The globalisation of higher education and the sojourner academic: Insights into challenges experienced by newly appointed international academic staff in a UK university

Introduction

The globalisation of higher education is contributing to the increasingly diverse nature of the communities of individual universities. Across the world, trans-national academic mobility is ubiquitous, with academic members of staff (or ‘academics’) increasingly seeking conducive environments in which to develop their potential. Some may be seeking to liberate themselves from unfavourable working conditions in their home country. All are aspiring to achieve developments in their teaching, scholarship and research, in a new and stimulating environment. Indications are that this global movement is trending on an upward trajectory.

The term International Academic Staff (IAS) refers to academic staff educated and enculturated in one system of education and currently teaching and researching in another. Newly appointed or novice IAS are those who are lecturing/tutoring/supervising for the first time, having either recently completed their studies or held professional posts in contexts other than higher education such as in engineering, medicine or industry. The Association of Commonwealth Universities’ (ACU) survey of 2005 found that the average proportion of IAS was 12% across all responding institutions worldwide. It was higher among Australian, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Canadian institutions, with Asian and African institutions reporting a lower proportion of staff from abroad (Kubler and DeLuca, 2006: 2). Universities UK (UUK), the largest body in the country with a membership of Vice-Chancellors of UK universities, reported in 2007 on the success of UK universities in recruiting IAS in the face of growing global competition for academic year 2007/2008: of 179,040 academic staff, 40,393 were non-UK nationals, that is, 22.5%.

In academic year 2010/2011, the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) of the United Kingdom, to which universities return data each autumn on their students and staff, reported that of the 181,185 academics employed that year, 43,305 (24.8%), were from overseas, and since 6705 individuals were classified as ‘Unknown’, the total could be higher. HESA data for 2011–2012 state that 28% of all UK university academics at that time were non-UK nationals (HESA, 2012). Moreover, since these percentages are based on the total population of academics, it can be assumed that the proportion of IAS is not evenly distributed across the country and is much higher in some universities than others; for instance it is more than 30% in some London universities. It is the case that trans-national academic mobility to the United Kingdom is rising, and there now exists a web site, International Staff, dedicated to the phenomenon: http://www.internationalstaff.ac.uk/

The literature suggests that teaching in UK universities in the early years of the 21st century is considered to be a challenging occupation. Key findings from the 2007 Changing Academic Profession (CAP) study found not only that satisfaction with the academic profession in the United Kingdom in 2007 had fallen by 2% since 1992 but also that the United Kingdom reported the least satisfaction with academic work of any of the countries in the survey (Locke and Bennion, 2010: 12).

This dissatisfaction has been noted by Gale (2011). She identified a range of anxieties experienced by early-career academics in a ‘post-1992’ teaching-oriented institution (i.e. a former Polytechnic re-designated as a University by the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992) about assuming an academic identity. Their anxieties related to students, the teaching arena and organisational practice. Green (2009), investigating newly appointed academics’ perceptions of the language of teaching and learning, found that there was a range of impediments preventing new staff accessing and benefitting from the scholarship of learning and teaching which, we can infer, would prevent individuals from developing their professional practice to support their work with students.

It is acknowledged that challenges facing the academic profession are not confined to the United Kingdom. In a global report for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Conference on Higher Education in 2009, Altbach et al. (2009) found a discouraging environment for the academic profession worldwide – albeit with different sets of difficulties facing developing and developed nations, a view that is supported and demonstrated in the literature. In addition to those offering comparative studies of a range of countries, Bentley et al. (2013), Van der Walt, Wolhuter et al. (2011), Teichler et al. (2013), Teichler and Höhle (2013), and Coates and Goedegebuure (2012) investigated tensions and anxieties among academic staff in Australia, while Abramov (2012) discussed the rise of managerialism in Russian universities, finding that the resulting demands on academics have the effect of diminishing academic freedom and autonomy.Indeed, Williams (2008), writing from South Africa, questions whether at this time academia is actually a profession. A different viewpoint was expressed by Weinrib et al. (2013), who found that career satisfaction of recently appointed staff in Canada did not differ substantively from that of their experienced colleagues overall. So there are suggestions from across the globe that academic work is challenging for the majority of academic staff, whether newly appointed or experienced.

Against this background of challenge across the academic profession, this article considers the lived experiences of newly appointed academic staff, specifically non-UK nationals working in UK universities. It investigates whether and to what extent an individual enculturated in a national system of education, possibly predicated on different cultural values and privileging different approaches to learning and teaching in a university environment than the system to which they have relocated, experiences cultural dissonance in fulfilling the duties of an educator in a national system which may embody and aim to transmit values, standards, cultural capital, systems of institutional governance and social norms and mores with which they may not be familiar and to which they may not subscribe. We can hypothesise that this is indeed the case for some at least, as individuals attempt to meet their responsibilities in terms of teaching, research and administration given that none of these undertakings are culturally neutral. As Heimlich and Norland (1994: 113) observe, teaching is always based on cultural values, regardless of the extent to which the individual is or is not aware of their influence.

The purpose of the preparatory study described in this article was to attempt to tease out where problems, confusions, contradictions and tensions might occur, with a view either to studying them further and systematically and/or to considering what systems might be put in place to prepare and support newly appointed IAS for the challenging career in an unfamiliar education system in which they have elected to participate. Some or all of the pressures touched on above will be experienced to a greater or lesser extent by all novice academics, as the CAP study indicated. Experience suggests, however, that they are likely to be exacerbated in the overseas academic, and to be linked to differences in the educational experiences of the individuals, as the findings of this study will reveal below.

International Academic Staff

In today’s universities, especially urban universities in the inner city with an increasingly diverse student body, staff encounter fellow academics from different cultural backgrounds in every aspect of their institutional lives. As they work together, in the lab, the workshop and the lecture theatre as well as in board rooms and social spaces on campus, a complexity of diversity can be encountered. As Olson and Kroeger (2001) observe,

Time and space have shrunk; we are no longer insulated from cultural differences as we have been in the past. Today, we encounter people of different culture in every realm of our lives. When we meet each other, we discover differences in perspectives, behaviours, and communication styles and this process of internationalisation involves all of us, academics, students and all aspects of university life. (p. 16)

Similarly, the work of Palfreyman (2007), now regarded as seminal, demonstrates that the rapid spread of globalisation has engaged our consideration of the cultural dimension in these areas, noting that as students and academics move into new settings, ‘contact zones are created in which these cultural factors become more salient, providing new challenges and new resources for teaching and learning’ (in Palfreyman and McBride, 2007, p.1).

Pratt (1992) described these contact zones as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (p. 4), an idea that is extended by Kenway and Bullen (2003: 5) to higher education, where they see the contact zone as the space where students, writings or cultures might come together in productive dialogue. Rarely, however, is mention made of the tutor or academic, who may equally be negotiating power relationships in the lecture theatre or laboratory.

In the research literature, studies investigating the issues and themes touched upon above, where they exist, seem not to be foregrounded. There is a plethora of outputs on the learning experiences of international students, particularly (though not exclusively) in English speaking countries. For example in-depth research has been conducted on specific cultural groups, the Japanese learner for instance, to whom an eponymous journal is dedicated (Carroll and Ryan, 2005), and similarly for the Chinese learner (Watkins and Biggs, 1996), while there is an entire body of work on teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), all of which tackle culturally specific educational issues in a range of contexts. There is room for serious attempts to view teaching, as opposed to learning, in an inter-cultural perspective.

Given that it is almost 40 years since Kolb (1976) proposed to educators the idea of different learning styles, and Lawrence (1979) emphasised how very significant the differences in individuals’ learning behaviour can be, it is interesting that as yet, few researchers have turned their attention to the way in which acculturation into different learning styles can affect the learner turned teacher.

Kolapo (2009) observed the existence of such a lacuna, stating that while research on refugees, migrants and population mobility is in abundance, little research has been done on immigrant scholars. His view is that this is regrettable since

the host social and academic communities where immigrant academics work as professionals … already have set identities framed by culturally specific expectations, ethics, norms, ideologies, and a culture to which individuals are often admitted as total or near-total strangers. They have to learn, adopt, and adapt … and might have to sublimate, suspend, discard or adapt some old aspects of self-identity and norms from back home in order to … operate effectively as balanced social persons and effective professionals in the host society. (p. xi)

It is worth mentioning that not all international staff are immigrants, but rather may be sojourners, albeit for extensive periods of time. A number of studies quantify the extent of academic mobility, and its effect on institutions, but the lived experiences of academics themselves barely attract even cursory coverage. This is acknowledged by Kim (2009a) in commenting on the changes in the scale and speed of cross-border academic mobility. She claims we are far from being able to theorise the resultant problem issues: she recognises elsewhere (Kim, 2009b) the ‘new strangers’ in the universities in the grip of marketisation. There is an echo here of Kolapo’s (2009) phrase ‘Stranger Scholars Abroad’ (p. 3). Hamada’s (2005) study of Japanese female academics in the United States emphasises cultural differences in learning and teaching between the academic enculturated in the Japanese conflict-avoidance society where harmony is seen as a fundamental principle in the community (including the community of the university), and the behavioural and attitudinal norms of her American students to whom the notion that ‘silence is golden’ is more than an anathema and rather a sign of weakness.

Bodycott and Walker (2010) studied the internationalisation of the campus through the experiences of two academics teaching an international group of students in a country culturally foreign to all of them. The authors focus on language and communication issues, social and cultural distance, vertically oriented societies and so on, concluding that inter-cultural understandings must permeate the curricula, and be a shared goal and responsibility of both teachers and students. They too point to the paucity of research concerning the effects of internationalisation on teachers in higher education.

Many researchers choose to focus on issues of inter-cultural communication, while Yourn and Kirkness (2003) widen the discussion to the culture of education. In their view, research studies had little to offer so they turned to the literature on international students to guide their thinking.Kim and Locke (2010) have helpfully pointed to what can be seen as an important omission, warning that ‘the nature of international academics’ experiences in their host institutions and countries and the broader impact of academic mobility on styles of scholarship and intellectual traditions remain largely unexamined’ (author’s emphasis) (p. 27).

It is the purpose of this article precisely to begin to explore the pedagogical assumptions and intellectual traditions brought by the IAS into the lecture and seminar rooms, labs and workshops and the potentially conflicting learning styles and expectations of their students, in order to break the long silence on this important policy and pedagogical issue that is of importance to academics, students and university management.

The internationalisation of higher education has hitherto largely been linked to the discourse around inter-culturalism focussed on the relationships between international students and how they interact with their peers on campuses across the world. A different set of challenges are likely to be experienced by IAS practising within a pedagogy reflecting a particular nation, policies devised by the state government, management operating within the guidelines of the national establishment, and cohorts of students with differing characteristics to those previously encountered in the home country.

National systems of education can be conceptualised as expressions of the nation state, encompassing and transmitting its values, priorities and hierarchies. It is axiomatic therefore that IAS will have been enculturated in an environment privileging knowledge, skills and attitudes shared neither by their UK colleagues nor by the students they are teaching. Such IAS face unfamiliar pedagogical, epistemological and philosophical paradigms as they teach and research in an education system of which they have no experiential knowledge. Furthermore, those appointed to inner city institutions or metropolitan universities in ethnically diverse communities may not be prepared for the multiplicity of cohorts presenting with a bewildering array of different attitudes to learning and teaching, including differing expectations of their tutors, together with widely ranging culturally specific behavioural norms and mores. They may be nationals, immigrants or international students. In this super-diversity, such as exists in the inner London institutions as one example, the cultural signposts available to the IAS may be difficult to read, leading to confusion and conflict. It is these issues that this article is seeking to tease out.

Methodology

This article is framed within an action research paradigm with an ethnographic focus on the work of newly appointed academics, born and educated overseas, teaching (some for the first time) in an inner city London university and simultaneously studying on an elective professional development course. These newly appointed IAS were set a writing task based on a critical incident from an experience teaching/tutoring/researching/managing or any other aspect of professional work in the university during the course of the semester, which was then reflected upon with a view to understanding the origins of the incident in order to handle it differently should it re-occur. Only IAS work is reported here, and the participants are recognised to be a convenience sample for which no claims of generalisability are made, although the challenges faced by these sojourners are likely to be similar to those experienced by those employed by other metropolitan universities.

The article is informed by a range of literature, including government, international and national, and non-governmental organisation (NGO) documentation, as well as by academic journals, and relies on a number of approaches: theoretical, conceptual and interpretive. Furthermore, it draws on the author’s long experience of teaching international students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, and of professional development work with university academics in the United Kingdom and overseas. The research approach is attractive because it exploits advantages of positionality, to maximise the opportunities to theorise and interpret the students’ experiences expressed through their own words.

Participants wrote about a wide range of incidents, scenarios and environments; they dealt with difficulties, challenges and conflicts with colleagues, students (undergraduate, postgraduate and foundation level), peers, managers, and even external examiners. In an attempt to search for any commonality which might exist across this diversity, the responses were considered in the light of Hofstede’s dimensions of culture, in order to judge whether the concerns of the IAS could be traced to culturally normative aspects of living and working (Hofstede, 2001).

Hofstede’s work is not without its critics, not least those who highlight the obvious potential for stereotyping, and critics have debated whether this reductive model can truly reflect and/or accommodate the complexity and varieties of cultures and sub-cultures that exist in many contexts. Nevertheless, it was believed to be a useful starting point to attempt to categorise culturally influenced behaviours. Such deeds and activities are not purely the preserve of the anthropologists: international business and applied psychology, as well as sociology and pedagogical studies can use Hofstede’s ideas as a point of departure – as a preliminary to describing, analysing and categorising group and individual behaviour. It goes without saying that awareness of behaviours viewed through the lens of the national and collective level of identity must also be appreciated in terms of the individual, bearing in mind that highly educated people are perhaps more likely to eschew collective national characteristics in developing their individual identities.

Extracts of text presented below are drawn from a number of respondents, for whom no attributions of individual gender, nationality, ethnicity or academic discipline are offered. The focus at this stage is purely on analysing a range of staff experiences against Hofstede’s set of cultural dimensions. Perhaps a later study might re-focus on individuals’ backgrounds, but that was not the intention of this study. The excerpts are verbatim with no standardisation of written expression, so that the individual authors’ voices can be heard.

Long ago Burton R Clark (1960) demonstrated that the university or college could be studied and theorised (by, for instance, an anthropologist or other social scientist), like any other modern community or tribe, since which time ‘cultural analysis has flourished as a means of studying higher education organisations’ (Smerek, 2010: 381). Furthermore, ‘A cultural perspective offers powerful ways to understand deep-level, partly non-conscious sets of meanings, ideas and symbols’. It seems important, therefore, to investigate to what extent and in how many different ways culturally determined uncertainties and unfamiliarities afflict sojourners, given that their education and early enculturation took place in a system outside that in which they are now expected to nurture and support the education of others. If it transpires that cultural issues in teaching and learning are becoming increasingly significant, there may be an argument for Continuing Professional Development centres in universities developed specifically to respond to these challenges in order to help academics grow in inter-cultural competence, thus providing them with the range of skills necessary to help them navigate the deep-level, partly unconscious sets of meanings with which they are surrounded and which may well be a source of cultural, indeed cognitive, dissonance for them.

Although Hofstede’s work has been extensively critiqued as noted, other educationists have nevertheless found his dimensions of national and ethnic culture helpful in discussing culturally influenced interactions including teaching and learning. Some academics recognise four dimensions; others identify five and sometimes six. This exploratory study identified incidents which can be categorised as relating to the following:

Findings

The voices of the IAS, as viewed against Hofstede’s dimensions of culture, will be discussed under each of Hofstede’s dimensions as follows.

Conclusion

As a result of higher education widening participation initiatives in some countries, and demographic changes resulting in a decline in the size of the college-going population in others, there has been such a strong focus on student recruitment over the last decades to the extent that election has been replaced by seduction (Walker, 2005) and the power of the student consumer is paramount (Walker, 2009, 2010). Newly appointed academic staff struggled with the issue of ‘student centredness’, finding the concept confusing and alarming, and dreaded offending or upsetting students. As one such tutor reported,

When I refused to raise the grade on the assignment she told her friend she would not give a good feedback in the National Student Survey. I am very worried because we have been told that we have to give student satisfaction.

Scholarship of learning and teaching in universities is overwhelmingly student-focussed. A glance at any collected volume of research will reveal studies on feedback, student numeracy and literacy, under-performance in a module, adapting to the needs of dyslexic students and other equality issues, teaching strategies and learning styles, academic tribes and disciplines: a veritable industry around e-learning and, of course, a wealth of comment on higher education policy. A welcome addition to the literature is that around the changing nature of the academic profession, but the focus tends to be on conditions and remuneration, and data on trans-national academic migration.

The voice of the international academic is not foregrounded. This is disturbing because students come, stay awhile and move on. Academics on the whole come and stay. Those who move on tend to move on to other institutions: different name on the door, same challenges behind the door.

The insights this article offers are limited but nevertheless based on hearing the clear voices of recently appointed international academics. Some were fresh from doctoral studies, others from post-doctoral work; some with recent experience in medicine, in the media and the arts; all bright, knowledgeable and all from time to time anxious, confused, and without a cultural compass to navigate super-diverse, super-complex working environments in which despite proficiency in the national language, unfamiliar nomenclature can be bewildering. All this results in challenges of a culturally related nature, or cultural dissonance. It is clear that, as Thomas (2005) notes,

The internationalistion of HE is a growing trend likely to intensify – all the signs indicate globalisation, modernisation and the changing needs of economies, whether developed or developing. HE will need to brace itself sooner rather than later for the impending challenges that will accompany the age of ‘super-complexity’. (p. 2)

It is considered good practice in UK universities to offer induction courses to newly appointed staff, covering a range of aspects of the work of the institution including finance, quality assurance, equality legislation and perhaps also an introduction to the university mission, and the values, principles and priorities on which learning is predicated. There is an expectation, however, that the academic is prepared and competent to deliver the teaching and research required as set out in the role descriptor attached to their post. The compelling evidence from these brief excerpts from international staff reflections on their professional experiences is that on arrival they believed they were prepared and competent, armed with years of study and specialist knowledge. It is the unfamiliar cultural norms and mores that can be challenging, as noted in the following two extracts:

My teaching in the seminar was mainly based on transmitting information … I kept the same style and rhythm. Since I came here I have learnt that teaching excellence is judged by creating a constructive relationship between student and teacher based on an interactive process towards the learning process. My seminar was based on didactic teaching solely.

I was more concerned on expressing myself in the right words and expressions. As a foreigner, I still underestimate my oral skills and I tend to beg my pardon to students.

It is difficult to hear such words and fail to be moved; teaching is a very emotional activity whatever the context, and one cannot hear an academic reflecting in such a fiercely honest and principled manner without being similarly affected. For this reason it is essential that we strive to hear more of what academics from overseas are saying to us.

Finally, although the cultural aspects of learning and teaching were not formally explored in this study (though they came up frequently in discussion), they were reflected upon by some participants, including the following:

My own education means I had a more authoritarian approach to teaching, teacher as figure of authority which has the danger of coming across as overbearing. This has been an uphill struggle to unlearn this continental behaviour.

Individuals need to handle many frames of reference in order to understand themselves and the changing world around them. There is therefore a clear and pressing need for an empirical study to inform the development of, perhaps, a training resource for novice IAS which will act as a reliable cultural resource in addition to, or as an alternative to, the current provision.

Academic staff are the foundation on which universities are built. Overseas academics are a vital source of new blood in a somewhat ageing UK workforce. As Scott (2006) noted, quantitative renewal is essential if UK higher education is to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Since ‘the baby boomers’ are reaching retirement, we need to attract young researchers and scholars from overseas as well as from the United Kingdom. They bring current ideas and expert knowledge. Yet as a result of a range of issues pertaining to cultural diversity as well as the changing nature of UK higher education (which can baffle and disorientate UK born and educated academics) not only might we fail to get the best from new young colleagues; to a greater or lesser extent they are at risk of personal and organisational stress. If we do not want to lose them, we must find a way to nurture them. If we fail, we are all – students and academics alike – impoverished.