PhD students, interculturality, reflexivity, community and internationalisation

Abstract

Interviews with a small group of doctoral students at a British university indicate that the students feel that the programme provides an environment within which they develop interculturality through reflexive engagement with the PhD community and in some cases with the participants in their research. Significant here is that they are interpretivist, constructivist qualitative researchers within a larger university community of qualitative researchers where there is a shared reflexivity that is at the core of interculturality. They also bring with them existing cultural complexity with which to engage, build on, make reflexive sense of and resolve in this experience. This complexity which they all share make it difficult to consider them differently as 'international' or 'home' students, which are revealed as inappropriately divisive labels within an intercultural community. Where there are apparent issues with English as a second or other language among some of the students, it is realised that this represents a broader struggle, shared with all students, regarding self-expression in writing. These findings demand cultural belief in whatever backgrounds the students come from. This belief impacts on how we understand internationalisation and the nature of academic knowledge and process. KEYWORDS Interculturality; research methods; higher education; doctoral; internationalisation This paper considers the perceptions of nine current and recent students regarding the cultural impact of their PhD applied linguistics programme at a university in the south of England. The purpose of the study was to interrogate the proposition that there may be a conflict between British PhD study and the cultural orientations of 'international' students. However, while the students were both 'home' and 'international', they resisted any notion of cultural conflict along these lines and talked generally about a shared development of interculturality through a reflexive engagement with cultural identity. The study also connects with recent discussions surrounding cultural identity within the internationalisation of higher education in Britain and elsewhere.

Developing the global graduate: how first year university students’ narrate their experiences of culture

“…A focus instead on developing a strong academic identity (Lee & Anderson, 2009), linked to academic disciplines or courses of study, would remove the need to label and categorise students into overseas, EU and home students, at least for pedagogic purposes (see Holliday, 2017). In addition, it would encourage the development of a shared disciplinary culture and of the skills needed for disciplinespecific communities of practice.…”

Exploring the Interconnections between Culture and Behaviour: an Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Warwick

“…Thus for him, cultural formation is an on-going group process through which people consistently create rules for how to behave within changing circumstances, which in turn helps them understand and engage with cultural behaviour. By exemplifying his recent work on the intercultural perceptions and behaviour of 'home' and 'international' students, he demonstrated how perceptions and behaviours of individuals emerged and thus have to be seen as non-deterministic (Holliday, 2016). He also elaborated on how culture emerges and changes with individuals creating small communities forming their own norms.…”

Developing relationality and student belonging: The need for building cosmopolitan engagement in undergraduate communities

“…Thus there has been considerable focus on the international student experience but little work has been carried out on the implications of the changing demographics of 'home' students. While the potential artificiality of the term 'home' is acknowledged (Holliday, 2016), the notion of 'home' is used here to identify the difference between those students already resident in the UK, including many European students, and those who entered the UK for the purposes of pursuing their education.…”