every Muslim has to pray five
times a day…Some people have a job as well.
Some ethnic minority students are married
because culturally they want to be married
young or religiously, whatever, they’ve got a
wife to support or a husband to support and
they’ve got children.’
Time demands, stresses
and workloads, isolation
‘A lot of international students don’t
have time to socialise because they
go back and have to translate each
and every word on the brief…and
that leaves them no time to
socialise.’
Time demands, stresses
and workloads, isolation
‘One of the people who later came to
become my friend said to me that they were
really amazed about how much effort I
made to try out English things – I went to
the bar and had a pint of beer and was sick!
But I tried… And black pudding. I wasn’t
doing it to make them feel better about
themselves, but they thought I was making
an effort to try and be English, or try the
British culture and that’s probably why they
were more accepting as well.’
Good practice examples:
Language ability
Support is fundamental, and needs to cover
specific disciplinary language and idiomatic
use/colloquialisms, so that group working and
social interaction is possible.
‘Sometimes I don’t understand their explanation
because of the pressure on me because I feel
they’re in a rush and I’m unhappy, I don’t
understand the explanation. I just say alright,
alright I get it, thank you very much! And
sometimes I didn’t understand it at all…’
Good practice examples:
Personal tutor relationships
Beyond implementation of the legal duty to
promote race equality, or the financial need for
high levels of retention. Needs goodwill, staff
development and monitoring of student opinion.
‘In my first year my personal tutor…I still speak
to him though, ‘cos I was very comfortable with
him so we still speak to him even now about
certain issues, and he is very open about them
which is fine.’
Good practice examples:
Personal tutor relationships
‘What do you think could be done here?’
‘At this University?’
‘Yes. Or in this Department?’
‘Oh God, in this Department! Having an ethnic
minority lecturer would be nice. There’s not one
ethnic minority lecturer…I think there’s one Asian
guy but I’ve never seen him…If every department
had an ethnic minority officer or something…they’d
get better academic results so in the long run it’s for
themselves really..’
Good practice examples:
Induction & course literature
Induction to expectations about learning styles
is crucial, with timetables constructed to allow
full participation by everyone, and enlightening
literature.
‘You look for common ground with people and
as soon as you find that you kind of stick to it
because the first year at University it’s a
foundation year for everything – for your group
of friends, for your way of life, whatever – it
propagates what decisions you make
throughout your university life, and in that year
when perhaps you’re feeling most vulnerable…’
Good practice examples:
Induction & course literature
Appropriate early support is critical.
Vulnerable students fall very quickly into
patterns of working that stem from a feeling
that there is going to be no support. They
exclude themselves, and try to rely on
struggling to make sense of the work and
doing vast quantities of work to solve their
problems. This socially excludes them and
makes them feel even less confident in
engaging.
Good practice examples:
Student-based solutions
‘If you have difficulties you can see the person from
the third year or from the second year who has
been through this to explain to you or to guide you –
yeah, that would be very good.’
‘I don’t feel very confident, so if we had a meeting
like that where you could meet somebody it would
be very nice.’
‘Like there’s an Italian girl on one of my modules
and it’s really interesting because she made friends
with me because I offered to help her because of
her language barrier and explain things to her and
share my notes with her…’
Good practice examples:
Cultural stories
For different groups, ask current
students to put positive explanations of
how to maintain ‘cultural self’ on the web
so that they can be read prior to arrival.
‘Ethnic minorities, they get to positions of
influence and they suddenly forget they
are an ethnic minority. They forget what
the journey was for them!’
Good practice examples:
Working styles
Use ‘icebreakers’ with diverse groups, with
multicultural and international membership.
‘One of the lecturers prepared notes, just like
normal lecture notes, but he would say “we will
have a formal critique session” and then in
brackets “this means that you will be expected
to blah blah”…It’s just a little bit easier for them;
they know in bullet points what they need to do’
Good practice examples:
Drawing on the richness
Celebrate diversity purposefully by
including examples in the curriculum, in
tuition and on the web. Ask for
contributions from existing students, and
make them feel important and valued.
Re-awaken the interest that home
students have from gap years. Make
university a place for learning about life
as well as a discipline.
Conclusions
• The major element of participation in active
learning is contextual - a feeling that one
can learn meaningfully, and participate
successfully – that there is a welcome, that
one is wanted in a partnership or group, and
is not being a barrier to others.
• Similarity of learning needs for
International and BME students. BUT not
identical) - not a homogeneous group
• Active Learning styles generally
welcomed, BUT socio-cultural perception of
IHBME students by mainstream students
and vice versa can undermine the necessary
confident relationships that active learning
requires.
Conclusions
• Students’ backgrounds are a huge
untapped resource for active styles of
learning – not only content but
methodology. Narrow views of the
curriculum are inadequate
• The issues are similar to those
surrounding other aspects of diversity,
for instance disabled students’ needs.
Change for inclusivity can benefit all
• Staff want to support all students; there is
much goodwill evident.
More conclusions
• The pressures experienced by
International & BME students are
cumulative
• Establishing expectations of outcomes
clearly is important
• Isolation is also a key issue in terms of
study, social and institutional settings –
active learning can be both opportunity
and challenge
• Need to resist tendency to view
students as the core problem, instead
of other factors (HEA, 2008)
‘Is he ethnic minority himself? Is he
English? And what did he say - we’ve
got no problems? He thinks we’ve got no
problems ‘cos no one's complained. It
doesn’t mean you haven’t got a
problem...Maybe those people have got
problems but they’re silent. That’s often
the issue.’
Acknowledgements
• Students and staff at the Universities of
Birmingham, Gloucestershire and
Wolverhampton, including Sonia Chilton for
struggling with the interview transcripts.
• Funding from the Centre for Active Learning
(CeAL), University of Gloucestershire. CeAL is
a national Centre for Excellence in Teaching
and Learning, recognised by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England.
http://resources.glos.ac.uk/ceal/
• Support from the Black Environment
Network. BEN is a national charity working
with black, white and other ethnic communities
for full ethnic environmental participation.
http://www.ben-network.org.uk