Increasing Internationalisation-Increasing Diversity

1. Increasing Internationalisation-Increasing Diversity Studying the effects on lecturers, home and international students Diana De University of Glamorgan

2. Should we create separate classrooms for teaching international students and home students in an attempt to meet both of the groups’ and every student’s individual learning needs?

3. A Focus Group Response • L4 :home students have short attention spans, they tut, talk when questions are asked by home international students or clarifications are requested. All in all they blame international students for being time wasters.

4. What would be your reaction to this request? • L3 in particular felt extremely uncomfortable with this suggestion and wrote down feelings in the margin that this was, “a dodgy suggestion”, underlining this to emphasise their discomfort at the idea. • L3: ‘this politically incorrect method of teaching would be highly criticised within higher education and problematic in many ways’ • IS1:…I can understand to some point as they want to progress and they are delayed by lecturers answering our questions.

5. ‘Lecturers treat international students in a very equal way to home students (which I think is very nice), but, they need to realise that sometimes it is harder for us and that we may need extra help and support’ (IS1). IS3: ‘I get lost in my classes, I don’t say anything or ask any questions, I just sit there quiet.

6. L1 ,,this type of proposal had, in fact, been given too much negative connotation. It was suggested that taking individual factors into consideration and giving international students extra time and flexibility would aid them progress and go forward in their studies. When L3 highlighted the practical difficulties in just how the different nationalities could be separated, L1 convincingly responded by stating that ‘the common denominator in this intention would be inability to speak the language and students who had a very high dependency upon the teacher’.

7. S C Plan a day trip around London?... L4 P One home student refused to sit with us [international students]… IS 2 PCS Model: Exploring Anti-Oppressive Practice P (personal) C (cultural) S (structural) Fraudulent applications by international students are a common concern across higher education… L3 Thompson (1997)

8. Self Awareness • Lecturers not asking international students to participate, or speak up during class, talking over, talking too fast, guilty of answering their own questions, or flatly dismissing wrong answers, without offering any exploration of ideas behind responses put forward. • ‘dis-respective of international students’ (HS4) • HS3 blamed lecturers of ‘switching off’ when students from overseas took their time to answer questions.

9. Teaching International Students Workshop • IS2 ‘they tell us to be open-minded but they are not! Just because we say the wrong word like ‘what’ instead of ‘pardon’, they misunderstand us and we come across as being rude or as stupid. If they only got to know us,they will realise we do understand the subject, we just cannot express ourselves in the ‘right’ way. All the lecturers suggested that academic colleagues would benefit from cultural awareness training Contact dde@glam.ac.uk

10. Inclusive Practice • Once you engage students, they feel so, so pleased that you are actually interested in what they have to say. You often see the shock on their face that someone is in fact interested in them and wants to know more about what they have to say and share (L4).