Academics’ International Teaching Journeys: Personal Narratives of Transitions in Higher Education 9781474289771, 9781474289801, 9781474289788

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Academics’ International Teaching Journeys

Academics’ International Teaching Journeys Personal Narratives of Transitions in Higher Education Edited by Anesa Hosein, Namrata Rao, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh and Ian M. Kinchin

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Anesa Hosein, Namrata Rao, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh, Ian M. Kinchin and Contributors, 2018 Anesa Hosein, Namrata Rao, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh and Ian M. Kinchin have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8977-1 PB: 978-1-3501-4320-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8978-8 eBook: 978-1-4742-8979-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Foreword Ruth Hayhoe Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1

Academics’ International Teaching Journeys: An Introduction Namrata Rao, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh, Anesa Hosein and Ian M. Kinchin

vii viii xi xii

1

2

Contextualizing the New Teaching Environment Erik Blair

13

3

Complexities and Cross-Cultural Challenges of Foreign Lecturers: Personal Narrative Histories in Cameroon and England Henry Asei Kum

25

Cultural Shock of an International Academic: From a Liberal Arts Education in the United States to a Post-1992 University in the UK Jennifer Chung

45

Being Women and Being Migrant: Confronting Double Strangeness in UK Higher Education Thushari Welikala

61

Overcoming Doubts in an Intercultural Academic Journey: From the East to the West Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh

75

Negotiating Transitions in Academic Identity: Teacher or Researcher? Tanya Hathaway

93

4

5

6

7

8

9

Examining Pedagogical Autonomy in International Higher Education Systems Anesa Hosein

109

Pedagogy of Academic Mobility Judith Enriquez-Gibson

125

vi

Contents

10 Towards a ‘Pedagogy of Connection’: ‘Home’ Academic not at Home Maja Jankowska

141

11 Continuing the International Academics’ Teaching Journey Sheila Trahar

161

Index

175

List of Illustrations Tables 1.1 1.2 8.1

Labels used by authors to describe themselves as an academic in a foreign context The origin and international experiences of the contributors Initial feelings of pedagogical relatedness, autonomy and competence at UWI and LHU with reference to UG

3 5 113

Figures 8.1 8.2

Systems affecting my pedagogical relatedness Blended learning website for ME30B: Engineering Management

111 119

Foreword Ruth Hayhoe

Since Sheila Trahar’s ground-breaking volume, Narrative Research on Learning: Comparative and International Perspectives (2006), the comparative education literature has been enriched by various forms of narrative, including autoethnography, making it possible for students and scholars to engage with the individual experience undergirding the macro sociological shifts in educational policy and structure that have fostered an increasing isomorphism. In the current era of globalization, attention has been given to processes of deterritorialization and the emergence of common policyscapes in diverse contexts (Carney 2009). In the higher education arena, these result from the widespread embrace of global ranking systems for universities, benchmarked by the ‘global research university’, and the imposition of research assessment exercises with a strong corporate flavour. This kind of homogenization makes it ever more important to hear the diverse voices of faculty members. While higher learning institutions had an international orientation in the composition of their faculty as early as Nalanda in ancient India and Bologna in medieval Europe, there is probably no historical parallel to the current extent of faculty mobility across nations and regions. This volume brings together the narratives of nine scholars, seven of them women, who share with the reader intense and profound reflections on the experience of moving from one university context to another, in most cases to the UK from diverse countries around the world – Guyana, Trinidad, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Poland, Cameroon and the United States. Also, there are two cases of moves from the UK to the Caribbean and to Australia. Theoretical frames such as social identity, threshold liminality and cultural habitus, make possible in-depth reflection on the highly diverse epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings of global higher education. Several things delighted me in reading these impassioned accounts. One was the sense of individual persona and scholarly identity that had taken shape in the diverse contexts where each author had been educated. Another was the intense reflection on the contrasting experiences of student-teacher relations

Foreword

ix

and teaching methods in two contexts. The search for an approach to teaching that is both authentic and effective in the new context is one of the common threads that runs through most chapters. Thus, any reader who is concerned about how the teaching function of universities will survive and flourish under the pressures of global ranking systems and ever more widely adopted research assessment exercises will find this volume heartening to read. Thushari’s chapter, for example, begins with a moving depiction of the teaching and learning in a Sri Lankan context, while Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh describes the warm, respectful and harmonious relationship between students and teachers in Taiwan’s Confucian context. Virtually every chapter devotes attention to issues of pedagogy, student learning and the evaluation of teaching. This is set against the increasing pressure imposed by an approach to evaluating research that counts products and measures so-called productivity rather than looking at either the quality of thought and potential for societal benefit in research projects or the ways in which research may serve to inform and enrich teaching. Many of the authors are concerned about the extreme individualism and cutthroat competition that shapes the pressured lives of academics, for example, in the UK and Australia, contrasting this to the greater sense of commitment to the collective good experienced in their original contexts. Even as they adapt in self-consciously reflective ways to a new and different context, appreciating some aspects of the more student-centric pedagogy and transparent approaches to student evaluation, they seek to bring cultural enrichment from their own contexts and develop a teaching approach that is authentic to their intercultural journey. Judith Enriquez-Gibson indicates that identities as being ‘constantly shaped and reshaped’ with one’s identity not readily converted in different spaces. These narratives give hope for a university of the future that values the richness and diversity of a cosmopolitan cohort of teaching faculty, deeply committed to all-round student development and to forms of research that can be incorporated within the pedagogical process. While the global research university, with its German American roots, has much to offer, my personal hope is for a global revival of the normal university, a higher institution dedicated to the formation of teachers, which emerged in post-revolution France and reverberated across East Asia, as ‘shihan daigaku’ in Japan and ‘shifan daxue’ in China. ‘Shifan’, meaning ‘the teacher as a model’, embodies Confucian values that emphasize accountability to society, close and mutually respectful teacher-student relations and an integrated and morally explicit approach to knowledge development. This was the first higher education open to women in nineteenth-century

x

Foreword

Europe, North America and East Asia, and it is a model that has persisted in the context of Greater China, with five leading normal universities in the Mainland and one in Taiwan. It may be just one of the future models capable of challenging the dominance of the global research university and bringing back the legacy of civilizations other than the European. Let me close this foreword with a word of thanks to each of the chapter authors, for the candour, sensitivity and sophistication of their narratives, and for the ways in which they are enriching and diversifying the teaching contexts in which they find themselves. I believe their stories will be an inspiration to many readers and give hope for the future as the university reinvents itself in response to changing local and global contexts.

References Carney, S. (2009) ‘Negotiating policy in an age of globalization: Exploring educational “policyscapes” in Denmark, Nepal, and China’, Comparative Education Review, 53 (1): 63–88. Trahar, S. (2006) Narrative Research on Learning: Comparative and International Perspectives, Oxford: Symposium Books.

Acknowledgements This book has been inspired by the international teaching journeys experienced by three of the editors. We wanted to provide a forum for ourselves and other colleagues working in foreign countries to share their experiences of teaching in new contexts – the uncertainties they face and the joys they experience as they adapt and develop their teaching. We would like to thank our colleagues in our respective universities for the casual conversations and intellectual support, which was very helpful in guiding our thinking and shaping the chapters during the editorial process. In particular, we are very grateful to all our colleagues who have contributed honest accounts of their teaching journeys, which provide a fascinating reference point and a wide range of perspectives of teaching experiences across many regions including Europe, Australia, North America and the Caribbean. We would also like to thank Alison Baker, the education publisher and Maria Giovanna Brauzzi, the editorial assistant at Bloomsbury for their advice and support during the entire editorial journey. We are very grateful for the comments offered by J’annine Jobling on the final draft of the manuscript. The book and chapters were peerreviewed. We would like to thank colleagues who helped in peer-reviewing the chapters and the overall book. We are also grateful for the research funding from Liverpool Hope University that supported this work. Finally, we would also like to thank our families for their support and patience during this intellectual pursuit.

Notes on Contributors Erik Blair, Academic Developer London School of Economics, UK Eric Blair was born in Scotland and attended universities in Scotland and England. He is a trained teacher and has a doctorate from Birmingham University. He has taught in higher education in the UK and in Trinidad and Tobago. His research focuses on practitioner understanding and the nature of the teaching context. Jennifer Chung, Lecturer in Education and Social Sciences St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK Jennifer Chung holds a BA from Amherst College and an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, United States, and an MSc and DPhil from Oxford University, UK. Her current research interests involve the Nordic countries, and Finland in particular. This stems from her doctoral dissertation, focusing on the reasons for Finland’s top outcomes in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). She is currently researching teacher preparation within England in response to the 2010 policy paper, The Importance of Teaching, and exploring policy borrowing and transfer from Finland to the rest of the world. Judith Enriquez-Gibson, Senior Lecturer in Education Informatics Liverpool John Moores University, UK Judith Enriquez-Gibson’s work and research interests engage with various disciplinary spaces that probe the relationship between technology and education. She participates and contributes to academic conversations and topics related to e-learning and technology-enhanced learning by engaging with the neglected aspects of technology use, computer-mediated communication, and open movement in education. Her recent work has focused on corporeality, that is, the place of (our) bodies in technological, spatio-temporal productions and practices, including her own academic mobility and corporeality. As a true mobile academic and nomadic subject, her academic life extends across

Notes on Contributors

xiii

continents, having worked in universities in the Philippines, Malaysia, United States, Australia and the UK. Tanya Hathaway, Lecturer in Higher Education at the Teaching and Learning Support Centre University of New England in Armidale, Australia Attending university in the UK, Tanya Hathaway completed a degree and doctorate in geology. After working in the oil and gas industry, she trained as a secondary school teacher, and after five successful years of teaching information and communication technology, she left to pursue doctoral studies in higher education. Since then she has worked at universities in both the UK and Australia exposing her to many forms of learner diversity. Her main interests are in the fields of personal epistemologies, student diversity and teaching and learning in higher education. Ruth Hayhoe, Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto, Canada Ruth Hayhoe’s professional engagements in Asia included her work as a foreign expert at Fudan University (1980–1982), head of the Cultural Section of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989–1991) and director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now the Education University of Hong Kong (1997–2002). Her recent books include Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (2011), China Through the Lens of Comparative Education (2015) and Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation:  An Untold Story (2016). Anesa Hosein, Lecturer in the Department of Higher Education University of Surrey, UK Anesa Hosein is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the Research and Development Committee of the Society for Research into Higher Education. She has worked in the higher education systems of the Caribbean and in the UK. She has an eclectic collection of qualifications in areas of physics, engineering and education. Her career aim is to help people (students, lecturers etc.) to achieve their intrinsic needs, namely of self-growth, which she has accomplished in a variety of research areas including academic practice, mathematics education, research methods, educational technology and academic mobility.

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Maja Jankowska, Senior Lecturer in Psychology University of Bedfordshire, UK Maja Jankowska is the course leader for BSc Psychology, Counselling and Therapies. Her interdisciplinary educational background has provided a baseline for the development of research work that has always crossed the boundaries of psychology, education and cultural studies. Her interests are in qualitative methodology, personal development, processes of identity development, cultural aspects of teaching, learning and psychotherapy, psycho-social and educational perspectives on multilingualism, internalization of education, lifewide and lifelong learning and creativity. Ian M. Kinchin, Professor in Higher Education University of Surrey, UK Ian M. Kinchin has published research in the fields of zoology, science education and academic development. He is the editor of the Journal of Biological Education; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology; a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is a member of the governing council of the Society for Research into Higher Education. He was an external examiner at Imperial College London between 2012 to 2016. Henry Asei Kum, Lecturer in Education Studies Liverpool Hope University, UK Henry Asei Kum holds a BA, DIPES, PGDE, MA and a PhD in the sociology of education. He has taught in schools and universities in Cameroon, France, Scotland and England. His research interests include voice and inclusivity of marginalized children, the intersectionality of class and race, and post-conflict education. Namrata Rao, Senior Lecturer in Education Liverpool Hope University, UK Namrata Rao is the coordinator of the postgraduate courses within the faculty of education. She has a particular research interest in undergraduate research methods pedagogy, quality assurance and enhancement in higher education and the impact of internationalization of higher education with particular interest in the impact of migration on academic identity construction. She has been a

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principal investigator in several externally funded higher education projects focussing particularly on pedagogical research within higher education. Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies Bath Spa University, UK Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh specializes in interdisciplinary research involving emotion, cognition and computer gaming, publishing in psychology and education. Her most specific research interests include creativity, perspective taking, academic motivation, emotions in learning and academic acculturation across the fields of psychology, positive psychology, education and higher education. Sheila Trahar, Professor of International Higher Education University of Bristol, UK Sheila Trahar is currently a co-investigator on the ESRC/Newton Fund Southern African Rurality into Higher Education (SARiHE) project that is investigating, with three South African universities, the transition of students from deep rural areas of South Africa into higher education. She is also a methodological consultant to a large project at the University of Pretoria that is using narrative inquiry to investigate Ubuntu. From 2012–2016, Sheila was the Internationalization of the Curriculum Work Package leader on the EU Tempus project IRIS, which focused on internationalization of higher education in Israel. Sheila has taught on the majority of the School of Education’s postgraduate programmes, both in Bristol and in Hong Kong, leading the MSc Education Management in Hong Kong from 2008–2015. Thushari Welikala, Lecturer in Higher Education King’s College London, UK As the director of continuing professional development, Thushari Welikala’s main responsibilities include managing and designing professional learning and development of university teachers. She has worked in many institutions in Sri Lanka and in the UK including the Institute of Education (IoE) and the University of Nottingham. She has considerable teaching experience in teacher education and in academic practice. Her research focuses on internationalization of higher education, curriculum and student experience. Thushari holds a PhD in higher education from the Institute of Education, University of London.

1

Academics’ International Teaching Journeys: An Introduction Namrata Rao Liverpool Hope University, UK, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh Bath Spa University, UK, Anesa Hosein University of Surrey, UK Ian M. Kinchin University of Surrey, UK

Introduction If we want to grow as teachers – we must do something alien to academic culture:  we must talk to each other about our inner lives – risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. (Palmer 1998: 12)

In the book The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, P.  J. Palmer challenges us, the academic teachers, to go outside of our comfort zones and to grow in our profession by having the courage to expose our fears and anxieties with respect to teaching. This anthology, which is a collection of personal teaching narratives, is about fulfilling this dictum from Palmer, by looking at the inner lives of the international academic. Research on international academics can sometimes be abstract and distilled to the facts and figures of the academic mobility of staff or an outsider’s interpretation of the academics’ experience (see for example, Altbach 1996, 2007; Thomas and Malau-Aduli 2013). Inevitably, these abstract perspectives cannot reveal the vulnerabilities of ‘the academics themselves’, as they face the challenges

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of moving and teaching in different contexts. On the occasions when the literature delves into academics’ vulnerabilities, such as in examining academic identities and cultures, the focus tends to be on developing a researcher identity rather than a teaching identity (see Hosein 2017 for a discussion on this research-teaching bias). To redress this research-teaching balance, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), based primarily on the work of Schön (1992), has emerged. However, knowing how learning and teaching manifest or change when there is intersectionality of different higher education (HE) cultures or beliefs, as in the case of international academics, is less well understood. This book attempts to address these issues (outsider interpretations, exposing vulnerabilities and focus on teaching) by sharing the personal teaching narratives of nine international academic staff in their learning and teaching journeys. In the concluding chapter, themes and debates emerging from these nine personal narratives are explored. In this introductory chapter, we will explore the concept of ‘international academic staff ’, the reasons for the increase in international staff and the implications of this trend, the use of personal narratives for exploring learning and teaching and the contributions that these personal narratives can make to the fields of academic culture/identities and teaching and learning.

Who are international academics? International academics have been referred to by several names in the literature, including migrant academics, immigrant academics, foreign academics and transnational academics. In the concluding chapter of this book, Sheila Trahar raises her reservations on the use of the terminology ‘international academics’. Trahar points out that if a person has had a vast international career of teaching in different countries, when they return to their ‘home’ countries they are no longer considered as being international staff. This, however, does not stop the staff viewing themselves as international, as they have an international outlook and perspective on teaching. Therefore, Trahar sees ‘the internationality of an academic’ as being an innate quality that is created through exposure and not bound by national boundaries or citizenry.1 Trahar’s definition aligns most closely with Kim (2009), who speaks about transnational academics ‒ those academics who move ‘between’ and ‘above’ territorial boundaries, due in part to their job/ academic mobility. The academics are therefore experiencing the international 1

This view closely aligns to the concept of the internationalization of the curriculum

An Introduction

3

space or different HE systems due to the nature of their academic job, such as that in international research groups where there are no physical boundaries. The terminologies of migrant, immigrant and foreign academics are most closely associated with how a country’s government may view an international academic. That is, someone entering a national boundary and requiring the appropriate clearance before they can embark on paid work. Our definition of international academic in this book is perhaps most closely in accord with this last definition. This is not because we believe that a governmental body decides on who can be labelled as an international academic. Instead, this definition suits our purpose of understanding the teaching journey by which international academics transition and submerge themselves in a different cultural and HE environment such as one developed through the HE policies that are enforced within a country’s borders. Therefore, in the context of the book, our international academics were selected as being those who were exposed to compulsory and post-compulsory education (i.e. up to the undergraduate level) in a different country to the one in which they are currently employed. This definition, unlike the terminology ‘foreign academics’, encompasses those academics who have taken up citizenship within their employed country or who are citizens but educated elsewhere. Within this book, we have allowed each author to identify how they wished to label themselves, without prior knowledge of our definition of the international academic (see Table  1.1). Interestingly, although the label of ‘transnational academics’ has grown in the last few years in the literature, it appears it is not yet commonplace, as our contributors instead preferred the use of ‘migrant’ Table 1.1 Labels used by authors to describe themselves as an academic in a foreign context Author Erik Blair Jennifer Chung Judith Enriquez-Gibson Tanya Hathaway Anesa Hosein Maja Jankowska Henry Kum Thushari Welikala Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh

Migrant/ Immigrant

International/ European

Transnational

No Label ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

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Academics’ International Teaching Journeys

or ‘international academic’. Perhaps as the popular media and the universities themselves refer to them as international staff, the acceptance of this label is more likely. Three contributors did not use any labels, but simply referred to themselves as academics who were working in different contexts. This non-labelling does not appear to be a resistance to the label of international academic, but rather, that the state of being a migrant does not affect their identity as an academic.

Why focus on international academics? While academics have always travelled to different countries, with neo-liberal globalization and a more connected world, academic mobility has significantly increased. Kim (2010) explains that market imperatives have significantly affected the flow and direction of international academic mobility in HE due to political and economic forces, as well as there being an increase in academics’ personal choices and professional networks because of better interconnectivity. The rapid changes in academic mobility have changed the contemporary landscape of HE in the globe, beyond the boundaries at regional levels. The majority of research on academic mobility in the era of internationalization has historically focused on the issues relating to international students’ experiences and their interaction with local academic staff; however, international academics’ distinctive experiences while living and working in foreign countries are underresearched (Kim 2010; Pherali 2012). More and more academics move between national and political boundaries to pursue their personal goals in an environment where there is an increasing level and intensity of global competition among HE institutions. For example, there has been a consistently large proportion (29 per cent, according to Universities UK International 2017) of international academic appointments in UK universities over the last decade. In Australia, international academics make up more than 40 per cent of the academic workforce (Hugo and Morriss 2010). Although international academic mobility is visibly apparent, there still exists a lack of understanding of the extent to which this increasing academic staff mobility impacts on the dynamics of academic culture, particularly with respect to teaching. It is likely that the experiences of international academics may have various benefits, such as the construction of institutional policies for internationalization, internationalization of educational practices and the interactions of international academics with local and international students and their host institutions. Interestingly, seven out of the nine contributors

An Introduction

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Table 1.2 The origin and international experiences of the contributors Author

Origin

International Experience

Erik Blair Jennifer Chung Judith Enriquez-Gibson Tanya Hathaway Anesa Hosein Maja Jankowska Henry Kum Thushari Welikala Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh

UK USA Philippines UK Trinidad and Tobago Poland Cameroon Sri Lanka Taiwan

Trinidad and Tobago UK UK Australia Guyana, UK UK UK UK UK

in this book were previously PhD students in the UK who then moved on to academic roles which involved teaching, research and administrative responsibilities. The contributors were selected to represent the diversity of this international academic workforce. Using our definition of international academic, the contributors were selected based on regional/geographical boundaries, that is, representatives from the major continents/regions (see Table  1.2). The international academics’ personal narratives often reflected the geopolitical and geocultural influences of these regional demarcations in their international transitions in teaching. For example, Maja Jankowska explains that as a Polish/ European academic, she struggled to feel like a ‘home’ academic within the other European Union country of the UK because of a lack of commonality in language or in proximity. In contrast, Anesa Hosein felt comfortable relating her experiences in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago to those in the UK. Although both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago were on different continents, they were geographically proximate and shared the same educational system and history as they were previously British colonies. Issues of post-colonization are also touched upon by Henry Kum and Thushari Welikala. The geographical demarcations also pointed out the differences in sociocultural views of academia. For example, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh looks at, in her move from East to West, the challenges in moving from a collectivistic society to that of an individualistic society. Unlike the other contributors who reflected on their regional/geographical identities, Judith Enriquez-Gibson and, to a lesser extent, Jennifer Chung used their institutional identities as a place theme within their narratives, with Judith seeing herself as an ‘Atenean’ and Jennifer as a graduate of an elite liberal arts college.

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Why teaching? The teaching profiles of academics, particularly in this neo-liberal era, are often seen as less prestigious than their research profiles. Often an academic’s research profile, rather than their teaching prowess, increases their academic mobility capital between institutions and countries (Kim 2010), even though teaching occupies a large proportion of an academic’s time. Through teaching, the international academic often faces transition issues, experienced due to the differences in the HE systems and student body they have experienced in the past and the one they are exposed to in their new teaching context. Therefore, international academics in their teaching roles can experience various challenges in negotiating pedagogical issues, situated within the margins of ethnicity, race, gender, culture, identity and educational traditions. These pedagogical issues include their approaches to teaching, their personal values and beliefs about HE. Thus, the personal narratives on teaching practices can highlight the internal conflicts experienced by these academics during the adaptation and acculturation processes. Further, these narratives may also demonstrate the strength and resilience and the contribution made by these academics in their new teaching contexts. Moreover, most of our contributors were early career ‘teaching’ academics (usually within the first ten years of teaching), and hence the issues they faced in being international were entangled with making sense of the teaching environment as an early career teacher. In these contexts, pedagogical dissonance may arise, that is, where the teacher’s beliefs about teaching are not matched with the institution’s beliefs about teaching (Postareff et al. 2008; Prosser et al. 2003) and can lead to pedagogic frailty (see Kinchin et al. 2016). An example of a pedagogic dissonance which appeared to be more pronounced in some of these narratives was due to the differences in the approaches to teaching. For example, Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh, Henry Kum, Maja Jankowska and Anesa Hosein noted their struggles with the notion of teacher-centred versus student-centred pedagogy (Samuelowicz and Bain 2001), and the consequent need to adapt their teaching approaches to match that of their new institution which was more student centred. In contrast, Erik Blair’s experiences were those of trying to fit within a teacher-centred educational culture after teaching for several years in a student-centred environment. Jennifer Chung’s, Anesa Hosein’s and Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh’s chapters also noted the pedagogic dissonance arising from the different educational systems and cultures with regard to assessment, curriculum and the value of a teacher. Sheila Trahar, in the concluding chapter, looks more closely at these pedagogical issues faced by our contributors.

An Introduction

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Why lived experiences? Methodologically, the chapters in this book adapt a personal narrative or autoethnographic approach. The criticisms of this methodological approach range from being self-indulgent to narcissistic in nature (Coffey 1999). Further, to what extent the personal narratives represent the reality of the real event is debateable as the interactions and conversations between the chapter contributors, other people, situations and institutions are reconstructed (Walford 2004). However, Denzin and Lincoln argue that the objective reality represented in any kind of research approaches can never be captured, and ‘We can know a thing only through its representations’ ( 2003:  5). Méndez (2013) also emphasizes that the advantage of an autoethnography is the reflexive interactivity between the readers and the realities illustrated in the narrative stories, which represent the interaction between the authors themselves and their own experiences. One unique feature of autoethnographic narratives is that the cultural and social contexts in which these stories and illustrations take place may trigger the readers to think and reflect about their own experiences. Further, autoethnographic accounts can evoke feelings in readers which are unpredictable, as well as expose the vulnerability of the contributors as they express their inner thoughts and feelings on sensitive issues (Méndez 2013). However, one of the challenging aspects of personal narratives can be due to some of the ethical dilemmas often associated with them. For example, our contributors, while they could anonymize colleagues in their accounts, could not anonymize their institutions as most of our contributors’ professional web pages provide a historical account of their employment. These limitations appear unavoidable, but Ellis (2007) and Méndez (2013) suggest that it is these qualities that make autoethnographic accounts valuable. Therefore, the book vocalizes the value of personal narratives and the uniqueness of individual stories that would render generalization useless, but more importantly, offers a rich picture of experiences. At a time when analysis of teaching and teachers tends to be undertaken anonymously, and on a large scale through quantitative surveys and analytics/metrics of various types, it is easy to forget that underneath the broad sweep of data are a myriad of individual personal stories. These stories show that there are no ‘average teachers’ or ‘typical academics’. The stories are all idiosyncratic, expressing differences that colour the ways in which individual academics work, and how institutions as a whole function. These stories show that the public image of the university teacher masks a range of personal challenges and developmental trajectories that provide a layer of complexity and social

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richness that is rarely articulated. The level of detail that we are able to uncover from individual teacher narratives allows us to better appreciate the challenges that face international academics as they enter a new environment. Further, it helps the ‘home’ academics (the native academics) to look beyond national or cultural stereotypes and to understand their colleagues’ actions. While we all need to develop ‘the courage to teach’, the colleagues who have contributed the narratives included here also display the courage to explore their teaching journeys and experiences in a public arena.

The personal narratives As editors, we wanted these personal narratives to be theoretically framed within social, psychological and/or cultural theories. This, however, biased our selection of contributors to be from the social sciences and humanities. These academics, therefore, all shared similar signature pedagogies due to the nature of their discipline (Shulman 2005). This also helped in dealing with issues that might arise due to differences which may be specific to a particular subject or discipline. The reader, therefore, can recognize that the similarities and differences in the teaching transitions are mainly due to the contributor’s geopolitical/cultural backgrounds, rather than due to differences in their disciplinary context. Given here is a summary of these personal narratives of the nine international academics who have shared their teaching journeys. Erik Blair reflects on the experiences of entering a foreign university and examining how practitioners can work to understand their teaching role in a new environment by drawing on a contextualized model of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Henry Kum looks at the professional shifts, foregrounding what constitutes teaching in HE as he moves from Africa to Europe. Using professional identity theory, social capital theory and threshold liminality theory, he illustrates the competing tensions posited by the impact of physical and imaginary boundaries and territoriality in the thin line that separates success and failure as a university lecturer in a foreign country. Jennifer Chung shares the journey taken from a liberal arts institution in the United States to a university in the United Kingdom, and the resultant cultural shock she experienced due to the philosophical and ideological differences in the academic culture of these institutions. She explains how this has informed her current teaching approaches.

An Introduction

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Thushari Welikela explores how being a ‘migrant woman academic’ is constructed, contested and acted upon within the HE system in the United Kingdom. She examines how the geopolitics of identity construction constrain as well as enable women academics to deconstruct socially constructed identities to find themselves and how this may impact on their teaching practice. Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh discusses her academic acculturation by highlighting the differences of cultural and educational traditions between the East and the West, challenges encountered during her academic acculturation and strategies developed and required to overcome and master these challenges. She also explores the characteristic strengths international academics may have develop during this ongoing journey. Tanya Hathaway highlights the key differences in the ways of thinking about the accountabilities of university teaching and how these translate to practice and impact learners. She moves from an ideological (macro) perspective to a learner (micro) perspective, to illustrate how she negotiated these differences and developed a research-informed approach to strategizing her professional practice as an educational developer. Anesa Hosein uses a self-determination theory framework to look at how the academic’s teaching autonomy and competence are challenged within the English HE context, as sometimes her experiences appear familiar and unfamiliar to her previous teaching experiences in postcolonial British countries. Judith Enriquez-Gibson explores the implications of the notions of boundaries and borders in her being and becoming a migrant academic. She argues that boundaries and borders that make up mobility are in fact multifarious and mostly invisible entanglements of physical movement, representation and practice. Maja Jankowska examines the experiences of herself as a ‘home’ (EU) academic and her reflection on misconceptions surrounding the idea that there are more commonalities than differences within the EU systems of education and therefore staff and students coming from EU countries are considered as being at ‘home’. She shares her experiences of the pedagogical dissonance she experienced in spite of being a ‘home’ academic from Poland.

Reflections and implications In his reflection on the challenges for global HE in the 2020s, Scott emphasizes that there will be an unpredictable growth in global HE, driven by ‘political agendas, socio-cultural influences, deeper structural changes, as well as the

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market’ (2010: 157), with a ‘decisive shift beyond post-imperial, hegemonic and geo-political frames of references, requiring governments and higher-education systems to engage more whole-heartedly with issues of cultural diversity and pluralism’ (2010:  157). However, currently, the internationalization in HE has been treated as an innovation to attract external marketing opportunities by maintaining and enhancing transnational academic mobility (focusing mostly on the recruitment of international students). However, there has been a continuous neglect in the consideration of the consequent impact of the growing proportion of international academics on the academic cultures in HE, let alone valuing the importance of building the strength of interculturality ‒ ‘the existence of a relation based on mutual understanding and interaction between the people who belong to various cultural groups’ (Kim 2009: 395–396). We need to recognize the courage of all the contributors in disclosing their stories, of how they faced and overcame challenges in their teaching practice to develop a culturally sensitive teaching practice. Therefore, these international academics’ teaching experiences should be used as a way to develop strategies to promote cultural diplomacy and cultural pluralism within the HE teaching environment. We need to recognize that each international teaching journey is unique because of its geopolitical history and cultural differences in view of the purpose of education and in approaches to teaching. Through identifying with personal narratives, such as those within this book, international academic staff joining new institutions can reduce anxiety and self-questioning by having an insight into how they are likely to change, or adapt or negotiate their differences. Further, the creation of communities of practice (Wenger 1998), where both international and ‘home’ academics can share their experiences, can prevent isolation, create a shared understanding of the differences and prevent the feelings of ‘othering’. Further, the introduction of mentoring by more experienced international staff of new international staff can ensure that ideas and issues about teaching in a particular country are addressed and that a shared understanding of the pedagogical culture is developed. Finally, in the words of Maja Jankowska in her chapter, we need to remain open and willing to learn from culturally diverse colleagues and students, and accepting risks involved in trying new things and putting ourselves into entirely new and unfamiliar contexts as part of our lifelong learning in the modern world.

References Altbach, P. G., ed. (1996), The International Academic Profession: Portraits of Fourteen Countries, Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

An Introduction

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Altbach, P. G. (2007), Tradition and Transition: The International Imperative in Higher Education, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Coffey, A. (1999), The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity, London: Sage. Denzin, N. K. and Lincoln, Y. (2003), ‘The discipline and practice of qualitative research’, in N. K. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), The Landscape of Qualitative Research. Theories and Issues, 1–43, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ellis, C. (2007), ‘Telling secrets, revealing lives’, Qualitative Inquiry, 13 (1): 3–29. Hosein, A. (2017), ‘Pedagogic frailty and the research-teaching nexus’, in I. M. Kinchin and N. E. Winstone (eds), Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience in the University, 135–149, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Hugo, G. and Morriss, A. (2010), Investigating the Ageing Academic Workforce: Stocktake, Canberra: Universities Australia. Kim, T. (2009), ‘Transnational academic mobility, internationalization and interculturality in higher education’, Intercultural Education, 20 (5): 395–405. Kim, T. (2010), ‘Transnational academic mobility, knowledge, and identity capital’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31 (5): 577–591. Kinchin, I. M., Alpay, E., Curtis, K., Franklin, J., Rivers, C. and Winstone, N. E. (2016), ‘Charting the elements of pedagogic frailty’, Educational Research, 58 (1): 1–23. Méndez, M. (2013), ‘Autoethnography as a research method: Advantages, limitations and criticisms’, Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 15 (2): 279–287. Palmer, P. J. (1998), The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pherali, T. J. (2012), ‘Academic mobility, language, and cultural capital’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 16 (4): 313–333. Postareff, L., Katajavuori, N., Lindblom-Ylänne, S. and Trigwell, K. (2008), ‘Consonance and dissonance in descriptions of teaching of university teachers’, Studies in Higher Education, 33 (1): 49–61. Prosser, M., Ramsden, P., Trigwell, K. and Martin, E. (2003), ‘Dissonance in experience of teaching and its relation to the quality of student learning’, Studies in Higher Education, 28 (1): 37–48. Samuelowicz, K. and Bain, J. D. (2001), ‘Revisiting academics’ beliefs about teaching and learning’, Higher Education, 41 (3): 299–325. Schön, D. A. (1992), ‘The theory of inquiry: Dewey’s legacy to education’, Curriculum Inquiry, 22(2): 119–139. Scott, P. (2010), ‘Challenges for global higher education in the 2020s: What the next decade holds in store’, in M. Kelo (ed.), Beyond 2010: Priorities and Challenges for Higher Education in the Next Decade, 157–162, Bonn: Lemmens. Shulman, L. S. (2005), ‘Signature pedagogies in the professions’, Daedalus, 134 (3): 52–59. Thomas, S. L. and Malau-Aduli, B. S. (2013), ‘New international academics’ narratives of cross-cultural transition’, International Journal of Higher Education, 2 (2): 35–52.

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Universities UK International (2017), International Higher Education in Facts and Figures, London: Universities UK International. Available from: http://www.universitiesuk. ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/International/International_Facts_ and_Figures_2017.pdf (accessed 19 August 2017). Walford, G. (2004), ‘Finding the limits: Autoethnography and being an Oxford University Proctor’, Qualitative Research, 4 (3): 403–417. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Contextualizing the New Teaching Environment Erik Blair London School of Economics, UK

Introduction This chapter focuses on how lecturers might work to rationalize some of the challenges they face as they move from one teaching environment to another. This is done through reflecting on my own experiences of living and teaching in Trinidad and Tobago, and examining how I tried to understand my role in a new teaching environment. Before moving overseas, I had taught in the UK for almost twenty years. I had worked in different institutions: schools, colleges and universities, and, in the years before my move, I had felt somewhat established in my university lecturing role. However, the move to Trinidad and Tobago caused me to look afresh at how I conceptualized and enacted my teaching. The chapter is structured in three parts. The first part focuses on the shock of entering a foreign university. The second part uses Schön’s concept of the ‘Reflective Conversation with the Situation’ to frame my discussion on how I  worked to understand, adjust and reconceptualize my teaching in my new environment. The final part draws together my experiences in this new environment with my ontological and epistemological perspectives and discusses how developing a contextualized understanding of the situation helped me work to overcome some of the challenges I encountered.

The enigma of arrival It was January when I arrived in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The ten-hour flight from Britain had left on a cold, rainy, windy morning, and

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I now walked out into bright sunshine and heat that told me I was wearing the wrong clothes. Everything was new, green, bright and nothing seemed ‘normal’. My interview for the post had been through a combination of application, curriculum vitae and Skype, so this was my first time in Trinidad and Tobago. I had visited the Caribbean before on holiday, but this was different. On holiday, you expect the unfamiliar and you put your normal life on hold – here, I had to consider this to be the new norm and I had to try and make sense of things. Two days later I headed off to work. The walk from the apartment to campus was less than one mile and the sun was baking the morning streets. As I walked through the streets and watched the hustle of traffic, even the flow of traffic seemed different. I had an established idea about how traffic should flow – which vehicles had priority, what horns were for and the segregation of vehicles and pedestrians  – but the traffic here seemed to move in a very different, almost pulsating, way, and this caused me to question something that I had long taken for granted. Upon arriving, I was shown to my windowless office and told that my boss was on study leave for three months. No one quite knew what I was supposed to be doing, and there was no schedule for my induction. I spent my first morning trying to get answers to my many questions: What was I to teach? Who were my students? Did I have a timetable? Where did I get lunch? How did I log on to my computer? Where was the toilet? No one seemed flustered by the fact that there was no structure and that there was a lack of clarity on all these matters. No one seemed to be in a rush to get things sorted out. No one seemed to be guiding/mentoring me. No one seemed to want to ask me questions or bother me. Soon I would realize that this was normal for life in Trinidad and Tobago! The features of my new environment were familiar to me but my initial experience, like my experience of the traffic, was that a university department in Trinidad and Tobago had a very different character. Like most governmental institutions in Trinidad and Tobago, the education system is hierarchical and few decisions are made at the local level (Brown and Conrad 2007). This structure means that autonomy is limited and individuals have learned to await instruction rather than make decisions for themselves (Alfred 2003). Some might see this as the workforce having a poor attitude to labour (Artana et al. 2007) but, in a nation where bosses frequently scold their workers, it is often thought best to do nothing rather than make the wrong decision. Sitting in my office, I did not know all this. I had an expectation that people would want to help me get through my first day. But, as the boss was out of the office, my new colleagues preferred not to make any decisions for fear of being ‘bouffed’ (told off ).

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All universities have an educational purpose, but contextual factors flavour them and flavour the epistemological assumptions of those who develop within them. The university I had left and the university I now entered had a shared ancestor, but had taken different paths in 1962. This meant that, as I  entered the university system of Trinidad and Tobago, I found myself in a system that I could recognize, yet it felt out of date and out of place. I was able to see ‘the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what’ (Schön 1983: 138). European universities have their roots in ‘The Enlightenment’ and were conceptualized as spaces for scholarly enquiry that led to self- and societalactualization (de Ridder-Symoens 2003). This scholarly foundation still exists today and creates tension as British universities attempt to maintain their academic nature, while simultaneously meeting the needs of the job market (Knight and Yorke 2003). However, this tension is not evident in the university system of Trinidad and Tobago. While the debate about the purpose of higher education (HE) in Britain has swung between functionalism and philosophy, and pedagogy has moved from lecturer- to learner-centred, the form and function of HE in Trinidad and Tobago has remained relatively static and relatively unquestioned. Government after government invested in education, but they did so from a position of counting numbers  – more schools, more teachers and more students. More students were university educated but the format of their education was not too dissimilar to that of previous generations (Artana et al. 2007). There was never time to debate the purpose of HE in Trinidad and Tobago; instead, there was a drive for wealth creation, with the university seen as a source of human capital (Tewarie 2011). The twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a ‘multi-ethnic, multireligious society that has emerged from a historical background of slavery and colonialism’ (James 2010: 387). In 1962, Trinidad and Tobago became an independent state, but before that it endured a history of colonization by the French, Spanish, Dutch and British. Colonialism brought enslaved people from Africa and, later, indentureship brought labourers from India  – both groups worked the land and made others rich. Through emancipation, self-governance and independence, the multiform nation of Trinidad and Tobago was born, and its history now shows itself in phenotype, ideology, music, food and, the nation’s biggest event, Carnival. As a new nation, Trinidad and Tobago spent its formative years focused on nation-building with an emphasis on functionality. Palmer (2006) describes how the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago,

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Eric Williams, set about the intellectual decolonization of the nation, and how the early university curriculum focused on the training of workers. But the scars of history have left governmental institutions characterized by colonialism and shrouded in mystery (George, Mohammed and Quamina-Aiyejina 2003), and the education system has been cultivated by a history of centralized and highly partisan politics. Some of my early frustrations with HE practice in Trinidad and Tobago were connected to my habituated expectations. Education reinforces social structures and codes of being (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), and the reciprocal nature of education means that cultural perspectives inform the HE context and the learning outcomes that are generated inform future social norms (Cervero and Wilson, 2001). Because I had never stood outside my own educational journey, I had never realized that I had been socialized by the system, and it was not until I encountered this new situation that my academic identity was made explicit. Initially, I felt a shock. I had come from a HE environment in the UK where the general movement was towards openness – of data, of systems, of working and learning relationships. Everyone was expected to have a basic understanding of the photocopier and everyone was expected to complete their own paperwork. I had been conditioned into believing a specific set of expectations and norms of the teaching and learning environment and had an idea about what pedagogy, management, teamwork and university life should look like. However, the cultural and historical factors that informed the institution I  now entered led to some tension, as I tried to combine the old with the new. The established hierarchies of Trinidad and Tobago meant that management was not used to being questioned; teaching was content-heavy, and students were expected to be passive notetakers (Watson 2013). While I felt that I should do my own photocopying, my administrative colleagues felt that in doing so I was slighting them – so I learned to resist the urge to print, photocopy and staple resources and worked to become comfortable in asking for documents that I was capable of finding for myself.

Understanding the new situation Understanding practice in relation to the space within which it exists is something Schön (1992) calls having a ‘Reflective Conversation with the Situation’. Schön drew on the work of John Dewey – seeing reflection as a creative process where the ‘inquirer does not stand outside the problematic situation, like a spectator; he is in it and in transaction with it’ (Dewey quoted in Schön 1992: 122, original

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emphasis). I was drawn to this perspective, as it suggested a practical approach to understanding my new situation aimed at development through making tacit knowledge explicit. Through having a reflective conversation with the situation, I  was able to examine my previous assumptions and use these as a means of making sense of my new environment. Schön suggests that individuals cultivate their understanding of contextualized teaching through involvement, rehearsal, consideration and deliberation. Here, I use these four concepts as a framework for examining my development within this new teaching environment.

Involvement The first stage of having a reflective conversation with the situation is considering your relationship with the space. This means engaging with the new environment and seeing yourself as part of the context, rather than attempting to be an objective outsider. To understand the new teaching environment, I had to consider my role within the situation and seek to understand my practice through making explicit the many implicit codes of my new context. Trinidad and Tobago is a humid, tropical nation with two seasons – the wet season and the dry season. The temperature does not vary much over the course of the year. Most shops and businesses close on Sundays, and many religious and domestic holidays lead to a total national shutdown. Except for the odd earthquake, life is steady. But the political machinations since independence have not been so steady. Each election brings heated debate on the need for good governance. Promises of transparency and excellence are made by each new government, but the people rarely put their faith in such promises and instead place their trust in the regularities of life  – festivals, religion, alcohol, sport and Carnival. For me, to know what it was to teach in HE in Trinidad and Tobago involved getting to know what it was like to live in Trinidad and Tobago: understanding the context and its impact on people. The concept ‘identity’ encompasses how an individual conceptualizes and presents their many facets and how these are interpreted by others (Gee 2000). I had arrived with a conditioned academic identity, and now realized that this identity was context specific. Previously, I  had felt that my epistemological and pedagogical assumptions were broadly aligned with curricular aims, the way students were conceptualized and the relationships within my academic community but, in my effort to make sense of my new environment, I found that I began to question how I could be effective in a situation that was structurally similar but operated in such a different way. Questions of legitimacy are central

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to the formation of academic identity. We might consider this legitimacy in two forms – intra-legitimacy and extra-legitimacy. In the former, an individual can recognize and value their role and purpose. In the latter, an individual’s role and purpose are validated by others. For me to be effective, I  needed to feel that I  fitted in, and I  needed others to consider that I  was committed to working in a way that was local, specific and useful. I realized that, if I wanted to reduce the tension I felt, I had to stop thinking of myself as a spectator and start conceptualizing myself as part of my environment. By considering my role within my new situation, I was able to purposively localize my practice. Getting to know, and becoming involved in, the customs, ways and manners of the people of Trinidad and Tobago meant that I became enculturated. This process did not lead to me becoming a different type of academic, nor did it lead to fundamental changes in how I  conceptualized teaching and learning, but I was able to fine-tune my practice so that it became more relevant to my new teaching environment.

Rehearsal Once you have become ‘involved’ with the new situation, the next stage in having a reflective conversation with the situation is to work out what can be taken from your previous context and used in the new one. This is a re-imaging, rather than a reuse, of previous working practices in light of the new environment. This means developing a new contextualized practice through synthesizing initial reflections about the new context and making sense of the environment in relation to what you already know. In my previous context, there was a broadly learner-centred approach and learning was conceptualized as joint enterprise, but my first reactions to teaching in Trinidad and Tobago revolved around ‘communication’. Trinidad and Tobago has a semi-established hierarchy of honorifics, such that only those judged to be at the same level dare use someone’s actual name. This system has its roots in the colonial past, but is now seen as an everyday form of politeness and is mainly used to show social position (Mühleisen 2011). Students addressed my Trinbagonian colleagues by their titles  – Dr Inniss, Professor Phillips, and so on. I was not used to being addressed in this way and found it somewhat uncomfortable, but when I asked students to call me ‘Erik’, the best I could get was ‘Dr Erik’. I had felt that using first names would create an interactive atmosphere but, on reflection, I realized that I was actually making my students feel uncomfortable and creating a barrier to communication. Since it was important for me to encourage interaction, I decided my students

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would be more at ease within a familiar framework of communication, and that I should learn to adapt to the local norm. I worked hard to maintain my belief that teaching should enhance learning rather than supply the answers for a test, but I began to realize that students did not feel comfortable in leaving a lecture without having something tangible that they could keep ready for their next assessment. The education system of Trinidad and Tobago broadly embraces rote learning with an eye on summative evaluation; therefore, my students tended to want concrete answers and I found it difficult to persuade them that sometimes there were no clear answers. Teaching for me is about connections, generating ideas and challenging understanding – I enjoy being challenged by students, but students in Trinidad and Tobago are a little more deferential and the system does not expect challenge. There is an expectation in the Caribbean that students should be passive and that learning is about transmission rather than interaction or interrogation, and students can feel a sense of dissonance if they are asked to study in new ways (Alfred 2003). In action, this meant that I had to be blatant in signposting how aspects of a taught session might relate to future assessment and I found myself saying things like, ‘Great point Marc – keep that in mind when you are doing assignment two’. I was familiar with such signposting in the UK teaching environment, but the traditions of HE in the UK meant that concepts such as ‘teaching for the test’ were a source of tension. In Trinidad and Tobago there was no such tension as the curriculum had been deliberately crafted since independence as a means of human resource management. Previously, I had felt that learning was central, and that examinations were a necessary device; in Trinidad and Tobago, this relationship was reversed. Relating my established way of teaching to my new environment meant adapting to meet the needs of my students (something that was aligned with my perspective on education anyway). My process was simple – I learned about the history and culture of the nation; I  learned what was contextually significant; I  considered what would best enhance student learning; I  adapted aspects of my pedagogy, and I  reflected on how well adaptations were received. None of this involved fundamental change; I still tried to challenge, inspire and motivate, and I still felt that my teaching practice was rigorous and valid, but I made pragmatic changes in my signposting of learning, so as to make my practice contextually student-friendly.

Consideration The third stage of having a reflective conversation with the situation involves seeing differences in the old and new environment, but not judging one to be

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better than the other. Through consideration of these differences individuals can work out what the best method might be at any given moment. For me, this meant that I expanded my repertoire – and could actively decide to use old, new or blended pedagogical approaches. An example of how I  came to see difference, without judging one way to be better than the other, comes from my reflections on language use. The language of Trinidad and Tobago is English and I am a native English speaker; however, as in all places, day-to-day language was not Standard English but localized English – Trini. Over the years my language changed as my colleagues osmotically transferred some of the unique local terms, diction and cadence that make up Trini. Knowing (and adopting aspects of) Trinbagonian syntax and grammar was useful, as it meant that I  could learn to distinguish statements from questions  – in Trinidad and Tobago the question ‘Can I?’ is usually reversed, ‘I can?’, so my UK students would interrupt, ‘Can I ask a question?’, and my Trinbagonian students would interrupt, ‘I can ask a question?’ Learning this subtle difference meant that my initial confused look was soon replaced with a more open facial expression that encouraged further dialogue. Reflections on language and figures of speech had two outcomes. First, having a relative understanding of Trini meant a reduction in barriers to communication. Second, my reflections led me to step back and gain a wider appreciation of the role of language in the educational environment. Since I had grown up and taught in the UK, I took many things for granted. Now, at a distance, I could see that the metaphors, similes, ironies and idioms that I had used in the UK may have been barriers to students from other nations, classes, cultures and socio-economic groups, as well as students with specific learning disorders or disabilities. My consideration highlighted the importance of adopting a contextualized approach, allowed me to see the specificity of education, encouraged me to be active in deciding which aspects of the two cultures (my old and new environments) were best suited to particular instances, encouraged me to use a more nuanced/blended pedagogy, and helped me see the bigger picture.

Deliberation The final phase in having a reflective conversation with the situation is ‘deliberation’. This involves taking a holistic perspective and examining the new environment alongside the activity that takes place in it. Once I  had started to understand the history and the people of Trinidad and Tobago, and

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I  had experienced life in my new homeland, I  could better comprehend my professional identity. From having a better understanding of my context, I could better understand and better fulfil my role. From this holistic deliberation of my practice in alignment with my new context, I was able to move away from a simple dualistic conception of ‘normal’ and ‘other’. Through having a more nuanced understanding of the educational context and through seeing myself as part of that context, I  began to reconceptualize myself. I was no longer an outsider, I was now a member of a particular tribe within my institution. For me, the process of understanding my role and function within this new context took time and effort. People in Trinidad and Tobago do not easily give out personal information, and asking too many questions is considered macocious (nosey). This cultural bias towards privacy meant that there was very little transparency in the workplace and, therefore, information always seemed at a distance. I began to realize that the many questions I asked on my first day were culturally unusual; I had been a little too forward, and may have come across as rather demanding. I learned that, to be effective in my workplace, I had to avoid conflict and seek alliances, avoid being too direct, and work to be more relaxed about the national trend towards lateness. Through deliberation, I was better able to appreciate the contextual nature of identity (Clegg 2008) and adapt my conceptualization of teaching to my new environment. I could see that I had been shaped by my previous experiences and that the same was true of my new colleagues. Through having a reflective conversation with the situation, my feelings of otherness reduced, I felt more at home, and I was better able to perform the job I was employed to do.

Developing a contextualized understanding of the situation Through active involvement in the day-to-day life of my new country and engagement with my university colleagues, I worked to recognize the differences between my old and new environments, and, in making these differences explicit to myself, reduced my feelings of otherness. I got to know some of the key social, cultural, political and historical debates that would form the cornerstones of discussion in general day-to-day life and within the learning environment. Exploring and accepting my new context meant that my teaching was more relevant and my examples were contextualized. Food, festivals, holidays, music and national icons form cultural reference points. These reference points become shorthand techniques and are useful tools for making a point or establishing

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an ontological perspective. For example, when we say ‘The Rolling Stones’, ‘The Eiffel Tower’ or ‘The Mona Lisa’, we use shared icons to quickly establish a premise or position. In Trinidad and Tobago, my shorthand teaching tools involved reference to Mas,1 doubles,2 parang3 and liming4. Åkerlind (2007) reports that developing as a university teacher is not just about becoming familiar with what to teach, but also becoming familiar with how to teach. I  would fine-tune Åkerlind’s point and suggest that it is about how to teach in relation to the space in which you find yourself. Until this point, the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpinned my teaching had been largely unexamined. I had a philosophical understanding about what I  thought was the purpose of education but, in examining education at the contextual level, I could better see the significance of the individual in relation to educational outcomes. I began to examine what I thought my role was in this new environment, and I  began to see that investigation into student learning should be grounded in contextualized inquiry into the methodology of teaching (Felten 2013). My experience of settling into my new environment highlighted the importance of academics being scholarly about their practice and the place in which their practice takes place. This scholarship of teaching and learning seeks to discover how teaching can best support learning and for Cranton this must include reflection on ‘the social and institutional norms and expectations that inform and constrain teaching’(2011: 76). In coming to understand my new teaching environment I had gone through such a process – moving to Trinidad and Tobago had started with me questioning my new environment, but eventually led to me examining my established practice and adapting my pedagogy to better suit my new understanding of myself as a practitioner. My adapted practice involved respecting the established communication methods and social graces, signposting learning, building alliances, limiting my use of questioning, using culturally relevant examples in my teaching, and reflecting on how my professional development was enhanced through a heightened awareness of the difference in context. I  am not saying that this was a life-altering existential experience  – it was more of a thoughtful adaptation.

1 2 3 4

A shorthand term for masquerade (Carnival). Common street food made from fried flour pancakes with chickpea filling. Christmas music with Spanish/Latin American origins. Relaxing, hanging out, spending time with friends.

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Conclusion I had developed my academic identity through studying and working in the UK education system. This had happened in such a way, and over such a period of time, that I  did not notice how my environment had sculpted me. But such assumptions were brought to the fore under the hot sun of Trinidad and Tobago. Moving to this new teaching environment had a threefold impact on my pedagogy. Initially, my established ways were highlighted due to the contrast between the old and new contexts. I  then worked to make sense of my practice by trying to understand it in relation to the lived experiences of my students and colleagues. Finally, through considered reflection with my situation, I was able to adopt a more scholarly approach to my teaching that questioned my underlying assumptions and helped me understand how I saw myself as an educator. When I was leaving the UK, I did not have a plan for how I would teach in Trinidad and Tobago. I naively thought that I would simply be doing the job that I already knew but in a different environment. However, over time, as I embraced life and came to know more of the history, culture, politics and day-to-day life of my host nation, I began to notice how I had gone through a staged development. I am not sure that I would call this a strategy but I was certainly deliberate in my attempts to understand my new environment. There will always be a difference between those born and brought up in a place and those who arrive later, and there can be no shortcut to experience. However, if the new arrival simply accepts this otherness, then a disconnect may form between themselves and their new context. For me, the best way to overcome this was to embrace life in Trinidad and Tobago. Getting involved, synthesizing my old and new experiences, accepting differences, and working to understand my place in my new situation led me to develop a contextualized understanding of my new teaching environment. When I  first arrived in Trinidad and Tobago, I felt I knew how to do my job, but I soon learned that teaching is a contextualized activity and that knowing about your environment helps you know about yourself.

References Åkerlind, G. S. (2007), ‘Constraints on academics’ potential for developing as a teacher’, Studies in Higher Education, 32 (1): 21–37.

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Alfred, M. V. (2003), ‘Sociocultural contexts and learning: Anglophone Caribbean immigrant women in U.S. postsecondary education’, Adult Education Quarterly, 53 (4): 242–260. Artana, D., Auguste, S., Moya, R., Sookram, S. and Watson, P. (2007), Trinidad and Tobago: Economic Growth in a Dual Economy, Washington, DC, United States: InterAmerican Development Bank. Brown, L. and Conrad, D. A. (2007), ‘School leadership in Trinidad and Tobago: The challenge of context’, Comparative Education Review, 51 (2): 181–200. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Cervero, R. M. and Wilson, A. L. (2001), Power in Practice: Adult Education and the Struggle for Knowledge and Power in Society, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Clegg, S. (2008), ‘Academic identities under threat?’, British Educational Research Journal, 34 (3): 329–345. Cranton, P. A. (2011), ‘A transformative perspective on the scholarship of teaching and learning’, Higher Education Research and Development, 30 (1): 75–86. de Ridder-Symoens, H. (2003), A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Felten, P. (2013), ‘Principles of good practice in SoTL’, Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 1 (1): 121–125. Gee, J. P. (2000), ‘Identity as an analytic lens for research in education’, Review of Research in Education, 25: 99–125. George, J., Mohammed, J. and Quamina-Aiyejina, L. (2003), ‘Teacher identity in an era of educational reform: The case for Trinidad and Tobago’, Compare, 33 (2): 191–206. James, F. (2010), ‘Learning educational improvement in Trinidad and Tobago’, School Leadership and Management, 30 (4): 387–398 Knight, P. T. and Yorke, M. (2003), ‘Employability and good learning in higher education’, Teaching in Higher education, 8 (1): 3–16. Mühleisen, S. (2011), ‘Forms of address and ambiguity in Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles: Strategic interactions in a postcolonial language setting’, Journal of Pragmatics, 43 (6): 1460–1471. Palmer, C. A. (2006), Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, North Carolina, USA: University of North Carolina Press. Schön, D. A. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, London: Temple Smith. Schön, D. A. (1992), ‘The theory of inquiry: Dewey’s legacy to education’, Curriculum Inquiry, 22 (2): 119–139. Tewarie, B. (2011), ‘The University of the West Indies: Regional tertiary education in the English-speaking Caribbean’, in M. Martin and M. Bray (eds), Tertiary Education in Small States: Planning in the Context of Globalization, 121–132, Paris, France: UNESCO Publishing. Watson, D. (2013), ‘Re-evaluating focus, forum and frontiers within the Academic Writing classroom’, Caribbean Teaching Scholar, 3 (2): 121–137.

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Complexities and Cross-Cultural Challenges of Foreign Lecturers: Personal Narrative Histories in Cameroon and England Henry Asei Kum Liverpool Hope University, UK

Introduction This chapter employs the autobiographical narrative method, also known as personal narrative, in which I explore my own life to capture invisible or hidden physical, verbal, psychological and imaginary territory that characterize my employment in higher education (HE) and transitions from one country to another (Coffey 1999, 2004; Tenni, Smyth and Boucher 2003; Sharkey 2004; Robyn and Haden 2008). I  use the autobiographical narrative to reflect on the complexities of my teaching from Cameroonian universities to European universities (Scotland and England). In order to do this, an interrogation of the trajectories evident in the reconstruction of social and professional identities (Garson 2005; Sachs 2001), while functioning as an academic in Europe are considered. I  begin by providing a Cameroonian background relevant to the establishment of my beliefs and ethos in teaching at university. I proceed to a discussion of the dissonance that such beliefs produce during my employment in European universities that operate on different values to my Cameroonian background. I  employ threshold liminality (Cousin 2006a, 2006b; Land and Meyer 2010) and threat theories (Stephan and Stephan 2000) as lenses to interrogate the various complexities that define my professional self in different HE contexts. The chapter concludes with recommendations and the implications for practice that my journey has on ‘new’ professional emigrants teaching in HE in Europe. Through a discussion of my experiences in these different professional settings, I  seek to assist those who find themselves in similar professional dilemmas, while at the same time engendering empathy and understanding

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among my hosts as they seek to support migrant academics to successfully chart their evolving trajectories of continual self-reinvention and renewal.

Personal and geographic background: Cameroon – sociopolitical and educational context The HE framework in Cameroon is based on a series of educational cycles, reflecting the mostly French origins of this education system. French is the dominant language of instruction in most HE colleges and providers of professional courses. This derives largely from French colonial policy of assimilation and cultural deracination (see Senghor, 1988, to understand the context of ‘deracination’ as the French colonial past). Even after independence, France continues to play a major role in the political, economic and social character of most former colonies. Using French in education and most official life in former French colonies continues to keep ‘francophone’ alive in most citizens of former colonies even after independence (Clark 1993). Like most African countries, Cameroon’s postcolonial picture remains as a legacy of an education system designed to train an elite set of students to service the administrative needs of the colonial power. Two of the ten regions in Cameroon  – the South West and the North West  – formerly colonized by Britain practise the English system of education, while the remaining eight regions practise the French system of education. Although the demand for HE institutions is rising rapidly, a number of qualified professionals have fled the conflicts, persecution, poor working conditions or relocated to other countries as economic migrants, and this has led to a huge brain drain of the HE sector of the country. The negative impact of losing qualified professionals to richer countries has reduced the pool of suitably qualified teaching staff at all levels. This has meant that, typically, one lecturer may cater for a large university lecture session of more than 1000 students. There is less incorporation of technology in teaching and learning, a centralized management and vertical relationships with a top-down approach. Despite the large class sizes, and drawing from my experience as a tutor in Cameroon for over nine years, discipline has been observed to be very high and commendable. The sociocultural background described situates a geographic focus that sustains the beliefs I held about teaching in HE, before I was employed in Scotland and England. I was educated in that system and learned about what I believed to be good practice in HE, by observing lecturers and learning from the practice

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of those I considered to be role models in the art of teaching at university. It is important to clarify that there is no formal teaching qualification that enables a practitioner to teach at the university level in Cameroon. Further, there is little or no expectation for Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Upon graduation with a Diplome d’Enseignment Superieur or Postgraduate Certificate in Education (DIPES), I was recruited to teach at the School of Education (ENS Bambili) in the University of Yaoundé. Although formal teaching qualifications are not needed to teach at university in Cameroon, this professional diploma provided an advantage to be considered for both theoretical and practical phases of teaching in the teacher-training sector. I decided what to teach and how to teach it. My inclination was to follow my beliefs as established by observing those that I considered as the best lecturers when I was a university student in Cameroon. What I  considered ‘good’ practice that characterized my teaching included a teacher- and content-centred approach, where lecturers talked for most of the time and answered few questions from the students. As a result, my approach to teaching at university became defined by a philosophy where the teacher talks and the learners listen. I  taught in HE in Cameroon from 1995 until 2003 before embracing new challenges in Europe. How I  re-construe these peculiar cultural experiences in the current foreign context as a ‘new’ professional emigrant in Europe forms the core of this chapter.

Transition and becoming an academic in Europe (Scotland and England) The shift from teaching in a university in Cameroon to universities in Scotland and England immersed me in trajectories of identity shifts within both pedagogic and cultural contexts. There is evidence of huge cultural and professional differences between HE in the UK (England and Scotland) and HE in Cameroon that posed major challenges for me. Culture threats affect professionals switching from one country to another. Culture, which is ‘the collective programming of mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another’ (Hofstede 1991: 5) can push individuals in a new setting towards cultural shocks normally experienced when setting up and settling into a new country and profession. Every culture has the unspoken rules, cues and inferences that determine normal interactions among members of a particular class, ethnicity or profession. Every culture transmits the ideas, beliefs and values that help to shape the actions and subjective experiences of particular groups or communities, and such ideas

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and values transcend social and cultural differences and help to develop shared meaning and understanding (Hofstede 1991). That should also be the case with mobility in the academic profession, which is generally presented as something positive associated with benefits of labour globalization at various levels (Musselin 2004). It is thus appropriate to state that I experienced some cultural shocks transitioning from an African, French-speaking country to systems of education in Scotland and England. When I arrived in England, the General Teaching Council for England did not recognize my teaching qualification from Cameroon. The Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) is the only qualification recognized to qualify as a secondary school teacher. I had to undertake a PGCE programme at the University of Northampton, which qualified me to teach in England. After completion of the PGCE programme, I  taught in England for three years. Although this was at secondary school level, it helped me to understand the contextual differences within the same profession. My Cameroonian teaching qualifications were redundant, and consequently my beliefs and teaching philosophy were called into question. It reminded me that teaching is culturally informed and differs with contexts. The self-doubt created by my encounter in school teaching made me review my beliefs about teaching in HE. Realizing that there were so many differences and limitations faced by foreign-trained teachers, I felt the need to pursue further studies that led me to undertake a PhD in the sociology of education at the University of Northampton. After gaining employment as a tutor, teaching in a university in the UK constantly reminded me that I was in foreign territory. Universities competed for students through adverts and open days as opposed to Cameroon, where students competed for the few available university places. I  was programmed into review meetings with line managers where CPD programmes, research and pastoral care of students were discussed. I  was allocated a mentor, and targets were set which needed to be reviewed regularly during ‘keeping in touch’ meetings with line managers. My teaching philosophy in Cameroon had been built on the understanding that the lecturer worked individually to meet the needs of his/her students, while in the UK, teaching at university is seen to be shared across a community of practice with checks and balances that ensure parity across the department. I  felt that my professional autonomy was being challenged, and I was, rather, being crafted into being a dependent tutor, who was constantly watched, not only by mentors and line managers, but also by my students. I started to struggle in many aspects of my professional life, and I became hypersensitive to my ‘new’ social, cultural and professional environments, often

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identifying major challenges and complexities that impacted on my professional identity. ‘New’ became a ubiquitous adjective describing the classroom experience between students and myself, each time we met. Beginning with commonplace issues like differences in accent, to more complex professional and contextual challenges like understanding the educational context of the UK across different UK countries (Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland), my desire to teach was replaced by my desire to learn in my new environments.

Realities and challenges in the new settings (Scotland and England) Transition from Cameroon to the UK posed several challenges and led to the renegotiation of my professional identity regarding teaching in HE. I  was recruited as a teaching fellow at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. I taught education studies in the Department of Education from 2005 to 2012. My involvement was with first- and third-year undergraduate students and trainee teachers studying for a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE), which is the equivalent to a PGCE that trainee teachers obtain in England. It is also important to state that I was the only black African tutor in the Department of Education, which had very few international tutors. The awareness of ‘self ’ as ‘the other’ was very evident in language, dress code, approach to teaching, professional expectations, and relationships with students and colleagues. There were many challenges in this role in a new setting, but my focus in the following section is on aspects of the profession that I struggled most with, and which also affected me directly and led to a shift in the way I approached my role as a tutor in Scotland and England.

Teaching and learning approaches Seeing students marching into lectures with iPads and laptops and becoming more focused on this equipment than on the lecture itself made me nervous, as I imagined that students were evaluating me through access to the information that they could obtain from various search engines. That was my first week in Scotland; I had not only arrived from a French-speaking country but from Cameroon, which had a diametrically opposed culture to the Scottish way of life. That perception often censored what I said, the pace of my lectures and the area of emphasis, with a continual self-evaluation of every utterance or action

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that I made (see Harashim, 2011, on self-evaluation in teaching). Whenever I asked a question, students would immediately check the responses using their digital equipment and shout out the answers. This was hardly a challenging activity as search engines provided ready responses. This experience created self-doubt and left me worried, especially when I  had to teach materials prepared by another lecturer in a different discipline. For example, at my next position at Liverpool Hope University, education studies was divided into four disciplines: the philosophy of education, the sociology of education, the history of education and the psychology of education. Each discipline had subject experts; however, they were expected to teach not only their own specialist area but also across other disciplines. I should clarify that teaching education studies meant that one could be called upon to deliver a lesson in philosophy of education or psychology of education  – even if one was an expert in the sociology of education, which in this case was my field. It was a huge challenge for a foreign tutor struggling with the English language, especially its accent, and at the same time being expected to teach students who are native speakers in a discipline outside their specialization and to teach a lesson planned by another lecturer. I started embracing myself as a generalist rather than a tutor in sociology of education. In order to embrace this change, I  had to attend lectures in the other disciplines. I  observed colleagues from the other disciplines. I attended seminars and conferences to listen to experts from different disciplines, and spent time reading publications in the other disciplines. I developed a much more collaborative approach by discussing the resources to be taught with the discipline experts before delivering the lectures. However, this adaptation came at a cost, as I  developed more interest in the other disciplines and fell behind in keeping up to date with developments in my own discipline. The difference in education contexts between Cameroon and Scotland and England was another challenge. The Cameroonian context required direct communication in a teacher-led teaching style. However, in Scotland and England students led the teaching process in a student-centred pedagogic approach. I  was required to shift from content-based teaching to an interactive student-centred teaching and learning. In order to be confident in embracing this change, I set myself CPD targets in active learning and communicative teaching approaches, as well as in using interactive strategies in classroom teaching. I  also observed more experienced colleagues, who were a product of the English education system. At Liverpool Hope University, peer observation is an integral part of teaching and learning policy, and the professional dialogues before, during and after

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peer observation enhance development and sharing of good practice, and help in the interrogation of one’s own practice as well as that of others. At this new institution, I had to undertake a further qualification, a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP), which is intended to prepare tutors for teaching in HE. The PGCAP course provided tasks, simulation exercises and strategies in interactive teaching and managing seminars, tutorials and lectures in line with the curriculum delivery model that operates at Liverpool Hope University. This changed my teaching approach to a much more hands-on and participatory teaching and learning approach (Alvesson 2002; Baume, Martin and Yorke 2003). I have been able to reconceptualize learning as a situated practice, defined by different contexts all aimed at negotiating learning and outcomes. As a result, I  have developed learning programmes built on a renegotiated professional philosophy about learning, as a negotiated process that supports the interests and transformative processes of learners and related stakeholders (Gravestock 2008). Such collaborative partnerships have shaped my contextualization and application of learning to practice (Butcher, Davies and Highton 2006; Campbell and Ryan 2007; Saunders, 2014). Teaching becomes a process where learning is negotiated between the teacher and the learner, thereby highlighting employability and graduate qualities, as well as academic literacies in our students (Cowan 2006; Biggs and Tang 2007). As Moore, Walsh and Risquez (2007) point out, teaching becomes an art that is constructed around the parameters of research-informed application of knowledge, with lecturers teaching specialized areas in which they are research active. This contrasts sharply with practice in Cameroonian universities where one lecturer could teach over 1000 students in one classroom designed for 700 students, often positing an omnipresent, omnipotent knowledge-owner and knowledge-producer identity that is passed onto the students (Freire 1970). However, my experiences in both contexts has made it easier for me to argue that an eclectic approach to teaching, where the lecturer draws from all teaching approaches/styles (teacher-centred, studentcentred, content-centred etc.), is more appropriate to meet the needs of different lessons, class sizes and course objectives. Through threshold liminality theory, the different journeys of my experience show the professional becoming a novice by virtue of being caught between two cultures (Cousin 2006a; 2006b; Land and Meyer 2010). Cousin (2006a) refers to the challenges of negotiating cultural dilemmas as the threshold liminality effect. Transition becomes routed into an unstable state, often likened to that which adolescents inhabit –‘not yet adults; not quite children’

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(139)  – but phased into an instability that provides no stable ‘fences’. Even the mobile expert becomes a novice, a learner caught betwixt and between two cultures, where previously acquired knowledge becomes almost irrelevant and which places the new arrival in a position of self-doubt that poses as a main challenge in the new environment. The process of becoming a new migrant academic from Cameroon in Scotland and England became fraught with such challenges that I had to doubt myself, and my previous professional identity became redundant. I doubted if I knew the subject matter; I doubted if I could teach what I knew to the students and I doubted my position in the new system. It provided instabilities that required a new journey to regain mastery of my HE expertise.

Assessment and feedback challenges Angelo and Cross reported that ‘in the 1990’s educators and assessment researchers were striving to provide answers to two fundamental questions: (1) how well students are learning? (2)  How effectively teachers are teaching?’ (1993:  11). Drawing from this, a major challenge for me remained, as to how to make assessments inclusive of the needs of all learners from diverse backgrounds – disabilities, or those with English as an additional language and those with other different cultural needs (as elaborated in Haines 2004 and Macdonald and Savin-Baden 2004). Perhaps, variations in assessments types (seen or unseen exams, posters, reports, oral presentations etc.) sometimes accommodate the needs of different students. This was in sharp contrast to my teaching in Cameroon, where there is one assessment for all students, without regard to their individual needs and ability and where unseen exams are the norm. Assessments in Cameroon were often marked by one teacher teaching the course, and the results were often unchallenged. The fact that another tutor has to second mark an assessment piece that I had marked, the fact that there was a moderation process to agree on an acceptable evidence-based grade, the prospect of an internal and external examiner and the fact that students could question the grade that I awarded them were initially strange practices that challenged my professional authority when teaching in Scotland and England. Nevertheless, after an exploration of the merits of these processes, it turned out to be a more transparent, democratic assessment approach that provided checks and balances (Suurtamm et al. 2010). One other aspect of the assessment process is the role of feedback before, during and after assessments. Black et al. (2003) indicate that feedback simply establishes which qualities meet the established criteria and which ones

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do not fit in, and the grade indicates how good or bad a learner is. This often defined my perception of feedback in Cameroon. The challenge in Europe, for me, was to embrace and negotiate the ‘new’ feedback pedagogy. Deborah and Haydn (2009) sum up the feedback pedagogy to be one that recognizes that for assessment to have a meaningful impact on pupils’ learning, feedback is crucial, so that pupils are aware of what they have done, where they did well, where they have made mistakes and what they might do to address the shortcomings. In addition, feedback does not only influence the opportunity of doing better next time but also students’ learning attitude. Deborah and Haydn (2009) suggest tutors should provide developmental feedback, where areas of strengths are emphasized as well as areas for further development highlighted. I had to embark on CPD seminars and discussions in team meetings and, as mentioned previously, I  completed the PGCAP in order to reposition my perception of feedback. This repositioning was required in order to understand the policies and career profile of being an academic in Scotland and England; in order to understand the students’ experience, the research culture, assessments, feedback and the delivery of courses to reflect not just forms and structure, but academic literacies as well as graduate qualities. These become what Land and Meyer refer to as ‘insights towards a mastery of the transitional status’ that help to constantly lead to reflection on one’s professional identities, thereby underpinning learning as ‘both affective and cognitive and that involves identity shifts which can entail troublesome and unsafe journeys’(2010: 67). The journey attempts at settlement while expectations from host community members become unsettling, requiring a persistent shift in identity. Cousin adds that ‘there is no simple passage in learning from “easy” to “difficult”; mastery of a threshold concept often involves messy journeys back, forth and across conceptual terrain’ (2006b:  139). The academic’s experiences are analysed and evaluated in both fixed and fleeting liminal states, and their actions and motives are influenced accordingly. As a ‘new’ academic, I am analysed in accordance with my situation on the threshold of society, thereby presenting an interesting liminal situation between being an academic as an expert professional and a novice learner in transition.

Research-informed teaching (RIT) and the research excellence framework (REF) Teaching was made more difficult due to more complex value-laden words and concepts in England and Scotland that informed classroom pedagogy and

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proved to be a huge challenge. One such concept was ‘Research-Informed Teaching’ (RIT), which is a recognition of a paradigm shift in teaching at university level, where the emphasis has moved to how lecturers use their research to inform their teaching as well as how students actively make sense of what they are taught rather than simply assimilating hard facts in a passive manner. In order to embrace this shift, I  had to encourage students to become active enquirers, where the importance of the reciprocal relationship between teaching and research in enhancing the students’ learning experience is recognized (Race 2005). Teaching becomes research-led, research-oriented, research-based and research-tutored (Butcher, Davies and Highton 2006; Cowan 2006; Biggs and Tang 2007). I had been immersed into a system of unpacking content material to silent listeners in a Cameroonian context. Even without formal induction, training and CPD provisions, my classroom approach in the UK was expected to have students taught in an engaging and challenging manner – in a manner that should have their subject knowledge kept up to date and their research and evaluation skills developed to better equip them for the challenges of their future careers (Griffiths 2004; Brew 2006). According to the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for HE (an independent body entrusted with monitoring and advising on standards and quality in HE in the UK ), a graduate should have the ability to harness and use established techniques of analysis and enquiry in their respective disciplines, and this can only be enforced by academics as active researchers. This challenge led me to another bigger challenge, embedded in the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF, the system for assessing the quality of research in UK HE institutions). The pressure inherent in obligatory participation in the REF exercise could be seen as the duty of the academic to the institution’s research agenda and the academic’s commitment to the needs of the students. There is sometimes a clear distinction between what one’s research activities and interests are, and the courses that are taught to the students, raising significant questions as to how much time should be taken away from the classroom and students’ support to writing non-course related research papers that have no connection with the students. Bowring (2008), Wells (2013), Jump (2013) and Murphy and Sage (2014) have shown a number of academics’ dissatisfaction with the workings of the REF, pointing to its potentially divisive and morale-sapping nature. In Cameroon, my interest in research was about what was relevant to my teaching and not necessarily about being boxed into a research structure relevant only to meet the criteria of inclusion in REF-like exercises (Townsend 2012). My concern is echoed by Watermeyer, who also sees the REF process ‘as

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an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketization of HE, and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the production of new knowledge’ (2014: 1). The pressures of playing the REF game places an increasing burden on research and administration, taking away a huge amount of time from students who are at university to be taught and supported. This is why Giroux qualified HE as under the onslaught of a merciless economic Darwinism and theatre of cruelty that has emerged since the 1980s, the historical legacy of the university as a public good no longer fits into a revamped discourse of progress in which the end goal is narrowed to individual survival rather than the betterment of society as a whole. (2011: 147)

Like Watermeyer (2014) and Giroux (2011), I  have continued to find REF a challenge that increases the distance between myself and my students but narrows the gap between myself and the institution’s authorities in meeting their ends of ‘merciless economic Darwinism’ as just summarized by Giroux. University authorities are ready and able to stretch their teaching staff to meet REF expectations in order to provide the university with the associated benefits of good REF results. This occurs simultaneously when expectation on excellent teaching and student satisfaction is significant. The REF exercise has increased my research profile and enabled me to multitask, although it has also made me be a ‘Jack of all trades but master of none’. In Cameroon, as with most French education systems, research is optional in universities and rather devolved to research centres within universities, where the researchers are not necessarily academics.

Students’ satisfaction and the national student survey (NSS) There is widespread interest in the quality of undergraduate education in the UK; the NSS results play an important role in helping students make informed decisions about where and what to study. In the NSS survey, students are asked to provide feedback on what it has been like to study on their course at their institution. There is no doubt that the NSS plays a huge role in shaping the classroom approaches and methods of teachers, especially after the implementation of tuition fees. From my experience as a student and tutor in Cameroon, it is possible to conclude that the culture in Cameroon puts the teachers above the students, and students are not considered to have the required resources to make objective judgements about the professional

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competence of academics, who are considered to be well read. This culture shaped my professional identity of a teacher always being ahead of the students in matters of content, method and professional judgement. The challenge to me as a migrant academic was on how to draw the balance between keeping students happy and maintaining standards of good practice like attendance, course work, assignments and course expectations. The overarching question that often sprang to mind when I  learned that students were going to evaluate my course was, how many students had I made uncomfortable by the strict implementation of university guidelines on discipline. Issues like asking students not to use their mobile phones in class, stopping students from accessing social media sites during lectures, refusing to grant assignment extensions and refusing to authorize unjustified absences, among others, always placed the academic and the student at odds with each other. Unlike in Cameroon, students in Scotland and England considered themselves as adults who were above eighteen, and should not be told what to do or should not be challenged or disciplined if they failed to comply with university regulations. I use the word ‘discipline’, because in Cameroon students are actively punished if they disobey a tutor and this can even lead to dismissal from the university. The feeling has always been that a misinterpretation of one of such issues could lead to negative comments on course evaluation, especially on the questions of ‘Teaching on my course’ and ‘Overall satisfaction’, which are two key areas in the NSS. Colleagues have questioned students’ responses in the NSS survey and drawn conclusions that indicate that some answers are based on one bad experience or dissatisfaction with one tutor or with having had a bad day. Balancing university policies, fairness and compromise to students played on my mind whenever the thought of course evaluation came into play. The fact that the NSS is a written set of questions poses further problems: students could actually misunderstand the question; students could have a bad day on the day they are asked to fill out the questionnaire; students could actually plan to target a course tutor who they considered had been strict with them; students who have irregular attendances and who are disinterested in the course also undertake the evaluation and might just portray a wrong image that will define the professional standing of that course tutor. In addition, the outcome would impact on the individual course evaluation as well as the institutional ranking in the National League Tables. Although this dilemma has helped me to be able to balance fairness and firmness, I am still unable to determine whether the course evaluation results are a true reflection of how good or bad I am in my teaching.

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There is no available research into the objectivity of this practice. There has been some joy in also being evaluated by colleagues where the process is nonthreatening and leads to further discussions on areas of good practice. It is worth noting that there is no course evaluation process in Cameroon, and when I was a student and tutor in Cameroon, there was no peer observation. Tutors defended the quality of their course delivery based on how many students passed and how many students scored higher grades. This could not be considered as an effective way of evaluating a course and sharing good practice, because factors other than good delivery and engagement could lead to better grades. Not that I  am particularly questioning the value of course evaluation instruments. I am not against opinions from students on how they feel about the course that they pay for. The more fundamental issue is the struggle of positioning my cultural identity from Cameroon to Scotland and England in what I refer to as the new context of professional practice as prescribed by the new community of practice. When you are new and ‘different’ in any setting, every small detail matters in how you reconcile your difference, in order to avoid being continuously seen as the ‘other’. The challenge here was not simply how I  negotiated my new identities, but also how I  came to terms with my own experience of hybridity and multiple belongings (Tololyan, Waltraud and Alfonso 2004). Identity is significant in discourse about assimilation and integration, and this raises conflict within the concept of ‘structural versus identificational integration’ as described by Lucassen (2005). While structural integration can be measured more or less objectively by mapping social mobility, school results, housing patterns and so on, identificational integration is subjective and refers to how migrants and their offspring keep on regarding themselves as primarily different to the extent that they are viewed as ‘primarily different by the rest of society’ (Tololyan, Waltraud and Alfonso 2004:  2). Hopkins uses the metaphor of ‘blue square’ being a square and being blue to elaborate the dilemma of identity shifts and to assert the fact that the feelings of ‘otherness and difference’ can be either ‘enforced upon one through others or through personal choice’ (2007: 72). The cultural as well as professional orientation shifts of this black Francophone Cameroonian–African academic in a Scottish or English university shows these complex layers. Subscription to the fluidity of identities (see postmodernist investigations of identity in Hall 1996; Brah 2007; Parekh 2007; Wetherell and Laflèche 2007) and its multifaceted nature, viewed as being about belonging, based on the recognitions of what is shared with some people and what is different with others, is very important to how debates in academic settings

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can evolve. As a result, Integrated Threat Theory will argue that intercultural relations will be simpler and more rewarding the closer the two groups are and more fraught with misunderstandings, cultural shocks and anxiety, the greater the distance (Stephan and Stephan 2000; Ward, Bochner and Furnham 2001). Integrated Threat Theory presupposes realistic threats, symbolic threats, intergroup anxiety and negative stereotyping (see Harrison and Peacock 2010). Fear of causing offence, fear of racism, lack of differentiation between individuals, work orientation and language skills, and absence of shared cultural reference points, among other challenges, pose a significant threat to societal harmony. And the ‘new’ professional becomes engrossed in conflicts of ‘being new’ and dilemmas in being regarded as a ‘professional novice’ that threaten confidence and complicate the transition process.

Conclusion, reflections and recommendations The analysis of my own autobiographical narrative on my transition from Cameroon to Scotland and England revitalizes my life lived in the context of intercultural and cross-border teaching in HE. My account not only helps me glimpse and reflect on the conditions that have led to the emergence of the multiple identities of an international tutor and the nature of these identities but, by articulating them, I am also connecting the individual nuanced challenges I faced. While it may be important for overseas academics wishing to teach in a European country to rethink their pre-exile practices and investigate the host country’s education system, curricula and the teaching philosophies and behaviours that they are most likely to encounter; HE institutions need to invest in developing the experiences of foreign academics and providing them with robust induction programmes, CPD programmes, mentoring, and support programmes to enable them settle into their new roles and environment (Colbeck 2008). I  am aware that not all university web pages provide detailed information about the country and teaching culture. It is important to read these websites as a starting point, talk to the programme director and decide on training needs that should be addressed as the academic starts the journey in their new country. New arrivals need to be proactive and discuss these training needs with their line managers, who should ensure that these needs are met. I failed to make these enquiries and as a result my induction phase was more generic than particular to my needs. Not all CPD

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programmes proposed by the university are relevant to the immediate needs of the new arrival. Advising the CPD providers of gaps in the integration and ‘fitting in’ process may help to create training opportunities that could lead to a minimization of challenges that the new international academic would face. Universities need to be investing in international academics as much as they invest in new international students. The absence of a mastery of local concepts and philosophies, the pressure of administration and time management in an increasingly REF-driven context and student experience parameters (NSS, assessment feedback etc.), among other factors, often lead to cultural and professional stresses. James argues that ‘for most people entering teaching, the unpredictability of the classroom is likely to challenge a sense of ontological security exploring new practices often leads initially to a sense of inadequacy and loss of control . . .’ (1997: 22; see also Giddens, 1991). In line with Giddens, the difficulty of understanding the assessment systems, the classroom pedagogy, and the REF exercise made me feel inadequate and gave me a sense of a loss of control. Although I had considerable teaching experience from Cameroon, including in HE, there was little space for this experience to be integrated into the new system simply because the authorities were ignorant of what cultural and social capital I had brought with me. It was easier for me to conclude that the authorities in the new system could not determine how relevant it was for me to maintain some form of continuity rather than being expected to start from scratch (Brew 2006; Hall and Burns 2009; Brew and Peseta 2009). One other tool that is often utilized to ‘fit in’ when in a new setting is the availability of mentors. The assumption here is that your mentor is more experienced than you are. That assumption needs to be challenged, because the mentor might not have worked in different cultural settings and, as a result, may not understand your difficulties. Experience is also relative, as the experience of the ‘new’ academic professional in their home country might not be recognized. It is important that the new arrival reflects on their new contexts, produces a list of areas where mentoring could be beneficial to them and discusses this with the mentor. These are the areas where mentoring should focus on in order to enable a successful transition and integration in the new system. This negotiated pathway may expose the limitations of the appointed mentor in the mentee’s areas of need, which would lead to further opportunities being explored in the right direction where the needs of the mentee could be met. I also found it useful for the mentee to interrogate the diversity among colleagues in the department and wider university and build a relationship with somebody with similar

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circumstances – someone who could become a critical friend or an unofficial mentor, who might come from a similar background or who is an international academic who might have experienced similar transitional challenges. Another consideration is for the new arrival to be able to engage in reflective practice. It is important that colleagues know their strengths and credits from their previous background that are useful to the new system. This offers an opportunity for the new arrival to be useful and recognized from the onset, and it can build confidence to recognize oneself as a valuable member of a community of practice. A sense of loss increases when the new arrival is made to feel that they are starting as freshers, whereas their journey is a continuation from experiences they have gathered in previous education systems. I have been able to draw from teaching strategies that I built up in Cameroon, integrate that in my teaching in Scotland and in England, and shared this with colleagues. It is important to note that an eclectic approach to teaching that combines different teaching approaches is essential because learners are not homogenous but culturally diverse. Lee (2009) notes that an eclectic approach could serve as an enabler that does not only value pre-exile social and cultural capitals but also powerfully convey the cultural and personal transformations involved in ‘becoming an alien’ in a foreign setting. This self-narrative also shows how I  have mediated the multiple identities emerging during transition from teaching in one cultural context to another, and how deconstructing the label of being ‘new’ is a process of self-empowerment and reconstruction of oneself as a flexible and reflexive human being. International academics are constantly creating space for agency and become driven by a desire to become a successful ‘insider’ in their profession in the new setting. As seen from the narrative, international academics have to move beyond roles and methods inherited in their previous professional settings to exploring new knowledge, approaches, cultures and expectations in their new settings. This requires a process of negotiating and renegotiating identity-change and multiple identities within the context of transnationalism. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation’(1987: 4), along a seemingly nomadic trajectory in order to counterbalance an inside-out dynamic in relation to social and cultural structures in different worlds.

References Alvesson, M. (2002), Understanding Organisational Culture, London: Sage.

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Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P. (1993), Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd edn, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Baume, C., Martin, P. and Yorke, M. (2003), Managing Educational Development Projects, London: Kogan Page. Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2007), Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does, 3rd edn, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B. and William, D. (2003), Assessment for Learning: Putting it into Practice, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bowring, R. (2008), ‘Pressure to publish is hurting universities’, The Guardian, 5 June. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/jun/05/ highereducation (accessed 12 June 2012). Brah, A. (2007), ‘Non-binarised identities of similarity and difference’, in M. Wetherell, M. Lafleche and R. Berkeley (eds), Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion, 136–145, London: Sage. Brew, A. (2006), Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brew, A. and Peseta, T. (2009), ‘Supervision development and recognition in a reflexive space’, in D. Boud and A. Lee (eds), Changing Practices of Doctoral Education, 126– 140, London: Routledge. Butcher, C., Davies, C. and Highton, M. (2006), Designing Learning: From Module Outline to Effective Teaching, Abington: Routledge. Campbell, A. and Ryan, L. S., eds, (2007), Learning, Teaching and Assessing in Higher Education: A Reflective Approach, Oxford: Learning Matters. Clark, R. B. (1993), The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, Oxford: University of California Press. Coffey, A. (1999), The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Coffey, A. (2004), ‘Autobiography’, in M. S. Lewis Beck, A Bryman and T. F. Liao (eds), The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Social Science Research Methods, 46–47, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Colbeck, C. L. (2008), ‘Professional identity development theory and doctoral education’, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 113: 9–16. Cousin, G. (2006a), ‘An introduction to threshold concepts’, Planet,17: 4–5. Cousin, G. (2006b), ‘Threshold concepts, troublesome knowledge and emotional capital: An exploration into learning about others’, in J. H. F. Meyer and R. Land (eds), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, 134–147, Abingdon: Routledge. Cowan, J. (2006), On Becoming an Innovative University Teacher: Reflection in Action, 2nd edn, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Deborah, C. and Haydn, M. (2009), ‘Assessment options in higher education’, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 34 (2): 127–140. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. Garson, B. (2005), ‘Teaching abroad: A cross-cultural journey’, Journal of Education for Business, 80 (6): 322–326. Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2011), Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University, London: Pluto Press. Gravestock, P. (2008), Inclusion and Diversity: Meeting the Needs of All Students (Key Guides for Effective Teaching in Higher education), Abingdon: Routledge. Griffiths, R. (2004), ‘Knowledge production and research – teaching nexus: The case of the built environment disciplines’, Studies in Higher Education, 29: 709–726. Haines, C. (2004), Assessing Students’ Written Work: Marking Essays and Reports, London: Routledge. Hall, L. and Burns, L. (2009), ‘Identity development and mentoring in doctoral education’, Harvard Educational Review, 79: 49–70. Hall, S. (1996), ‘What is this black in black popular culture?’, in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds), Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 468–478, London and New York: Routledge. Harashim, L. (2011), Learning Theory and Online Technologies, London: Routledge. Harrison, N. and Peacock, N. (2010), ‘Cultural distance, mindfulness and passive xenophobia: Using Integrated Threat Theory to explore home higher education students’ perspectives on “internationalisation at home” ’, British Educational Research Journal, 36 (6): 877–902. Hofstede, G. (1991), Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, London: McGraw-Hill. Hopkins. P. (2007), ‘Blue square, proper muslims and transnational networks. narratives of national and religious identities among young muslim men living in Scotland’, Ethnicities, 7 (1): 61–81. James, P. (1997), ‘Stress in a career transition’, Australian Journal of Education, 41 (1): 5–26. Jump, P. (2013), ‘Ding dong: Impact “chaos” lurks on the doorstep’, Studies in Higher Education, 4 (2): 199–214. Land, R. and Meyer, J. H. F. (2010), ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Dynamics of assessment’, in R. Land, , J. H. F. Meyer and C. Baillie, 2nd edn, Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning, 61–79, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Lee, S. (2009), ‘Becoming an alien’, Iowa Journal of Communication, 41 (1): 31–51. Lucassen, L. (2005), The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1880. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Macdonald, R. and Savin-Baden, M. (2004), A Briefing on Assessment in Problem Based Learning, LTSN Generic Centre Assessment Series, no. 13, York: Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN).

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Moore, S., Walsh, G. and Risquez, A. (2007), Teaching at College and University: Effective Strategies and Key Principles, Maidenhead: Open University. Murphy, T. and Sage, D. (2014), ‘Perceptions of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2014: A media analysis’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 36 (6): 603–615. Musselin, C. (2004), ‘Towards a European academic labour market? Lessons drawn from empirical studies on academic mobility’, Higher Education, 48: 55–78. Parekh, B. (2007), ‘The cultural particularity of liberal democracy’, Political Studies, 40 (S1): 160–175. Race, P. (2005), Making Learning Happen: A Guide for Post-Compulsory Education, London: Sage. Robyn, F. and Haden C. A., eds, (2008), Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, Mahwah NJ: Taylor and Francis. Sachs, J. (2001), ‘Teacher professional identity: Competing discourses, competing outcomes’, Journal of Education Policy, 16, 149–161. Saunders, M. (2014), The Use and Usability of Research Outputs: Making a Difference, Higher Education Close Up Conference, Lancaster, University, 21 June–3 July. Available online: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/hecu7/docs/ThinkPieces/ saunders.pdf (accessed 10 July 2016). Senghor, S. L. (1988), Ce que je crois: Négritude, francité, et civilisation de l’universel, Paris: Grasset. Sharkey, J. (2004), ‘Lives stories don’t tell: Exploring the untold in autobiographies’, Curriculum Inquiry, 34: 495–512. Stephan, W. and Stephan, C. (2000), ‘An integrated threat theory of prejudice’, in S. Oskamp (ed.), Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination, 23–46, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Suurtamm, C., Koch, M. and Arden, A. (2010), ‘Teachers’ assessment practices in mathematics: Classrooms in the context of reform’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 17 (4): 399–417. Tenni, C., Smyth, A. and Boucher, C. (2003), ‘The researcher as auto biographer: Analysing data written about oneself ’, The Qualitative Report, 8 (1): 1–12. Tololyan, K, Waltraud, K and Alfonso, C., eds, (2004), Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, London and New York: Routledge. Townsend, T. (2012), ‘The publication game: Acceptable and not-acceptable in the British REF exercise’, International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 15 (1): 421–435. Ward, C., Bochner, S. and Furnham, A. (2001), The Psychology of Culture Shock, Abington, UK: Routledge. Watermeyer, R. (2014), ‘Issues in the articulation of “impact”: The responses of UK academics to “impact” as a new measure of assessment’, Studies in Higher Education, 39 (2): 359–377.

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Wells, P. (2013). ‘The REF will strangle our vibrant academic community: It will alter morale, academic valuation of our work and the way in which we do it’, Impact of Social Sciences [Blog]. Retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/ 2012/01/23/ref-will-strangle-academia/ (accessed 18 August 2017). Wetherell, M. and Laflèche, M., eds, (2007), Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

4

Cultural Shock of an International Academic: From a Liberal Arts Education in the United States to a Post-1992 University in the UK Jennifer Chung St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK

Introduction My academic journey from the United States of America to the UK began with my studies in the United States and continued with my study and subsequent employment at English universities. Despite the consistency of language used in these two countries, I faced significant professional culture shock, one especially striking between an elite liberal arts institution in the United States and a post-1992, ‘modern’, or ‘new’ university in the UK. This chapter documents my journey across the Atlantic, the culture shock, and the subsequent resolution. Learning, in its purest form, broadens minds with the active pursuit of knowledge. Liberal arts education, a descendant of the modern universities in Europe, upholds the philosophy of traditional learning. Liberal arts institutions support the holistic development of a human being. While rare in its truest form in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this vestige of higher learning for learning’s sake still exists in the United States (Chung 2004). Shunning preprofessionalism, these institutions urge students to choose their own curriculum, encourage interdisciplinary thought and critical thinking (ibid.) rather than preparing students for a specific career. Interestingly, many employers in the United States actively seek those with a liberal arts education, even though the potential employees do not regularly pursue study directly related to their future careers (ibid.).

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In contrast, most institutions of higher education (HE) do not adhere to this philosophy. In recent years, the connection between education and a country’s economy has gathered more importance. For example, a strong economy is often associated with a successful education system; on the other hand, a country with a weak economy could attribute this to a faulty education system (Tobin, Hsueh and Karasawa 2009). Education, therefore, is seen as essential for economic development (e.g. Moutsios, 2009). Politicians and education policymakers increasingly stress the importance of education’s connection with a country’s economy and a university graduate’s immediate contribution to the labour market. Budget constraints in HE have led to favouring career-orientated disciplines over traditional ones, assuming, or fearing, that classical subjects and humanities do not prepare the modern student to best perform as an asset in the labour market. I speculate that high tuition fees in both the UK and in the United States add to this pressure in these two countries. While all universities need to attract a student body, newer institutions, especially, must compete for students; part of this involves employment prospects after graduation. In the UK, these new institutions are referred to as a ‘post-1992 university’, ‘modern university’, or ‘new university’ (Read, Archer and Leathwood 2003: 263) established under the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, expanding university provision in the UK. Post-1992 universities ‘have tended, however, to continue to be regarded as of lower status than the more traditional, older universities’ (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003:  613). These post-1992 universities have had to typically carve out their own niche within the HE framework in the UK. The emphasis on employability after HE has more gravitas at post-1992 universities, which contrasts greatly with the ethos behind the liberal arts tradition. While the Act of 1992 immediately awarded former polytechnics in the UK university status, post-1992 universities also include institutions that were not polytechnics, often colleges (in the UK sense) of HE. Both Liverpool Hope University and my current place of employment are post1992 institutions that were not polytechnics. In this chapter, post-1992 refers to ‘new’ and ‘modern’ universities in the UK. As the terms new and modern are relative, post-1992 is used for clarity. The liberal arts tradition has connections to HE in the Old World, meaning Europe, as well as American culture and values. This chapter gives some background and information about liberal arts education in the United States, the basis of my own undergraduate education, and its stark contrast with my first academic job in the UK at a post-1992 university. I  found the notion of ‘liberal arts’ is often misinterpreted or misunderstood outside the United

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States. As stated previously, I  experienced a significant culture shock from attending an elite liberal arts institution in the United States to working at a post-1992 university in the UK. To add to this contrast and culture shock, my postgraduate education in the UK, and first experience of HE in the UK, was based at Oxford University. My first employment opportunity as an academic made me realize that the Oxbridge culture, that of the two elite institutions of HE in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge universities, is not indicative of UK tertiary education in general. Perhaps some of the culture shock originated not only from the differences of HE between the United States and the UK, but also between elite HE institutions and one that was just beginning its journey as a full establishment of HE. In this chapter I discuss first the two settings which provide the basis of this culture shock, American and English HE, with some background on the liberal arts tradition. Next, the chapter delves into three areas of my culture shock, curriculum, assessment, and external evaluation, as these were areas of the most significant and startling difference in my experience in the United States and in the UK. Finally, the chapter concludes with my resolution of these differences among HE institutions on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Comparison of setting In order to provide a more meaningful contrast between the elite liberal arts college in the United States and the post-1992 university in the UK, this section provides some background on these two institutions. Amherst College, founded in 1821, has a tiny student enrolment of 1,600 students, and is located in western Massachusetts. The college hopes to provide its students with an excellent education in a personal atmosphere. The college believes: Our purpose, after all, is not to fill your mind with a lifetime supply of knowledge – an impossible undertaking – but to lead you to analyze evidence for yourself … According to a tradition as old as Socrates, these goals are best achieved through conversations – direct interchanges with experienced teachers skilled at asking challenging questions. Education in this tradition – the liberal arts tradition  – is necessarily a personal, face-to-face experience, not a massproduced one, (Amherst 2003:12).

The Open Curriculum marks another of Amherst’s unique characteristics. Students, with the help of their advisors, choose their own course of academic

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action, therefore ensuring that each student takes a course due to personal interest, not need. Amherst has one requirement, the First-Year Seminar, designed to help first-year students transition into ‘an academic environment that emphasizes discussion, writing, and research’ (Amherst 2003: 15). Amherst impressively admits fewer than 14 per cent of its applicants. The viewbook states, ‘Every year, U.S. News & World Report ranks Amherst as one of the best colleges [undergraduate institutions] in the country’ (ibid.; 55). Amherst College, through its commitment to teaching and learning, has produced many distinguished alumni. Amherst also enjoys an excellent reputation in the United States and internationally for its academic excellence. Liverpool Hope University is located in the North West of England. It is the only ecumenical university in Europe. Two colleges for women, St Katharine’s and Notre Dame, both established in the nineteenth century, merged with Christ’s College, a Catholic, coeducational teacher training college. In 1980, they formed an institute of HE. In 1995, following the 1992 Education Act, the institution became Liverpool Hope, able to grant degrees through a partnership with the University of Liverpool. Liverpool Hope was granted full university status in 2005. It aims to educate well-rounded individuals, developing the whole person in mind, body and spirit, regardless of faith, age, social or ethnic background. The Christian ethos underpins the university’s mission in developing a community contributing to academic, religious and social harmony. In particular, the university aims, through inclusion and wider participation, to reach out to those who may miss out on HE opportunities.

American higher education vs English higher education HE in the United States is in a constant state of evolution (Barzun 1969: 6) and has developed into an extremely complex and diverse system. The pluralistic nature of HE in the United States differentiates it from the rest of the world (Boyer 1987:  125). The American system, unlike those of other countries, never fell under central control: understandably, ‘the country in its youth was fearful of centralization in any form and the national university was never created’ (DeVane 1965:  121). This decentralization has proved a positive aspect of American HE, providing opportunities for all types of students and different styles of education. Even today, approximately 65 per cent of US students attend HE institutions, while fewer than 50 per cent of UK youth enrol in university.

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The fabric of American culture, society and economy encourages market values, even within the system of education. The decentralization and diversity of HE in the United States add to this, and creates competition between institutions. Bok (1986) feels that this decentralization and competition leads to the success of HE in the United States compared to other countries, and the aforementioned higher rate of participation in tertiary education in the United States versus the UK is an example of this. Thus, American colleges and universities, much like their UK counterparts, compete with each other on all levels (Bok 1986: 14). To feed this competition, the American and international public pay close attention to university rankings. Most of these rankings stem from the now-infamous magazine, U.S. News & World Report: ‘[T]he annual reports on “America’s Best Colleges”, published by U.S. News & World Report popularized the pecking order and gave it third party validity in the public mind’ (Breneman 1993: 93). Although this competition proves beneficial for the most selective places, not all institutions benefit from this competitive system. ‘Faced with mounting competition for a dwindling student population, many colleges [undergraduate institutions] appear to have responded by relaxing academic standards, adding vocational majors, and requiring fewer liberal arts courses’ (Bok 1986: 39). These less selective colleges have compromised academic rigour in order to attract students. It can be argued that the aforementioned competition for students in the HE sector in the UK has brought about the same compromising of academic rigour. Bok’s arguments also ring true with the creation of post-1992 universities in the UK. While this competition for the brightest student body proves beneficial for an institution like Amherst, a place like Liverpool Hope faces a harder task of recruiting a student body. An established, elite institution of HE engenders an established, elite student body; however, a newer institution of HE must foster both a student body and institutional reputation. Bok’s assertions imply that this is true of institutions in the United States and across the Atlantic in the UK, and around the world. This has repercussions in terms of the type of curriculum offered to the students at the two institutions, one purely liberal arts versus another aimed at pre-professionalism. This competition and compromising of academic rigour added to my culture shock, discussed later in the chapter. Few would contest that universities in the United States, especially the elite institutions, have proved themselves a world educational power. Interestingly, Lucas credits England with influencing American colonial education. ‘The course of study offered by the typical colonial college very much reflected the earliest settlers’ resolve to effect a translatio studii  – a direct transfer of higher learning from ancient seats of learning at Queen’s College in Oxford

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and Emmanuel College in Cambridge to the frontier outposts of American wilderness’ (1994: 109). English universities found their niche in their influence in the New World. ‘The English . . . are excessively conscientious teachers:  “It is our first business to teach,” one hears again and again’ (Flexner 1930: 254). This history of English influence and commitment to teaching, especially from Oxbridge colleges, has interesting implications in both the ethos of Amherst College and my expectations of becoming a lecturer in the UK. My experience both at Amherst and at Oxford shaped the expectations of my first lectureship position. While all of my professors at both institutions were prominent academics, their commitment to teaching and learning was palpable. I began my lectureship at Liverpool Hope with the same commitment to teaching and learning. However, while I had a heavy teaching load at Liverpool Hope, the underlying message was to publish. This ‘publish or perish’ attitude superseded, at least implicitly, the quality of my teaching. While not unique to the UK or Liverpool Hope, this attitude contrasted with the teaching and learning ethos of a liberal arts college. Again, although my professors at Amherst were often worldrenowned researchers, it was their ‘first business to teach’ (ibid.). This ‘publish or perish’ attitude at Liverpool Hope added to my culture shock, especially in terms of external evaluation of universities and research in the UK, discussed later in this chapter. Today’s American liberal arts institutions, interestingly, closely resemble the traditional UK education model in terms of honouring learning for its own sake versus preparation for the labour market:  ‘Oxford and Cambridge have been important agencies in maintaining sanity at a time when vocationalism and practicality endanger all sound educational conceptions’ (Flexner 1930:  228). This quote, from 1930, has interesting implications when viewing the variety of institutions, from Oxbridge on the one side and the newer universities on the other, and the ‘endangering’ of HE from ‘vocationalism and practicality’. This impacts upon this chapter’s juxtaposition of an elite US liberal arts institution with a post-1992 university in the UK. While we see the connection between English universities, namely, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and their American counterparts, even American scholars (e.g. Bok 1986:  17) note the difference between the Oxbridge institutions and ‘newer’ institutions within the UK. As an alumna of Oxford as well as an alumna of Amherst, this added to the culture shock experienced while working at Liverpool Hope. Flexner (1930:  28), like many other authors, warns against the presence of vocational training ‘distracting’ from the purpose of university, for ‘[t]he result . . . has been large numbers of graduates who are highly trained but badly educated’

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(Seay 1990:  31, emphasis mine). Training for a career, in other words, does not necessarily educate properly. ‘If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I  say it is that of training good members of society’ (Newman, in Tristam 1952:  104). This statement mentions nothing of the acquisition of knowledge. While these sentiments were expressed some time ago, they still ring true today. The debate between learning for learning’s sake and preparation for the labour market along with its place in university education remains an area of much discussion. The original intentions, therefore, of higher learning have become skewed over time. The contrast between an established, elite liberal arts institution in the United States and a post-1992 university in the UK further highlights the tensions between the original intention of a university and its response to the labour market and employability for students. The similarities and differences between American and English HE in terms of competition, student recruitment, teaching versus research, and pre-professionalism versus the liberal arts all led to a significant academic culture shock. This chapter now discusses this in terms of curriculum, assessment, and external evaluation.

Culture shock The aforementioned differences between the United States and the UK, as well as the disparity between elite institutions and a newly established one, led to the culture shock within my academic journey. This chapter now discusses this culture shock, or pedagogical shock, in terms of undergraduate curriculum, approach to assessment, and external evaluation in UK universities.

Curriculum The approach to undergraduate curricula differs in the United States and in the UK. For example, and as stated previously, Amherst College adheres to the Open Curriculum, entrusting the students to choose their own course of study. After two years of a four-year university journey, a student declares a ‘major’, meaning main course of study. Amherst College students, as well as most US liberal arts students, are encouraged to experience a wide range of different disciplines, in order to broaden their horizons. Amherst also does not require students to have any distribution requirements or core course requirements outside their chosen major to graduate. Its philosophy remains one of entrusting the students with

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the ability to choose their own academic pathways. However, at Liverpool Hope University, at the time when I taught at the institution, students chose to study certain subjects, for example, education studies and early childhood studies, and did not have much choice in their coursework, and especially not in the first year. The lack of choice given to the students, even as undergraduate students, contrasted heavily with my own belief system moulded by my experience at Amherst. However, prior to my employment at Liverpool Hope, the institution had a much more modular and choice-led curriculum. The change to a more prescriptive curriculum coincided with an increase in entry requirements with the intention to offer students a solid grounding within their discipline. The attitude towards curriculum is a striking contrast between the two institutions. While Amherst’s Open Curriculum is the exception to the rule and not the norm for US liberal arts institutions, this added to my culture shock when transitioning between establishments. The debate over university curricula has and probably will always remain a central point of discussion, both within and outside university walls. Some argue that undergraduate students should have free rein over their choice of course work; others feel that the university should have tight control over students’ curricula. For example, Bok describes the debate as such: ‘while the soundest course undoubtedly lies some distance from either a wholly prescribed or a wholly elective system, it is doubtful that further debate beyond this point will ever produce a decisive outcome’ (1986: 40). Nobody has settled this debate. Some could argue, while the Open Curriculum allows for more depth in their subject area, it also limits the scope of students’ learning. On the other hand, a prescribed university course could give the student depth in a subject area, but can also limit interdisciplinary learning and critical thinking. The elective system, meaning student choice of their own coursework, at one end of the spectrum, has both supporters and opponents. With the elective system ‘the excellent students in the better colleges could be counted on to get a great deal out of their college years. But the indifferent and poor students who were in the vast majority took the easy and elementary course, the popular lectures, and the convenient hours’ (DeVane 1965: 23). DeVane’s assertions support my observations that the striking difference between Amherst’s Open Curriculum and Liverpool Hope’s prescribed undergraduate course reflects the quality of student. The aforementioned differences between the two reflect the students from differing ability and achievement levels taken in by these two institutions. While US institutions have embraced an elective system of curriculum, and the UK a more focused course of study, DeVane’s arguments from 1965 still hold

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validity in terms of the two very different institutions and approaches to HE discussed in this chapter. Therefore, the type of student body reflects the approach to curriculum taken by Amherst College and Liverpool Hope University. While initially a shock to me, upon reflection, and juxtaposing my thoughts with those of DeVane (1965), I think a more prescribed curriculum was more appropriate for Liverpool Hope University as an institution and for the student body it had at the time. Different institutions necessitate different approaches to undergraduate curriculum. For example, in 1945, ‘the Harvard Redbook stopped short of specifying what might furnish an optimal framework for unifying undergraduate learning. It cautioned against assuming any single pattern was workable for all colleges and universities’ (Lucas 1994: 250). This report simply encourages the diverse system of HE to tailor their curricula to their target student body. While DeVane’s (1965) aforementioned argument would complement the differences outlined in this chapter between Amherst College, an elite liberal arts institution in the United States, and Liverpool Hope University, a post-1992 university in the UK, most establishments of HE around the world follow a narrower course of study at the undergraduate level. Furthermore, as this chapter later discusses, this also stems from the trust, or lack thereof, within the education systems of the two countries.

Assessment Another element adding to this culture shock was the difference between the assessments undertaken by the students at Amherst College and Liverpool Hope University. Instead of being constantly assessed throughout each academic term, as was my experience in the United States, there was a higher-stakes assessment at the end of each term. This led to a ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ situation. Here, I argue that assessments in UK universities reflect the wider attitudes towards student evaluation in this country, for ‘[i]f we wish to discover the truth about an educational system, we must look into its assessment procedures’ (Rowntree 1977: 1). The UK, and more specifically, England, I argue, based both from my research and my own experience, appears to have developed an unhealthy over-reliance on assessment. This stems from the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). GERM has introduced competition, standardization and accountability to the vernacular of education policy-making and reform (Sahlberg 2011). The 1988 Education Act in England began this worldwide trend of accountability through

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policy diffusion (Jakobi 2009). This led to GERM-related measures such as high-stakes testing, accountability, inspections and league tables. This has diffused through all levels of education, including HE. Therefore, assessments even at the HE level have this sense of high-stakes accountability as a result of GERM and the testing culture it created. ‘[S]tudents are strategic and define the curriculum by what is assessed rather than by what is taught . . . if universities are driven down the path of just pleasing the student, through market forces, league tables and an increasingly competitive global market, then the concept of quality learning is under serious threat’ (Norton 2007: 92). I felt that the wider, holistic teaching of our subjects was compromised by these assessments and led to a teach-to-the-test approach to each module. A  byproduct of this was the amount of support with assessments we were expected to give the students. This contrasted heavily with my own ethos and philosophy of HE, influenced by the liberal arts tradition, which is to instil independence, self-reliance, and critical thinking in the students. I resisted the pressure to give extensive guidance to the students. Unfortunately, my own resistance to this extensive guidance on assessments was a small battle in a much larger, systemic issue. Students, teachers and lecturers all must succumb to the ‘system’: ‘The systemic model of learning argues instead that what students learn and how teachers teach is part of a system, which is itself constrained by the subject discipline, the institution and ultimately the government agenda. The point about a system is that if you change one part of it, everything must change, otherwise it will not work’ (Norton 2007: 93). While some of my colleagues produced sheet after sheet of written guidance, I  held to my values and refused to do so. Students informed me that some of their lecturers provided all the headings and subheadings needed for each essay. Still, I did not do this. The students were so appalled by my ‘lack of support’ that they lodged a complaint against me. Therefore, according to the systemic approach, I argue, and also based on Norton (2007), problems in assessment are part of the system, in this case, the English education system. The wider testing culture has created an undesirable ‘teaching to the test’ ethos throughout the education system, even at the tertiary level. It is an ongoing battle, as students will always ask for guidance, and the aforementioned GERM culture only contributes to this.

External evaluation External evaluation on the micro and macro levels of HE in the UK also contributed to the culture shock I experienced in my first academic position. On

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the micro level was the second marking/moderation of assignments in addition to the external examining of all assessments and university programmes of study. On the macro level was the evaluation of university research outputs, first with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which eventually became the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The second marking and moderation of a sample of assignments, as well as external examining of university programmes, was completely foreign to me. None of my assessments as an undergraduate had any second marking or external moderation. While this stems from a desire to guarantee quality assurance, this to me indicated a lack of trust. My doctoral research (Chung 2009) and the research of others (e.g. Sahlberg 2011) has uncovered that a culture of trust is beneficial to education systems and crucial to avoiding GERM. Another significant aspect that signified my time at Liverpool Hope University was the frantic preparation for the then-upcoming REF in 2014. The RAE, which eventually became the REF, measures and evaluates research across HE institutions in the UK (e.g. Henkel 1999: 105). This evaluation aims to ‘sustain academic values’ and determines research funding allocation to various UK universities (ibid.). However, this has had negative repercussions as well, as the RAE has been criticized as ‘a profound disturbance’ and a ‘vehicle of professional and personal humiliation’ (ibid.:  106). This evaluation added ‘accountability’ into research and publications from university lecturers and researchers, and led to the ‘stratification of universities . . . into research . . . teaching . . . and mixed institutions’ (ibid.: 107). This again adds to and exacerbates the external evaluation so rampant in the UK education system, and HE system, arguably related to GERM (Sahlberg 2011). When I arrived, Liverpool Hope was in the midst of a strong effort to instil a research culture throughout the university. The faculty, including myself, felt very pressured to produce top-class research. As a ‘new’ university, this rather immediate change in university research culture compelled the faculty, who at the time already had high teaching loads, to undertake an even more pressurized workload with high research and publication expectations. Liverpool Hope had been awarded the research degree awarding powers in 2009 and therefore the strategic vision was to do better in the REF. The RAE and REF, seen by many as another university league table, embodies the education culture in the UK, also reflecting GERM (Sahlberg 2011) culture, the so-called naming and shaming of universities producing high-quality research and those who were not doing so. Furthermore, research funding from the government is dependent on the RAE/REF results. Instead of producing research for my own

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ambitions, I felt extremely pressured to do so for the university. This ‘negative external evaluation’ (Phillips and Ochs 2004: 778) served as an impetus to create a research culture. Interestingly, ‘post-1992 universities felt they must quickly establish the foundation of a research culture, if they were to have any chance of making research a substantial component of their work’ (Henkel 1999: 112). This rang true during my experience at Liverpool Hope, especially since ‘post1992 universities were originally established as teaching institutions with almost no research allocations’ (Parker 2008: 246). Unfortunately, paralleling Parker’s (2008) assertions, this meant that research at Liverpool Hope was essentially prioritized over teaching and, with post-1992 institutions morphing into research-orientated, pre-1992 universities, this ‘damaged the status of teaching’ (ibid.: 248) at these institutions. This tension between research and teaching also exists in the HE culture in the United States. However, a difference exists between research universities and teaching, liberal arts colleges. Although very diverse, we can classify two main groups in American HE, the institutions directed towards research and those intending to teach. Boyer admitted that the research university overpowers the liberal arts college: ‘Small liberal arts colleges may have a culture of their own. Faculty may teach more and spend more time with students. But even these institutions live in the shadow of the research university’ (1987:  121–122). Unfortunately, the power of research eclipses the virtues of teaching (Breneman 1993:  87). There are those, however, who do not see the merits of research universities. ‘Successful research institutes are no substitute for universities’ (Flexner 1930: 35). In other words, places of research do not equal a university. Higher learning must have teaching as well. The difference between the United States and the UK in terms of external evaluation is that the external evaluation through the RAE and the REF has morphed primarily teaching institutions into research institutions. The tension between teaching and educating undergraduate students and producing top-class research is by no means isolated to my experience at Liverpool Hope University or only within institutions in the UK. University lecturing has taken on this dual nature, that of a teacher/educator and researcher. This tension makes it difficult for anyone in such a role to excel in either field. Heavy teaching loads, large student numbers, marking, tutorials, and pastoral care distract from the research element of a university lectureship. At the very least, I have learned to balance this better at my current job. We have very clear research days and I  use these days to work on my research. While teaching, which I  find very enjoyable, remains the focus of my job, I  do find time to

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research and publish. Nevertheless, this struggle will stay with me, along with university lecturers worldwide, for the rest of my career.

Resolution and conclusion Upon reflection, the two years I spent at Liverpool Hope University were eyeopening in terms of the differences to my own undergraduate experience at Amherst College. It made me realize that elite, highly selective HE, especially at a liberal arts institution in the United States differed greatly to tertiary education elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, my experience as a postgraduate within the UK at Oxford University probably exacerbated this culture shock. The culture shock included the relative rigidity of undergraduate curriculum. While most of the world’s HE institutions adhere to this model, my own experience at a liberal arts institution with an open curriculum differed greatly from that of my students at post-1992 institutions in the UK. While I  now understand that the Liverpool Hope approach was appropriate for the specific student body, I had felt that this reflected a lack of trust in the students’ choices, and thought they could use some more breadth in their curriculum. Another element adding to this shock was the attitude towards assessment. I  argue that the general attitude towards assessment in the UK stems from the 1988 Education Act and the spreading of accountability, high-stakes testing and standardization. These values have spread throughout the world through GERM, and at all levels of education, including HE in the UK. The higher-stakes testing culture led my peers, fellow lecturers, to provide high levels of guidance for student assessment. While not representative of all of my colleagues and of all universities in the UK, I felt that this detracted from the purpose of HE, to establish independent, critical thinkers and problem solvers. The culture of external evaluation also came as a surprise. The RAE and the REF have arguably caused an identity change in post-1992 universities, shifting quickly from teaching institutions to those undertaking research as well. The league table format of university rankings and external evaluation through the RAE and the REF added to this shift. However, the REF push-to-publish does not differ dramatically from institution to institution in the UK. The REF, I have come to accept, is part and parcel of an academic career in the UK, whether at a Russell Group institution or at a post-1992 university. The original idea of a university and the philosophy behind liberal arts education is a dying ‘art’. A handful of institutions in the United States and the

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UK have maintained these values; however, many, especially those competing for students and newer establishments, have turned towards a pre-professional approach. Employers, ironically, seek graduates of liberal arts institutions, a vestige of learning for learning’s sake, for their critical thinking and problemsolving skills. The contrast between an elite liberal arts institution in the United States and a post-1992 university in the UK led to many personal conflicts, as outlined in this book chapter. Although I have moved on to a different institution, the resulting learning curve and subsequent resolution of the problems discussed have been invaluable. I now realize that some of the features were not unique to my first job as an academic in the UK; however, some are a consequence of different approaches to HE in different locales.

References Amherst, (2003), Everett, Massachusetts: Merrill/Daniels. Barzun, J. (1969), The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going, London: Oxford University Press. Bok, D. (1986), Higher Learning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyer, E. L. (1987), College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, New York: Harper and Row. Breneman, D. W. (1993), ‘Liberal arts colleges: What price survival?’, in A. Levine (ed.), Higher Learning in America: 1980–2000, 86–99, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chung, J. (2004), ‘Liberal arts education in the United States of America: Survivor of classical teaching and learning’, MSc Diss., University of Oxford. Chung, J. (2009), ‘An investigation of reasons for Finland’s success in PISA’, DPhil Diss., University of Oxford. DeVane, W. C. (1965), Higher Education in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flexner, A. (1930), Universities: American, English, German. London: Oxford University Press. Henkel, M. (1999), ‘The modernisation of research evaluation: The case of the UK’, Higher Education, 38 (1): 105–122. Jakobi, A. P. (2009), ‘Global education policy in the making: International organisations and lifelong learning’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 7 (4): 473–487. Leathwood, C. and O’Connell, P. (2003), ‘ “It’s a struggle”: The construction of the “new student” in higher education’, Journal of Education Policy, 18 (6): 597–615. Lucas, C. J. (1994), American Higher Education: A History, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Moutsios, S. (2009), ‘International organisations and transnational education policy’, Compare, 39: 467–478. Norton, L. (2007), ‘Using assessment to promote quality learning in higher education’, in A. Campbell and L. Norton (eds), Learning, Teaching and Assessing in Higher Education, 92–101, Exeter: Learning Matters. Parker, J. (2008), ‘Comparing research and teaching in university promotion criteria’, Higher Education Quarterly, 62 (3): 237–251. Phillips, D. and Ochs, K. (2004), ‘Researching policy borrowing: Some methodological challenges in comparative education’, British Educational Research Journal, 30 (6): 773–784. Read, B., Archer, L. and Leathwood, C. (2003), ‘Challenging Cultures? Student Conceptions of “Belonging” and “Isolation” at a Post-1992 University’, Studies in Higher Education, 28 (3): 261–277. Rowntree, D. (1977), Assessing Students, London: Harper & Row. Sahlberg, P. (2011), ‘The fourth way of Finland’, Journal of Educational Change, 12 (2): 173–185. Seay, G. (1990), ‘Do Sophocles and Plato have nothing to say to students at inner-city colleges?’, in S. H. Barnes (ed.), Points of View on American Higher Education: A Selection of Essays from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume II: Institutions and Issues, 29–33, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y. and Karasawa, M. (2009), Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States, London: University of Chicago Press. Tristam, H., ed., (1952), The Idea of a Liberal Education: A Selection from the Works of Newman, London: George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd.

5

Being Women and Being Migrant: Confronting Double Strangeness in UK Higher Education Thushari Welikala King’s College London, UK

Introduction This chapter introduces how being a ‘migrant woman academic’ is perceived, constructed and re-presented within higher education (HE) in the UK. Drawing on autoethnographic data, I will delineate how the stories I encountered and lived while navigating the new geopolitical academic space resulted in a continuous process of identification, locating and dislocating the self within the uprooted place. As Brady holds ‘every retelling of a story is necessarily a new telling. It can lead to new knowledge, creating uncertainties in the processes’ (2017: 181). Similarly, the process of retelling this particular story in this chapter resulted in creating new meanings of my fragile identity, the places I dwell and the fellow colleagues and others I encounter and the ways in which I can or cannot position myself in relation to these numerous places and people. This chapter, in essence, focuses on the different formations of being, becoming and unbecoming as an academic over the years and their impact on the process of my practice as an academic. In what follows, I begin by discussing how my critical reflections on my prior experience of teaching and learning in HE in Sri Lanka kept disturbing my ontology as a student in the UK. Next, I discuss how this turbulence informed my role as an academic in a ‘foreign’ land, simultaneously dislocating and locating me in between the predetermined past and the unpredictable present. The subsequent section unfolds the influence of the intersectionality of being woman and being ‘strange’ on my identification process and its impact on my practice (Dillard 2000). I conclude by offering some recommendations to HE

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institutions and staff about using the experience of transnational academics in the process of creating genuinely global and international HE contexts. I turn to autoethnographic narrative in the process of telling some selected slices of my life experience as a migrant woman academic in the UK.

I am my stories: autoethnographic narrative Proposing the narratology principle, Sarbin claims that ‘human beings think, perceive, imagine and make moral choices according to narrative structure’ and that ‘narrative allows for the inclusion of actors’ reasons for their acts, as well as the causes of happenings’ (1986:8). Growing up in a small village in rural Sri Lanka, I have developed the knowledge and the ‘feel for the myths, folktales and the folksongs and how they cherished the storied nature of life’ (Bruner 1996: 9). Thus, I realize that I am my stories. Reflection on these stories convinced me that ‘finding a place in the world . . . is ultimately an act of imagination’ and therefore ‘for the culturally transplanted, there is the imaginative challenge of the fiction and quasi-fiction that takes her into the world of possibilities’ (ibid.: 41). Thus, I  feel that narrative is the most appropriate approach that will enable me to unfold my experience of living in cultural-professional interfaces as a woman academic. The decision, to come to the UK to continue higher studies and later to make a choice to build an ‘imagined home’ there, was informed by personal and professional dreams, desires and ambitions. I understand that the process of storying the impact of those dreams and desires on my migrant journey as ‘words on a page robs it of complexity’ (Kraus 2003: 284). However, my narrative encapsulates ‘every day understandings – commonness –whereby social actors construct their ordinary reality’ (Atkinson 1997: 332). Therefore, this narrative may speak possible meanings about journeys of other transnational women academics. I have chosen autoethnography in presenting my narrative self. For the purpose of writing this chapter, I  went through some of the stories I  have written down in small notebooks and diaries for years and started rewriting them. The reflective approach I  employed to rewriting fragmented stories led to an epistemic shift:  a turn from an epistemology of emotion to an epistemology of ‘analytic reflexivity’ (Anderson 2006: 378). This is a process of reflecting on reflection. This does not imply a possibility of occupying a ‘nonproblematic positionality’ (ibid.: 380). It only suggests the ability to flirt

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between fiction and fact, but not fully fracture the boundary between social science and literature. Autoethnographic writing engaged me in a sociological introspection. This process enabled me to understand, disturb and interrogate how I live the story and story the life of being a migrant woman academic (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011). The process of re-storying the cultural politics of the professional worlds through personal lenses has its own epistemic risks, namely, the tendency for self-absorption in the text written (Ryang 2005). While non-reflective narratives can harm the plausibility, as Trahar (2009) notes, reflexivity without criticality lacks rigor. Therefore, I  interrogate my reflections on the text to explore how my reflections on reflection will inform the process of telling and the meanings I  create. Using a critical analytic approach to autoethnography (Anderson 2006), I  maintain the balance of complete member researcher and the protagonist of the narration throughout this telling. This process is in accord with Trahar’s observation that narrative researchers own the journey while preparing it, and once the journey is started, the journey owns the researcher. This was evident, in particular, at the stage of analysis of the stories.

The beginning of reinterpretation The process of my journeying in the UK as a migrant started some sixteen years ago. Over the years, I have been a student, a researcher and an academic. On my passport, I was initially a student, a highly skilled migrant, and then a British citizen. On official forms, however, I remain the Asian other: the Sri Lankan; the migrant! Who counts as a migrant? Migrants are often defined in relation to discourse of places, spaces, physical movement and belongingness (King 1995). Defining migrants, however, is problematic since moving geographical boundaries inevitably shift social and personal boundaries of those who move and thus migration leads to constant re-definition of self and others (Gardner 1995). Within the context of HE in the UK, migrant academics who are not British by citizenship are identified as non-UK academics (HESA 2015). In this chapter, migrant women reflect women who are foreign by birth, by citizenship or by their movement into UK to stay either temporarily or to settle for a longer term (Anderson and Blinder 2015). According to Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), I am one of 198,335 ‘non-UK’ academics employed in HE in the UK (HESA 2015). In such statistical summaries, I  am just a number. However, if

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I am counted as a person, a woman who crossed cultural professional borders to study and work in the UK, I am a meaningful story.

My life worlds and their pedagogy When I started as a postgraduate student in the UK, with considerable experience as an academic in a different cultural context, as Appiah notes, I thought that ‘I am human and nothing human can be alien to me’ (2006: 111). Hence, I expected no big surprises in the new learning environment. Nevertheless, slowly, I realized that my expectations of my role as a student do not necessarily harmonize with that of my teachers. As a teacher, in Sri Lanka, I  had been very close to my students. Even though my students never considered me to be a friend, there was a distant closeness between my students and myself: they could even share their personal issues and problems with me. My role involved both pedagogic responsibility and moral obligation towards my students. I was both a lifelong learner and a lifelong teacher. Similarly, students in Sri Lankan culture remain lifelong students of their teachers. In that sense, the discourse of ‘studentship’ ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are culturally embedded in our lifeworlds, whereas (as I perceive) the businesslike, distant relationship between teachers and students I  encounter in the UK seemed simple and straightforward (Welikala and Watkins 2008). On reflection, I  can now see that my initial reading of the UK culture of learning was largely coloured by my sociohistorical past. Sri Lanka had been invaded by Britain in 1815. Using Christianity as the main legitimizing force of the colonialism, the interventionist state was involved in replacing Buddhism and Hinduism through new values to gain economic, political and cultural domination until 1948. This hegemonic project influenced how Sri Lanka society narrate their nation as well as their colonizer until today (Jayasekera 2017). For example, as a student in the UK, I was curious to explore how power relations mediate the ‘global’ knowledge-making process (Freire 2001). The assumed universality of the host university pedagogy and the unproblematized whiteness of the curriculum that was offered to an international cohort of students left me disenchanted. How civil war, terrorism or human rights in other countries were discussed, as if they were ahistorical, surprised me. As Singh and Doherty observe ‘asymmetrical power relations are not only historically constituted as the aftermath of colonialism . . . but are reconstituted and contested in day-today pedagogic interactions’ (2004: 11).

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As a student, I also critically reflected on the stories the host university told about its own culture of teaching and learning. I was confused why pedagogic relationships were constructed as friendly and relaxed when the teacher-student relationship was quite distant. It surprised me to find that a global university curriculum was based mainly on local, national values and knowledge. Thus, the experience of being a student in the new learning context was exciting, since I  was busy analysing my experiences through my sociocultural lenses which sometimes stood in stark contrast to the understandings of the host culture of learning.

From confusion to delightful conversations Confronting stories with socioculturally unfamiliar plots was emotionally unsettling as they invited ‘other ways of knowing, being and acting in the world’ (Jones 2012: 211). Nevertheless, such confrontations led to rich conversations with peers and with some academics about cultural ways of learning and teaching. Interestingly, the space created by some of my teachers in the new learning context in the UK to contest such alterities enhanced my critical thinking skills. Slowly, I began to question my initial perceptions of the host university context. Those interrogations in turn developed ontological insecurity and invited me to reconsider my fascination in perceiving the world in polarized dichotomies: west vs. east; us vs. them or black vs. white. Gradually, I began to problematize my perceptions and epistemic beliefs, which led to a kind of epistemic chaos. I started writing about such chaotic emotions and, as articulated by Jones, found that ‘writing a world in a state of flux and movement between story and context . . . crisis and denouement’ can lead to ‘charged moments of clarity, connection, and change’ (2012: 207). To further explore my epistemic dilemmas, I  started my doctoral studies to investigate whether there are different cultural scripts for learning within international HE contexts. The experience of doing my doctoral studies under the supervision of an academic who believed in new ways of perceiving the world convinced me that ‘conversations across borders can be delightful’ (Appiah 2006: xxi). My supervisor’s ‘intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures’ (Szerszynski and Urry2002: 468) opened up a multitude of avenues for me to be pedagogically imaginative. The transformation began. Richardson (2016) notes that human beings belong to their local community and to the broader community of

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humanity. I  began to shuttle between these two communities and could feel my familiar grand narratives about culture dissolving in specific stories about contexts, individuals and their histories. This led to a process of identification. Now, revisiting my ethnographic notes and reflecting on my initial reflections, I realize that ‘we inhabit worlds and travel across them and keep all memories’ (Lugones 1987:  14). When we travel and actually inhabit certain places, the memories construct new images of ourselves as well as others. Gradually, the alternative stories about learning became my stories too. Thus began the process of reinterpretation (Giroux 2005).

Flirting along the borders: the learning wave As Anzaldúa notes, borders are ‘vague and undetermined places created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ and that ‘the culture of the border is endlessly fermented with the ethnic, political, social, and cultural collisions’ (1987: 3). Hence, dwelling along the borders  – both psychological and physical – is socially, emotionally and pedagogically unsettling. This unsettling nature, keeps coming back to me whenever I happen to live culturally and professionally unfamiliar stories reminding me of the fragile nature of my uprooted self. Such stories, however, enabled me to imagine new ways of engaging in my personal and professional encounters.

Empowering start By the time I  successfully completed my doctoral studies on international student experience in the British HE at the Institute of Education (IoE), London, the process of internationalization of curricula and pedagogy was one of the major focuses of universities across contexts. So was the situation at IoE, which was a postgraduate institution with a large number of international students. Within this context, my research findings on international student experience gained currency. I  was thus offered the first ever fellowship of the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) at the institute. I  got to know the pro-vice chancellor for internationalization and she invited me to design and deliver sessions on internationalization of curricula and pedagogy across different departments in the university. The process of designing and delivering those sessions was a huge challenge. Nevertheless, they provided me with a wealth

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of experience. Later, I  got my first full-time HE post in the UK at the same institution. While I embraced the opportunity of being a researcher in a worldclass university, the role shifts from being an academic in Sri Lanka, a student at IoE and to a researcher seemed challenging. Being a student for some years in the same institution I had developed particular ways of relating to academics at the institution. They were my gurus. Shifting my role relationship to become a colleague to my teachers required altering my sociocultural imagination. This resulted in a role shock. I  experienced a strange sense of insecurity and disempowerment. However, I  soon realized that this was a self-constructed insecurity. The reality was that there was always someone to talk to and share my views over a cup of tea, someone to ask how I  was getting on. Thus, the initial experience of working in the HE sector in the UK provided me with some illuminating experiences.

Constructed identities: the non-white female As I moved away from my ‘familiar foreign’ context to take up posts in different universities in different parts of the UK, my narrative of being a migrant woman academic got shaped with multiple plots and different climaxes. While the normal migrant academic trajectories start from disorientation, followed by ‘acculturative stress’ which gradually develops into acculturation (Sam 2016: 68), my journey can be recognized as a learning curve: from orientation to disorientation which then developed into a passage of a mixture of confusion and serenity and back to disorientation. On reflection, I  understand that the ensemble of those stories I lived in four different HE institutions contributed to reconstruction of my academic self so far. Even though literature often portrays migrant academics within a deficit discourse (Hsieh 2012), I can recollect how unpredicted challenges made me resilient and persistent. One of the major challenges was to understand the accepted norms associated with professional performance within HE in the UK, which seemed to appreciate the celebration of power, competition and survival-of-the–fittestculture (Benschop and Margo 2003). Engaging in research, teaching, generating publications, making myself visible, on top of being a wife, a mother and a daughter of a terminally ill mother demanded a transition in managing my life. Coming from a non-competitive, free higher education culture, the businesslike HE in the UK seemed more demanding and instrumental. Academics are required to be thick-skinned and ruthlessly competitive and mainly men, or

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women who are able to act as men, were respected as strong survivors of the system. Another challenge was to understand my social and political location within the largely white academy. For example, as soon as I  moved to a different university from the IoE, I began to feel that my colour, nationality, gender as well as my accent mattered: even though I considered myself to be yet another academic in HE in the UK, for some of my colleagues I  was a woman academic with a different ethnicity and a nationality. Once, I was due to attend a research meeting in Bulgaria, for which I  contacted the relevant administrator who was supposed to help me with applying for visa and booking tickets. She was so reluctant to help me and highlighted the difficulty of getting a visa to a European country since I was not British. She further noted that she has warned my line manager to appoint people who are able to travel without restrictions. While this clarification did not make any sense to me since I have travelled to European countries many times before, it raised some interesting questions:  What were the actual reasons behind her reluctance? Did she imagine that I  have never travelled to other countries in Europe? Would her reactions be different if I were a man or a non-British Australian or American woman? Race-related stories are often distorted or silenced in the academia (Bhopal 2016) and hence ‘whiteness’ of the academy seemed to go uncommented (Trahar 2009). Interestingly, macro-aggressions aimed at women by women or men are not spoken of in academia, and hence there is no discourse that explains such situations. Once, after a team teaching session, a white male colleague mentioned: ‘Thushari, you should not walk around the classroom while teaching. In English universities, the teacher stands in front of the class’. Since white male insiderism is normalized within HE (Collins 2008) such comments could be (mis)interpreted merely as ‘peer feedback’ making cross-boundary conversations complicated (Appiah 2006). Such experiences consistently cautioned me about outsiderism: I am the ‘linguistic other’; ‘pedagogic other’ as well as ‘cultural other’. Similarly, there had been instances where minority women have engaged in othering, which made me feel severely segregated. Thus, the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ can operate at different layers within institutional contexts, perhaps, due to the ‘dog-eatdog’ mentality created within neo-liberal western academia (Bhopal 2016). Generalizations about academia based on such stories, however, seem unreasonable. Rather than conceptualizing me as a colour or a particular ethnicity, most colleagues normally identify me as another colleague. Irrespective of certain experiences, I have made good friends in all universities I have worked

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in so far and engage in collaborative work with them. Institutions have given due consideration to my expertise and have given opportunities to inform university policies and strategies in the area of internationalization.

Finding my own self: confronting the stranger within On reflection, I feel that I have lived the culturally subordinate and submissive migrant women role (Hsieh 2012) as well as the well-supported, empowered insider roles simultaneously. Hence my journey is characterized by ‘fluid . . . movement with multidimensional and reversible trajectories’ (Papastergiadis 2000:  7). This offered me the opportunity to locate myself as a ‘constructive marginal’ who is able to negotiate and sometimes resist the challenges encountered in the new context (Bennett 1993:  128). Realizing that a world without borders – both political and psychological – is illusory, I started dwelling on multiple borders, simultaneously, with multiple allegiances. This resulted in feeling that I  belong nowhere:  I am ‘zero, nothing, and no one’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 63) and this ‘zero feeling’ troubles me consistently to find myself in the migrant academic landscape. However, I  often find myself belonging enough rather than fully belonging anywhere. After working in three different universities in London, Nottingham and Liverpool, I moved back to London to work at a highly ranked university. This university context offered me the opportunity to challenge my professional self to maximize self-inclusion. My desire to understand specific situations and relationships or particular discourses gradually shifted towards understanding the organization and myself as one within a large system rather than someone from somewhere. I am now concentrating on what is on offer within my institution that empowers me, rather than what marginalizes me, exploring the ‘stranger within me’ rather than the strangeness in me (Kristeva 1991). Currently, I am holding two main leadership roles, which involve managing the quality of teaching and learning and professional recognition of staff members across the university. The opportunities I received to participate in leadership courses further enhanced my insights into effective self-management to address the demands of a complex work place. The experience of working in a multidisciplinary team and the challenge of working across disciplines involves reconfiguring my pedagogic knowledge, skills and values consistently. The programmes I design and deliver are open for all staff members who teach and support learning. Within this context, I have ample space to make use of my disillusionments and epiphanies to facilitate my colleagues’ learning process, enabling them to create inclusive,

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flexible pedagogic spaces for their students, who represent a wide variety of cultures.

The pedagogy of the (nativized) migrant Now that I  have delineated selected slices of my autoethnography of being a migrant woman academic in the UK, you may wonder whether the goal of my storytelling is therapy rather than analysis or explanation without impact (Atkinson 1997). Am I leaving the readers with some fragments of stories that are ultimately all about me? I began by telling you how my ontological being has shaped the theoretical underpinnings of my teaching. While reflection is the key to enhancing professional practice, reflection on practice should be followed by action on reflection. Hence, my pedagogic approaches result from reflections on the challenges I have undergone as a student and as an academic. Designing and delivering sessions to include all students (who are academics themselves), with multiple institutional, pedagogic as well as personal memories, is my main aim. Considering students’ tacit knowledge and respecting the fact that they can know more than they can tell (Gelwick 1987) results in ‘cognitive justice’ (De Sousa Santos 2007: 5). I am also conscious not to impose my cultural ways of knowing on my students. Rather, I create spaces in which all participants can engage in learning from each other. Knowing is consistently being reconstructed as a social act that is transformed and translated across contexts through conversation (Gergen 1997). Therefore, my professional development sessions allow students to enrich their professional journeys through multiple approaches, including conversational pedagogic approaches. They empower students and helps them realize that professional development is an ongoing, intellectual narrative rather than a one-off tick-box exercise. Coming from a culture of education which values silence as an effective way of learning, I am fully aware that too much emphasis on conversation can threaten certain students. Thus, I  create learning spaces that include different types of students through a wide variety of activities. My involvement in managing, designing and delivering programmes to multidisciplinary cohorts of professionals has also convinced me that geopolitical border-crossing harmonizes with disciplinary border-crossing in certain ways:  both involve the feeling of insecurity, foreignness and disbelief. For example, participants with clinical backgrounds in clinical education programmes initially find themselves as epistemic migrants in relation to the

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field of education. Being shaped by their disciplinary values, they perceive the world within a particular ontological frame. Moving beyond this familiar frame to know how social sciences make knowledge is a huge epistemic challenge. Hence, I help participants to develop interdisciplinary pedagogic fluency through storytelling and peer conversations. It makes disciplinary border dwelling less threatening and more enjoyable. Thus, I  understand that there are instances when all academics feel being migrants:  epistemic, ontological and cultural. Apart from disciplinary or geographical border-crossing, academics are required to cross multiple borders within this competitive and unpredictable HE business. To keep pace with a fast moving HE system, we all need to be involved in enculturation. So, I wonder whether all natives are migrants and all migrants are natives.

My story and the wider context: implications My migrant journey may not replicate journeys of other migrant academics. However, it can send some significant messages to HE institutions and staff both ‘home’ and migrant. Migrant academics contribute significantly in the process of globalizing HE institutions. Similarly, institutions contribute to the development of global academics. Therefore, the enculturation process of migrant academics needs to be collaboratively managed by the HE institutions, ‘home’ academics and the individual migrant selves. As my autoethnography epitomizes, my initial perspectives about home and host culture have been largely coloured by my sociopolitical and professional histories. This made my acculturation into an alternative culture of learning rather complicated, but more critically engaging. Reflection on our prejudices and misreadings of the host culture sometimes help us identify how we can become strangers to ourselves as well as to others. It is also crucial to develop coping mechanisms to keep calm when confronted with disappointments and frustrations, even though this is the most difficult aspect of being a migrant academic. Individuals make many sacrifices to migrate to other places in search of greener pastures and once we have left our ‘home’, ‘re-locating home’ in the new place is a never-ending messy process. Transformation from being one of them to becoming one of us within a new context is hectic. Therefore, understanding the culture of the new system and then finding opportunities to enhance relevant skills – linguistic, cultural and social – that equip them as professionals in the new context is important.

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Migrant academics need to make extra effort to achieve their professional targets. Even though we know ‘what’ we want and ‘where’ we want to go, we do not exactly know ‘how’ to get there. Thus, migrant academics can successfully navigate their professional journeys when relevant direction and support is made available within institutions both for the migrants and for the ‘home’ academics. One-off induction programmes conducted by some universities for migrant academics do not fully address issues related to working within global HE, where all academics have now become academic migrants within new working contexts. It is important to offer continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities to develop cross-cultural competencies for both ‘home’ and ‘international’ staff members enabling both parties to understand each other’s cultural-professional prejudices and accommodate with unfamiliar cultural values. Taking a deficit approach to assimilate migrant academics to the host culture of working may lead to resistance since they have already shown their transnational capability in successfully competing with other academics to secure a post in a foreign HE system. My own experience across different universities in the UK convinces me that little or no recognition is given to the fact that institutions significantly benefit from the diversity of input that migrants offer: the alternative pedagogic approaches, cultural perceptions about teaching-learning and new skills migrants bring with them are resources that enrich global institutions. Therefore, transformation from familiar to unfamiliar should apply for both home and migrant staff members. Developing cross-cultural competency (Deardoff 2009) among all staff members would create cosmopolitan HE contexts that are open for alternative cultures of perceiving the world. This would enable all staff members, including managerial, administrative and service sector staff, to create truly global, inclusive institutions.

References Anderson, B. and Blinder, S. (2015), Who Counts as a Migrant: Definitions and Their Consequences, Migration Observatory Briefing, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford, 2015. Anderson, L. (2006), ‘Analytic autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35 (4): 373–395. Anzaldúa G. E. (1987), Borderlands: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Appiah, K. A. (2006), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, London: Penguin Books.

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Atkinson, P. (1997), ‘Narrative turn or blind alley’? Qualitative Health Research, 7, 325–344. Bennett, J. M. (1993), ‘Cultural marginality: Identity issues in intercultural training’, in M. R. Paige (ed.), Education for the Intercultural Experience, 109–135, Yarmouth, ME: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Benschop, Y. and Margo, B. (2003), ‘Crumbling ivory towers: Academic organizing and its gender effects’, Gender, Work and Organization, 10 (2): 194–212. Bhopal, K. (2016), The Experience of Black and Minority Ethnic Academics: A Comparative Study of the Unequal Academy, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Brady, I. (2017), ‘Other places and the anthropology of ourselves: Early fieldwork in Tuvalu’. Qualitative Inquiry, 23 (3): 179–191 Bruner, J. S. (1996), The Culture of Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, P. (2008), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn, New York: Taylor and Francis. De Sousa Santos, B. (2016), Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Deardoff, D. (2009), The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dillard, C. B. (2000), ‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 13 (6): 661–681. Ellis, C. Adams, T. E. and Bochner, A. P. (2011), ‘Autoethnography: An overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12 (1). Available online: http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3096 (accessed 22 October 2016). Freire, P. (2001), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos, New York: Continuum. Gardner, K. (1995), Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gelwick, R. (1987), The Way of Discovery: An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi, New York: Oxford University Press. Gergen, K. J. (1997), Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Constructionism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2005), Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, New York, NY: Routledge. Higher Education Statistics Agency (2015), Characteristics of Academic Staff in 2014/ 15, Cheltenham: HESA. Available online: https: //www.hesa.ac.uk/news/25-02-2016/ academic-staff (accessed 20 July 2016). Hsieh, Hui-hua (2012), ‘Challenges facing Chinese academic staff in a UK university in terms of language, relationships and culture’, Teaching in Higher Education, 17 (4): 371–383. Jayasekera, P. V. J. (2017), Confrontations with Colonialism: Resistance, Revivalism and Reform under British Rule in Sri Lanka, 1796–1920, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.

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Jones, S. H. (2012), ‘Autoethtnography: Making the personal political’, in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, 205–244, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. King, R. (1995), ‘Migrations, globalization and place’, in D. Massey and P. Jess (eds), A Place in the World, 644–655, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kraus, C. W. (2003), ‘On hurting people’s feelings: Journalism, guilt, and autobiography’, Biography, 26 (2): 283–297. Kristeva, J. (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lugones, A. C. (1987), ‘Playfulness, “world” traveling, and loving perception’, Hypatia, 2 (2): 3–19. Papastergiadis, N. (2000), The Turbulence of Migration: Globalisation, Deterritorialization and Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Richardson, S. (2016), Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era: Higher Education in an Interconnected World, London: Routledge. Ryang, S. (2005), ‘Dilemma of a native: On location, authenticity and reflexivity’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 6 (2): 143–157. Sam, D. (2016), ‘Heart and mind: Using critical incidents to decipher culture’, in A. Komisarof and Z. Hua (eds), Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life and Scholarship in Globalising Universities, 67–77, London: Routledge. Sarbin, T. R. (1986), Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, Westport: Praeger. Singh, P. and Doherty, C. (2004), ‘Global cultural flows and pedagogic dilemmas: Teaching in the global university contact zone’, TESOL Quarterly, 38 (1): 9–42. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2002), ‘Cultures of cosmopolitanism’, The Sociological Review, 50 (4): 461–481. Trahar, S. (2009), ‘Beyond the story itself: Narrative inquiry and autoethnography in intercultural research in higher education’, Forum Qualitative Social Research, 10 (1). Art. 30. Available online: http://www.qualitative-esearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/ view/1218/2653 (accessed 3 March 2016). Welikala, T. and Watkins, C. (2008), Improving Intercultural Learning Experiences in Higher Education: Responding to Cultural Scripts for Learning, London: IoE Publications.

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Overcoming Doubts in an Intercultural Academic Journey: From the East to the West Chloe Shu-Hua Yeh Bath Spa University, UK

Introduction Being a new academic in higher education (HE), I often felt that I needed to make extra efforts to master the challenges encountered in my intercultural academic journey. Generally, it takes at least three years for new academics to establish strong professional identities, which help to deal with the twofold challenge of developing pedagogical understanding in the subject area on the one hand, and maintaining an active research profile independently on the other (Murray and Male 2005). It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that new non-UK academics may face additional challenges when starting a new job in a foreign country. Given that there has been a large proportion (over a quarter) of non-UK academics appointments in UK universities (Universities UK 2015), it is vital to expand our understanding of foreign academics’ professional development and intercultural experiences in the process of the internationalization of HE in the UK context. Using an autoethnographic approach, this chapter focuses on my personal narrative as an example of a Taiwanese international academic’s acculturative experience of teaching in a UK university. This has involved overcoming various doubts caused by conflicts between my East Asian collectivist background and the individualist culture valued in Western society (Nisbett et al. 2001). I am an ethnic Chinese, who received formal education in Taiwan from childhood, so the Confucian educational tradition and expectations that I had been familiar with differ in many aspects from the university where I work in the UK, causing conflicts in my work life.

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My exposure to the UK educational systems started with my PhD, pursued at the University of Bristol in 2006. This chapter portrays my academic teaching and work experience as a lecturer in Liverpool Hope University from 2012 to 2016. In 2012, several developmental and educational reforms (e.g. departmental structure and policy changes, including the approach to pedagogy and curriculum) took place in response to the changes in the HE landscape in the context of marketization and internationalization (Luxon and Peelo 2009; Findlow 2012). As an early career academic, who worked in a foreign country where the cultural background was vastly different from where I  come from, I experienced additional professional challenges, conflicts and doubts in the first few years of my work life. These challenges and doubts prompted me to start a reflective journey. It originated from a piece of small-scale research on how to improve my teaching to facilitate my students’ learning in the first year of my academic life as an international academic. While preparing this research, I  was also preparing a lesson on international education for undergraduate students, introducing ‘Education in Taiwan’. The preparation of these separate works led me to a series of reflective journeys on the two separate educational systems I  have experienced. I began to examine my own academic acculturation, employing an autoethnographic approach (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011), resulting in this chapter. The aim is to portray the voices and experiences of an East Asian international academic working in a UK university. Ellis and Bochner define autoethnography as a type of research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wideangle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. (2000: 739)

Rather than merely focusing on the self, autoethnography brings writing about personal aspects of the self forward to its relationship to culture in a broader social context (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Hamilton, Smith and Worthington 2008). My autoethnographic data were collected in a variety of ways, including through my work journals and correspondence documents; reflection on analysis and observation of myself and my interactions with others; and the recalling in hindsight of the conversations with others, students and colleagues about various matters and in various contexts in my work life (Hamilton, Smith

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and Worthington 2008; Chang 2016). This process opens up a deep well of selfreflexivity in this autoethnographic account (Chang 2016). There is no one-size-fits-all procedure of data analysis in autoethnography research. Similar to a thematic analysis approach (Bryman 2012; Chang 2016), the findings of this research resulted from a circle of iterative processes of data collection, data analysis and literature review. I  began by reviewing my data, making notes, looking for recurring themes that showed the repeated thoughts and strongest emotions, which might possibly explain the causes of the conflicts that occurred during my academic work life. Repeated themes which emerged were respect, student-teacher relationships, teacher-researcher identity and academic identity, social interactions with others, language and culture, the East and the West, and so on. I  then looked into theme-related literature to assist in the interpretation of what I had experienced, such as the accounts of educational and philosophical traditions in East Asian and Western contexts, and other ethnic Chinese academics’ teaching experiences in the UK. Finally, I  present my academic acculturation process in three major themes, in the form of the doubts that played on my mind when I  faced challenges, including: (1) Am I respected enough? (teacher-student relationship); (2) What does it mean to be a good lecturer? (professional identity); (3) Am I an alien to other colleagues? (sociocultural adjustments). In each section that follows, I illustrate these challenges and share my experiences of how I overcame them. I  hope this chapter can highlight issues that have implications for improving international academics’ professional development in terms of balancing their roles of teaching and research in the context of internationalization in HE in recent decades (Luxon and Peelo 2009).

Am I respected enough? (Teacher-student relationship) Developing good teacher-student relationships is often a challenge for many teachers (Palmer 1998), including myself. I  often wondered whether I  was respected ‘enough’ by my students. For example, sometimes I  received emails from students without any subject, without appropriate title and without any customary acknowledgements such as ‘thank you’. I felt surprised and puzzled when I received such emails, since in my culture, not addressing a teacher by title or name or indicating ‘thank you’ at the end of an email requesting for help from students to a lecturer is considered impolite and inappropriate.

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In another instance, on graduation day, I expected my students to meet me and express some kind words/gestures to convey their gratitude for the help I  had extended to them in their educational journeys  – an experience I  was familiar with in Taiwan. However, I  did not receive even a ‘hi’ on the day. I remembered feeling very disappointed with incidents such as these and kept asking myself: Have I not done enough for them to be seen as a good teacher? – Am I respected enough? I wonder if such doubts and conflicts were amplified by the influence of my Chinese background and the changing educational climate in HE in the UK in the last few decades. The educational systems I  had grown up with are influenced by the core principles of Confucianism. In a Confucian society, maintenance of interpersonal harmony and high respect for relational social hierarchy (Zhang et al. 2005) are a norm. Individuals’ identities are heavily influenced by and through the group, such that some have stronger individual identity due to receiving stronger support and respect from the group to which they belong (Lane 2002). The social status of ‘teachers’ (referred to as 師/Shi) is relatively high in comparison with other occupations (Fwu and Wang 2002). There are hierarchical structures in Chinese society and educational systems, where education is closely associated with social class and occupation (Huang and Gove 2012). Confucius classified four social strata based on occupation: scholars (士/Shi); farmers (農/Nong); workers (工/Gong) and businessmen (商/Shang). ‘Scholars’ were the highest class, who did mental labour and often made the highest-level decisions, which had an impact on the whole of society (Huang and Gove 2012). Similarly, from a Taoist perspective, ‘scholars’ or ‘teachers’ were placed on the same level as ‘heaven, earth, emperor and parents (天/Tian, 地/Di, 君/Jun, 親/Gin, 師/Shi)’ (Gao 1999). With respect to the role of ‘teachers’, one maxim even stipulated that ‘One should respect one’s teacher as if he were one’s father even if the teacher-student relationship exists only for a single day’ (Fwu and Wang 2002: 217). Traditionally, this common maxim shapes the expectation of teacher and student interaction in Chinese culture. Under such influence, the occupational prestige and respect that Taiwanese societies give to a university professor (or lecturer) is higher than for other prestigious professions (e.g. government minister, judge and doctor) in comparison with their international counterparts (Fwu and Wang 2002). I have had the experience of feeling valued and respected as a teacher, in relation to one of my previous Taiwanese students whom I had taught in Taiwan in the past. She recently visited me in the UK. Even though I was no longer her teacher, she still addressed me as ‘老師 Lao-Shi’ (teacher) at the beginning of every sentence. In Taiwanese custom, keeping contact with former teachers is

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common practice, for example, by paying a visit as a gesture to demonstrate appreciation and respect for guidance and support in the school years (Fwu and Wang 2002). She was not my student anymore, but she still addressed and respected me as if I were still her teacher. Strangely, I felt awkward and thought she was being too polite when she called me ‘Lao-Shi’ and suggested that she address me by my name as a friend. However, the teacher-student relationship we had formed in the past, rooted within our shared culture, has continued to bond us together in our new relationship. I  felt warm inside that she still addressed and respected me in the same way as in the past. On sharing my experiences about feelings of disrespect from my UK students with my other UK and EU colleagues, I discovered that they also had similar experiences. However, the difference was that they did not seem to be too concerned, or did not feel disrespected by such experiences. I presume that this may be due to differences in culture and expectations between my colleagues and myself. In addition, one experienced English colleague suggested that over the last decade, with the introduction and rise in student fees, there has been an increased sense of student entitlement, which could have affected their behavioural interactions with university lecturers. In terms of different responses to teacher-student interaction between my Western colleagues and me, in contrast with Chinese philosophical foundations, the educational contexts where I teach in the UK university system are influenced by different philosophical traditions with different practices and expectations. In general, Western cultural and educational conventions are influenced by the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (Kingston and Forland 2007), adhering to an individualistic approach. In Western society, individuals are normally expected to be responsible for themselves and for the consequences of their own actions (Varnum et al. 2010). Individualists value their own individual opinions, identity, self-esteem and self-resilience throughout educational practices. This principle applies to every individual in educational settings, including students and lecturers. Traditionally, respecting students’ voices in the education system in England is also largely due to its underpinning humanism, in which individualism and morality are key principles (Pepin 1998). Habitually, English education emphasizes child/student-centred and individualistic approaches. The ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ teaching and learning tradition is strongly evident along with the pedagogical practice of grouping children for learning (e.g. setting, streaming and mixed-ability) (Halpin et  al. 2000). Although, originally, English education was for the elite, it progressed to respect principles

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of morality, with a belief that education should develop individual qualities such as fairness and integrity (Pepin 1998). Therefore, the teacher’s role had a pastoral as well as an academic purpose. This tradition resonates with my role as a lecturer in the UK and gives students the right to voice their individual needs by contacting me. In comparison with Chinese students, I feel that students in the UK are more vocal about raising concerns. Thus, there may be a more casual approach from students in addressing lecturers; and lecturers are not perceived as people in positions of authority as Chinese students may do. This difference in teacher-student interactions is something that required me to adjust in my early years of teaching. Today, there are additional pressures that academics experience in English universities. Being an academic in the UK involves balancing multiple roles, which demand high standards of performances in many aspects. The climate of HE in the UK has changed over the past two decades with an emphasis on marketization (Brown and Carasso 2013). The Further and Higher Education Acts of 1992 removed the binary system of universities and polytechnics, and UK polytechnics were granted permission to become universities. This led to a significant increase in the number of HE institutions and increased institutional competition. Consequently, universities now compete in a single marketplace for students, and the increasingly competitive landscape of HE demands that they be assessed at all levels (Hunt 2016) and for various facets of their functioning, such as research and teaching. The changing landscape of HE in the UK has positioned students as the ‘primary customers’, and universities are expected to provide good quality ‘service’ (Douglas, Douglas and Barnes 2006). With undergraduate students facing greater financial responsibility in the form of increasing student fees, there has been an increased focus on student employability. Consequently, this has led to an increased expectation on university academics to ensure students’ satisfaction and achievement (Cooper 2007). Given the emphasis on increased ‘teacher input’ (e.g. providing feedback, providing good quality lectures and tutorials, Skinner 2014), the authority of the academics may be undermined by the increasing emphasis on student-centred educational practice. As a result, the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship in UK universities may be altered by such pressures on academics. There are increasing expectations by universities, students and society on what constitutes a good lecturer. As I reflected on my previous experiences in relation to teacher-student relationship, I  realized that I  have experienced a period of professional identity shift.

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What does it mean to be a good lecturer? (Professional identity) As a new international academic in the context of the newly developing managerialism affecting the contemporary HE climate in the UK (Winter 2009), like other young academics, I  found myself questioning ‘what it means to be an academic’ (Archer 2008:  387). It is not easy to answer this question; as Archer (2008) emphasized, it is not a smooth, direct, linear or automatic process to ‘becoming’ an academic in the present HE context  – encountering conflicts, being inauthentic in various situations, experiencing marginalization and exclusion are sometimes unavoidable during this process. My professional identity is formed by the voices of my inner self, transformed by my previous experiences of interacting with both Western and Eastern cultures. It is merged with and shaped by the current influences of the institutional expectations and culture practised within the teaching community where I work. Different aspects of the role of being an academic produce different forms of professional identity. I  found my professional identity is being a ‘teacher’ and an ‘academic’. My own identity as a teacher was first of all rooted in my previous educational background in Taiwan, then transformed in the context of where I  teach in the UK. At the very beginning of my teaching career in the UK, I felt that to teach well meant to deliver refined and detailed knowledge to students using a teacher-centred approach. For the Chinese, individuals in a collectivist society perceive it as normal to attain their knowledge under the supervision of a higher authority (e.g. teachers) (Lane 2002). Therefore, I believed that a ‘good’ lecturer should be the model and expert, who conveys absolute knowledge and truth (Turner and Acker 2002). I expected myself to be an expert in all the subjects I taught and supervised. I often included far more information in lectures than was necessary. During the seminars, although I  understood that it should be a place where students could discuss issues openly and learn from each other, due to the fear of silence, I  rarely asked the students questions or paused to provide them with space and time to think and learn by themselves. Instead, what I tended to do was to teach and express to them as much content as I knew from a teacher-centred pedagogy. I thought a good lecturer should teach in such a way that abundant knowledge was conveyed. This expectation that I had of my role as a teacher resonates with Chinese students’ expectations of what a ‘good’ teacher should be, as was evident in the study done by Cortazzi, Jin and Zhiru (2009) and Turner and Acker (2002). Both studies indicated that Chinese

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students considered ‘good’ lecturers to be those who are experts in conveying absolute and deep knowledge, whereas UK students expected them to be good mentors, who inspire and develop their independent learning. I began to realize that my expectation of how I  should teach in order to enhance my students’ learning may not be functional and effective in the UK context. After a peer review of my teaching, a senior colleague pointed out that my teaching approach was more teacher-centred, and suggested that I could do more to enable students to construct their own knowledge during seminars. My awareness of such differences in expectation of what it means to be a good lecturer between the two cultures has led me to adjust my teaching practice from a teacher-centred pedagogy to a more student-centred approach. Kember (1997) explains that lecturers who focus on the delivery of knowledge tend to use a teacher-centred/content-oriented approach to teaching, yet those who believe that teaching is to support students’ development tend to use a student-centred/ learning-oriented approach to teaching. I  realized that I  had to change my teaching approach to be more student-centred as it encourages students to become independent in their pursuit of knowledge. Such awareness resonates with the findings of Jiang et al. (2010) on Chinese academics teaching in UK universities. They found that Chinese academics experienced challenges in adjusting their teaching styles and expectations from what they were accustomed to in their home country (knowledge-transmission and teacher-centred approach) to the UK context, where a student-centred approach is encouraged and students are allowed to question the teacher. There was another issue which concerned me about what it means to be a good lecturer. I  sometimes question my language, given that English is not my first language. Many international academics teaching in second languages experience language issues (Alberts 2008; Collins 2008; Luxon and Peelo 2009; Jiang et al. 2010; Green and Myatt 2011). It is normal for international academics to experience certain levels of anxiety while teaching in their additional language. I am no exception. Regardless of how competent I was in my oral presentation skills, I was sometimes dissatisfied with the vocabulary I used to explain concepts while teaching. Sometimes, I  was disappointed that my students complained about my accent, suggesting they did not fully understand what I said. However, I  understand that the language issue subsides with time and experience of teaching in the additional language. As for the students’ concern about my accent, Alberts (2008) states that foreign lecturers’ language issues, such as accent, are often not the cause of negative impact and constraint upon students’ learning: rather, it is students’ attitude towards the foreign lecturers’

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accent and ethnicity that plays a detrimental influence on their classroom experiences (Rubin 1992). It is through increasing informal and pleasant contact between foreign lecturers and students, some level of interpersonal communication, and an understanding of equality from both ends, that such attitudes and bias may fade. I  realized that this process relates to building positive experiences between my students and me outside of formal teaching and learning contexts, so I should not merely work on developing my academic expertise, such as language competence and subject-related knowledge, but also value opportunities to have informal interactions and conversations with my students and to gain more understanding of them. Teaching using an additional language should not be a weakness in my role, but a symbol of my strengths and foreignness, which can be a teaching resource that may facilitate teaching and learning experiences (Alberts 2008; Foote et al. 2008). Further, other roles and responsibilities placed on me as an academic also influenced the formation of my ‘academic identity’. Teaching in a university as an academic was no longer as simple as I had imagined from my previous experiences in Taiwan. The changing landscape of HE in the UK has altered university lecturers’ academic identities. Today, universities in the UK compete in multidimensional markets, including consideration for national and international students’ recruitment, research quality and enterprise opportunities (Findlow 2012). Therefore, academics can experience significant internal and external pressures. This was a frequent case for myself as a new academic in the UK. In addition to developing my teaching, I  am also expected to contribute to a multitude of administrative tasks. I am expected to produce good quality research outputs, support the university to comply with quality benchmarks and legal frameworks, create a positive student experience, educate students to become highly employable graduates, attract external research funding and so on. All these different dimensions of expectations have shaped my ‘academic identity’. Winter defined academic identity as ‘the extent to which an individual defines themselves primarily in terms of the organization and their position of managerial authority or as a member of a profession’ (2009: 122). He concludes that it is influenced by traditional conceptions of academic identities and the managerial identities that are aligned with the contemporary demands of managerialism. These two types of professional identities for academics in HE in the UK now often create competing conflicts, for young academics in particular. He clarified that, traditionally, academics in the UK value professionalism in terms of discipline scholarship, intellectual curiosity, accountability to peers and professional autonomy. However, as mentioned in the previous section,

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now academics’ professional identities are shaped as producers for student consumers (Douglas, Douglas and Barnes 2006). The work of academics has become businesslike; they are required to meet performance review targets, produce research outputs and enhance consumers’ (students’) satisfaction. The traditional role of being an academic with professional autonomy has vanished and is increasingly being marginalized by the contemporary managerial identity, which focuses on economic profit and cost (Winter, 2009). For example, I was surprised by the amount of administrative tasks I had very early on in my career, as my expectation of being an academic in Taiwan was primarily to teach, mark assessments and do research. It is a challenge for many new academics to balance teaching and research, while also trying to fulfil the expectations of their universities. In my experience, I  had the pressure of developing the next research project and related skills (e.g. funding applications) and, on the other hand, meeting the demands of teaching and administration. Luxon and Peelo (2009) explained that non-UK academics teaching in a UK university may experience even more pressure to deal with other aspects of challenges, such as gaining a sense of belonging and social adjustment in coping with strong intercultural resistances. Similar to the experiences voiced by non-UK academics in the study of Luxon and Peelo (2009), I  found myself making an extra effort to make social adjustments in my interactions with students and colleagues, formally and informally, and to familiarize myself with various aspects of sociocultural contexts.

Am I an alien to other colleagues? (Sociocultural adjustment) In addition to academic adjustment in the UK, Hsieh (2011:  19) suggests that ethnic Chinese academics may experience further challenges in terms of sociocultural adaptation and issues of identity and relationships, while starting a new job. For example, they may be less able to identify the hidden social signals which are important in communication in formal and informal contexts. I  had similar experiences; although I  was warmly welcomed by some senior colleagues, who were very supportive in the early years of my academic journey, I sometimes struggled with certain aspects of social interaction. I remember that I once felt extremely awkward and isolated in a social gathering organized to welcome new colleagues. I was one of four new colleagues and the only Asian in the group. I could not participate in any of the conversations as I was not familiar with the topics and contexts, such as current work-related matters, football and

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the Eurovision Song Contest, and so on. I left the gathering early and doubted myself; wondering if I was an alien to other Western colleagues.. Not only are my facial features and skin tone different, sometimes, but not all the time, my ways of thinking seemed to be incongruent with theirs – particularly when there were contradictions (e.g. disagreement on pedagogical practices) or unfamiliar topics (e.g. cultural contexts) in our conversations. I  found that it sometimes took me time to make sense of conversations, so I kept my thoughts to myself without responding promptly. On such occasions, I would often try to find a middle ground between the group and myself. But sometimes, I found myself leaving a conversation angry at myself and at a situation where I  was not able to join conversations or respond smoothly. So, I started to search for answers to the question as to why I felt I was different to my Western colleagues. I  realized that there may be two aspects of differences between me and my Western colleagues: sociocultural and cognitive. The sociocultural difference between me and my Western colleagues was that I had a strong inclination to connect with them interpersonally which affected my feelings and behaviours. In the first university where I worked, my colleagues and I had individual offices. Yet, I liked to knock on my colleagues’ office doors and went in to have formal or informal discussions about work life. I also liked to hear the sounds of knocking on my door from my colleagues and would love to have them there for any kind of discussion. I was so obsessed with this form of informal encounter with work colleagues, I remember I seemed to knock on my colleagues’ doors more frequently than they did on mine. There was once a Western colleague who indirectly questioned the intentions of my behaviour, such that it left me wondering whether maybe I had a stronger need for a sense of social integration and ‘belongingness’ in my work environment. I was also keen to find a research group within our team to belong to, but there was no developed research group which shared my interests, and hence motivated me even more to seek connections. I find my reactions in response to various formal and social interactions in a Western context are still subconsciously oriented to a collectivist approach, valuing the building of interpersonal relationships with my colleagues and attempting to avoid interpersonal conflicts in order to maintain harmony (Lane 2002). Such inclinations and longing for interpersonal relationships were so strong that it affected my professional identity formation. I wondered if this desire was rooted in my East Asian culture of collectivism, which may have contrasted with the more individualistic work-and-life approach of my Western colleagues. In Confucius’s collectivist culture in Taiwan, individuals are seen as part of a close-knit community (Fwu and Wang 2002), whereas, Western societies are influenced by

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Greek civilization which values the empowering of personal agency in terms of individualism (Nisbett et al. 2001). I started to be more aware of the different tendencies in thinking and communication approaches in group discussions; my Western colleagues might express and execute independent thoughts, whereas I seemed to focus more on collective opinions within a group. My perception of being an alien could also have been caused by the less understood cognitive differences in terms of systems of thoughts and information processes between East Asians and Westerners (Nisbett et  al. 2001; Nisbett 2003; Varnum et al. 2010). Sometimes, I was very annoyed with myself and situations where I went very quiet during ‘informal’ conversations with my Western colleagues. I was stuck in processing my information during these conversations, as I was experiencing two different kinds of ‘thinking flow’, which were in collision in my head. I often wondered if the incongruence of my thought patterns and the focus of conversations ‘with and between’ my Western colleagues were not merely due to cultural and contextual differences but also due to the possibility that perhaps Asians think and perceive things differently from Westerners. I am so relieved to have found research evidence and literature that supports and may explain my experiences; what I  want to emphasize here is that these cognitive differences may include differences in information processing, interpretations of communications, logical reasoning and language expressions, embedded within the two very distinctive language systems and learning cultures (Nisbett et al. 2001; Nisbett 2003; Varnum et al. 2010). First, it is commonly believed that generally East Asians, particularly the Chinese, under the influence of Confucianism, tend to think in a holistic way and that Westerners tend to be more analytical in their thinking due to differences in social orientation and social organization  – as supported by Varnum et  al. (2010) and Nisbett et al. (2001). East Asians tend to think in holistic ways by directing their cognitive attention outside themselves towards society, due to the tradition that they view themselves as a part of a larger world, and are inclined to maintain harmony within it by avoiding confrontation and debate in public, instead trying to negotiate a ‘middle way’ (Nisbett et al. 2001). However, Varnum et al. (2010) explained that Westerners, who tend to think analytically, are more independent and less constrained by social relations in a group. Therefore, they tend primarily to focus on the object and its properties in the field and one’s goals in relation to it. As a result, they are comfortable debating with others and expressing their own thoughts. Second, Nisbett (2003) suggested that typical rhetorical structures of logical thinking in terms of hypothesis testing and Hegel’s idealistic dialectic

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of thesis, antithesis and synthesis are second nature to Westerners, who adopt them well in their oral or written communications, but are largely absent in Asian traditional linguistic and communication contexts. East Asians tend to contextualize contradictory assumptions by finding a middle ground, instead of taking positions to support one of the contradicted assumptions (Gao, 2012). Third, linguistically, Tavassoli (2002) explained that the Chinese language requires a greater degree of visual-spatial cognitive function, whereas learning English relies primarily on phonological functions; such linguistic differences could affect other higher cognitive functions, such as memory processes and persuasion, that are essential for daily oral and written communications. These three points have helped me to find reasons to explain why I, sometimes, felt alien to my Western colleagues while experiencing cognitive incongruence and being silent in conversations with them. Such realization has helped in the process of my social adjustment and integration. I wondered if, perhaps, it may be common for Asian international academics to feel alien and different from Western colleagues, sometimes and in some contexts (but not always). When there was a situation where I  was teetering on the edge of losing my own pattern of reasoning in a conversation with colleagues, instead of withdrawing and being silent, I would try to clarify myself slowly in order to find my own voice. In some contexts, when there was a chance, I talked about how I may be different from others in order to help them understand the liminal state of rationality and irrationality, which is intertwined with my previous experiences in both East Asian cultures and in Western ones. I  then found a sense of belongingness among a group of foreign academics. No doubt, the support and understanding from other Western colleagues was also invaluable and helpful in my social integration in the professional context. This invisible tension of feeling an alien lessened as I gradually made sense of where I belonged and developed a shared identity with other colleagues, and an understanding of different ways of communication and cognitive functioning.

Conclusion New non-UK academics make extra efforts in balancing not only the roles of teacher and researcher, as expected in most universities, but also many other challenges caused by differences between what they are familiar with in their home countries and what they are required to adapt to in the host country; such differences may include in culture, educational tradition and system,

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social and educational expectations of teachers and students, social structures, linguistic and cognitive systems, and so on. This autoethnographic account of my experiences of being an East Asian academic teaching in a UK university has led me through a self-reflexive process of understanding and overcoming my own doubts that I had experienced on this journey, in order to improve my academic practice and professional development. Teacher and student relationships are vital to teaching and learning quality and experiences. It is therefore very important to develop better teacher and student relationships. As an East Asian academic who had experienced fundamentally different educational training, traditions and expectations to the majority of my Western students, breaking through the fear of not being respected enough has led me to realize the extent to which the Confucian educational tradition have affected my expectation of such relationships and interactions, and my teaching practices. I have also learned to understand my students, who are accustomed to student-centred educational approaches with an emphasis on their individual agency and a heightened sense of entitlement due to the changing landscape of HE in the UK. No doubt it will continue to be a challenge for new foreign academics to build a strong teacher-student relationship in similar contexts because respect comes from mutual understanding and efforts from both parties. My advice for new foreign academics who face similar situations is to be as genuine and authentic as possible during any formal or informal interactions with them. In becoming a good teacher, I have also come to realize that every academic needs to face their own fears – for better or worse, as illustrated by Palmer, that teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. (1998: 2)

My Confucian educational background put me under the pressure of being an expert who conveyed knowledge of ‘truth’ in all subjects I taught, and of being a role model who showed proficiency in the language used, yet my self-reflexivity on my own fear leads me to accept the differences in who I am and focus on what may help with my students’ learning using a student-centred approach. I also found, which I would also suggest as an advice to new foreign academics, that developing a strong academic identity is particularly important to help with stabilizing and balancing various roles, such as producing research outputs and securing external funding as a researcher on the one hand, and fulfilling students’ expectations, teaching, administration and other duties on the other.

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In overcoming the doubts stemming from feeling alien, developing a sense of social integration and belongingness, habitual within my Chinese culture, were substantial to my professional identity formation in UK academic society. The feeling of alienation may be due to cognitive and linguistic differences between Westerners and East Asians, such as thinking in an analytical versus a holistic way (Varnum et  al. 2010), logical thinking versus finding a middle ground between two arguments (Nisbett 2003 and Gao 2012), and phonological functioning versus visual-spatial cognitive functioning (Tavassoli 2002). These possible cognitive differences deserve attention to enhance intercultural communication, particularly so that host institutions may understand different communication styles and information processing in supporting new foreign academics’ social integration, with a view to developing an internationalized teaching and learning environment. The purpose of this autoethnographic account is not self-indulgence or to make anyone feel wrong or guilty. As my intercultural academic journey goes on, the implications of this personal account go beyond this chapter. With the increasing trend towards academic staff mobility in the globalized academic community, I hope what I share here could serve as a basis for further suggestions, for both new foreign academics and their host institutions, on developing techniques to enhance intercultural communication and professional development in many other international contexts.

References Alberts, H. C. (2008), ‘The challenges and opportunities of foreign-born instructors in the classroom’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 32 (2): 189–203. Archer, L. (2008), ‘Younger academics’ constructions of “authenticity”, “success” and professional identity’, Studies in Higher Education, 33 (4): 385–403. Brown, R. with Carasso, H. (2013), Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, London: Routledge. Bryman, A. (2012), Social Research Methods, 4th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chang, H. (2016), ‘Individual and collaborative autoethnography as method’, in S. H. Jones, T. E. Adams and C. Ellis (eds), Handbook of Autoethnography, 107–119 London: Routledge. Collins, J. M. (2008), ‘Coming to America: Challenges for faculty coming to United States’ universities’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 32 (2): 179–188. Cooper, P. (2007), ‘Knowing your “lemons”: Quality uncertainty in UK higher education’, Quality in Higher Education, 13 (1): 19–29.

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Cortazzi, M., Jin, L. and Zhiru, W. (2009), ‘Cultivators, cows and computers: Chinese learners’ metaphors of teachers’, in T. Coverdale-Jones and P. Rastall (eds), Internationalising the University: The Chinese Context, 107–129, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Douglas, J., Douglas, A. and Barnes, B. (2006), ‘Measuring student satisfaction at a UK university’, Quality Assurance in Education, 14 (3): 251–267. Ellis, C. and Bochner, A. (2000), ‘Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject’, in Norman K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 733–768, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E. and Bochner, A. P. (2011), ‘Autoethnography: An overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12 (1), Nov. 2010. Retrieved from: . (accessed on 25 August 2016). Findlow, S. (2012), ‘Higher education change and professional-academic identity in newly “academic” disciplines: The case of nurse education’, Higher Education, 63 (1): 117–133. Foote, K. E., Li, W., Monk, J. and Theobald, R. (2008), ‘Foreign-born scholars in US universities: Issues, concerns, and strategies’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 32 (2): 167–178. Fwu, B.-J. and Wang, H.-H. (2002), ‘The social status of teachers in Taiwan’, Comparative Education, 38 (2): 211–224. Gao, L. (2012), ‘Examining argumentative coherence in essays by undergraduate students of English as a foreign language in Mainland China and their English speaking peers in the United States’ (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from:  (accessed 08 July 2016). Gao, M. S. (1999), The History of Chinese Educational System (Zhong Guo Jiao Yu Shi Lun) [in Chinese], Taipei: Lian-Jing Bookstore. Green, W. and Myatt, P. (2011), ‘Telling tales: A narrative research study of the experiences of new international academic staff at an Australian university’, International Journal for Academic Development, 16 (1): 33–44. Halpin, D., Moore, A., Edwards, G., George, R. and Jones, C. (2000), ‘Maintaining, reconstructing and creating tradition in education’, Oxford Review of Education, 26 (2): 133–144. Hamilton, M. L., Smith, L. and Worthington, K. (2008) ‘Fitting the methodology with the research: An exploration of narrative, self-study and auto-ethnography’, Studying Teacher Education, 4 (1): 17–28. Hsieh, H. (2011), ‘From international student to integrated academic: Supporting the transition of Chinese students and lecturers in UK higher education’, PhD (Integrated) thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Huang, G. H. and Gove, M. (2012), ‘Confucianism and Chinese families: Values and practices in education’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2 (3): 10–14. Hunt, C. (2016), ‘ “Teachers” to “academics”: The implementation of a modernisation project at one UK post-92 university’, Studies in Higher Education, 41(7): 1198–1202.

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Jiang, X., Di Napoli, R., Borg, M., Maunder, R., Fry, H. and Walsh, E. (2010), ‘Becoming and being an academic: The perspectives of Chinese staff in two research-intensive UK universities’, Studies in Higher Education, 35 (2): 155–170. Kember, D. (1997), ‘A reconceptualisation of the research into university academics’ conceptions of teaching’, Learning and Instruction, 7 (3): 255–275. Kingston, E. and Forland, H. (2007), ‘Bridging the gap in expectations between international students and academic staff ’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 12 (2): 204–221. Lane, P. (2002), A Beginner’s Guide to Crossing Cultures, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Luxon, T. and Peelo, M. (2009), ‘Academic sojourners, teaching and internationalisation: The experience of non-UK staff in a British University’, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (6): 649–659. Murray, J. and Male, T. (2005), ‘Becoming a teacher educator: Evidence from the field’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 21 (2): 125–142. Nisbett, R. E. (2003), The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why, New York: The Free Press. Nisbett, R. E., Choi, I., Peng, K. and Norenzayan, A. (2001), ‘Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition’, Psychological Reports, 108 (2): 291–310. Palmer, P. J. (1998), The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. Pepin, B. (1998), ‘Curriculum, cultural traditions and pedagogy: Understanding the work of teachers in England, France and Germany’, in The European Conference for Educational Research, Book of Abstract, September 17–20, 1998. Ljubljana, Slovenia: University of Ljubljana. Rubin, D. L. (1992), ‘Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants’, Research in Higher Education, 33 (4): 511–531. Skinner, K. (2014), ‘Bridging gaps and jumping through hoops: First-year history students’ expectations and perceptions of assessment and feedback in a researchintensive UK university’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 13 (4): 359–376. Tavassoli, N. T. (2002), ‘Beyond reading: Visual processing of language in Chinese and English’, MIT Working Paper. Available online: https://www.bus.umich.edu/ facultyresearch/researchcenters/centers/yaffe/downloads/Visual_Persuasion/nader. pdf (accessed 16 June 2016). Turner, Y. and Acker, A. (2002), Education in the New China: Shaping Ideas at Work, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. Universities UK (2015), Higher Education in Facts and Figures (2015). Available online: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/ 2015/higher-education-in-facts-and-figures-2015.pdf (accessed 2 May 2016). Varnum, M. E. W, Grossman, I., Kitayama, S. and Nisbett, R. (2010), ‘The Origin of cultural differences in cognition: Evidence for the social orientation hypothesis’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19 (1): 9–13.

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Winter, R. (2009), ‘Academic manager or managed academic? Academic identity schisms in higher education’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 31 (2): 121–131. Zhang, Y. B., Lin, M. C., Nonaka, A. and Beom, K. (2005), ‘Harmony, hierarchy and conservatism: A cross-cultural comparison of Confucian values in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan’, Communication Research Report, 22(2): 107–115.

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Negotiating Transitions in Academic Identity: Teacher or Researcher? Tanya Hathaway University of New England in Armidale, Australia

Introduction The international teaching experience had seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity: a higher salary; improved teaching and research conditions; and a higher standard of living. But if I had the chance to do it all again, would I? This chapter is a self-reflexive endeavour that recalls my transitional experiences as an international academic (Thomas and Malau-Aduli 2013), upon entering a rural regional university in Australia. As lived experience, the narrative uses first-person storying (as described by Hunter 2009) to explore transitions in and portray academic identity through the lens of social identity theory (Tajfel 1981). Vignettes of competing academic discourse depict my entry into a culture where powerful self-interest groups used entrenched laws to challenge academic identity (Smith 2009:  112) in an attempt to construct and position new identities. The cross-cultural experience associated with transition was to become a ‘significant life event’ (Zhou et al. 2008: 69). It was an experience that tested my beliefs and values about teaching, research and scholarship within lecturing in teacher education. For a time, finding a way to cope with views of teaching and student learning that were antithetic to mine, and with individualistic research agendas in the institution, proved elusive. In recounting these experiences, self-reflexivity has enabled me to reconcile the economic and sociocultural forces at work in the Australian academic context. Through the narrative, I  acknowledge my inner resilience and the resolve to build a career as an academic in another country. In sequencing this chapter, I  start with a framework revealing my understanding of the formation of academic identity. I  then detail the power relationships that prompted my transitions in academic identity when entering

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the new academic and cultural context. Next, the narrative explores my lived experience as I analyse the challenges to my values and beliefs that came with transition. I  close the chapter by discussing the implications arising from my experiences and offer some practical strategies for others seeking to undertake international teaching experience.

Transitions in academic identity A framework for understanding transitions in academic identity For the international academic, the transitional experience reveals that academic identity and identities are sociocultural phenomena, co-constructed and negotiated in the everyday interaction and habits of the local setting (Tajfel 1981; McLean 2012; Monrouxe and Poole 2013). In the university environment, identities are transient constructions as they ‘are enacted interactionally and are highly fluid and contextual’ (Monrouxe and Poole 2013:  1), constituted in the relations between individuals. Identities exist in a temporal relationship to the subject positions constructed by the discursive practices of the educational context and among the individual academics. It is no surprise then that academic identity comes with group membership, perhaps in pursuing a joint research interest with a colleague or being part of a teaching team. Implicitly, group membership instils a sense of belonging and the evaluation of others through social categorization, social identification and social comparison (Tajfel and Turner 1979). In the university environment, the formation of academic identity is ‘associated with the relationship between structure and agency’ (McLean 2012:  97). It is further complicated by the transitory nature of some agendas due to shifting political, institutional and personal agendas that affect the power relations experienced in work-related encounters (McLean 2012). Universities are, by their nature, ‘extremely culturally complex organisations’ (Knight and Trowler 2000: 69) where cultures are episodically constructed and reconstructed. In times of instability, changing power relations can cause positional movement for academics and prompt transitions in academic identity. Indeed, becoming and being a migrant academic was a destabilizing experience defined by various position transitions, such as moving down through migration, moving up by accomplishment and moving on through a changing role. Unexpectedly, transition became an experience that connected multiple academic identities. For the international academic, institutional hierarchies and unfamiliar cultural ways of knowing readily expose the unequal structures and power

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relationships of the university environment (Olssen and Peters, 2005). Somewhat naively, I had been unaware of the global market forces that had impacted the Australian academic culture, leading to unequal power structures of this kind (Olssen and Peters, 2005). In transitioning from a global to a local context, I  experienced the diminishing of relative power and with this came a loss of agency, and marginalization (Kissman 2001; Saltmarsh and Swirksi 2010). Neoliberalism was the dominant power structure that I encountered upon entering the new academic context. It was manifested through a hyper-individualism that was so deeply embedded in practice that it influenced the formation of new academic identities and key relationships in the course of academics’ working lives. As an international academic, I  found myself socially categorized as ‘someone from abroad’, and through social comparison positioned as ‘neophyte’, despite having several years teaching experience; various criteria were used to determine membership of the different self-interest groups (Zhou et al. 2008). Offers of group membership were reliant upon transitioning to one of many prearranged identities. Some identities I favoured (experienced lecturer, research supervisor), and others I rejected (apprentice, reserve). In the narrative that follows, I  depict these transitions, where I  became a subject of competing discourses about teaching and research, experiencing the intersections and tensions it caused among colleagues and the impact on teaching practices (Harman 1989). Encounters with each discourse meant experiencing a set of sociocultural practices and talk that were the ‘spoken’ means of constructing identity in the academic community. I  experienced intersectionality as my various identities came to the fore under specific conditions and with specific actors (Deaux 2001). As there appeared to be little negotiation space when defining identity, my approach to positioning was accomplished by language statements, then by actions. Resolutely, I resisted all attempts by others to construct my identity by placing me; rather I placed myself in relation to others (Hall 1996). The complexity of illuminating teacher and researcher agendas and events associated with these transitions are depicted in vignettes of collective experience layered within the following narrative. In particular, I focus on my struggle to negotiate the tensions between teaching and research. I recall my experiences in terms of preferred academic identity and transition responses, and while the vignettes and the narrative are portrayed as personal intersections, their contents are imbued with observations, reports and other encounters. I attempt to reveal the power relationships, cultural specificities and contextual factors that influenced academics’ intentions and governed their behaviours. I  also

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reveal how my scholarship practice played a central role in negotiating the strain and the accompanying discomfort that came with transition. As scholarship tensions have shaped a critical pedagogy orientation, my self-reflective inside stories offer pedagogic disappointment as well as hope.

Narratives of the tensions between teaching and research Like many others who are part of the academic ‘brain drain’ from the UK to countries such as Australia and the United States, internationalization offered expectations of enhancement of life quality for an academic:  a higher salary; improved teaching and research conditions; and a higher standard of living (Shaikh 2009; Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010). I gave little thought to the new, yet routine, teaching and research practices I foresaw that would include distance learning. I was far more concerned about the sociocultural differences between the two countries that I might encounter, and how I might adapt to these.

The narrative of competition In the British and European context that I  had left, ‘Academic research is increasingly perceived as social activity based on competition between universities and between individuals’ (Erkkila and Piironen 2015:  50). The culture I  arrived to embodied a similar highly competitive scenario, where the staff used a number of strategies and evasive manoeuvres to preserve and increase their research time (Martin 2011) – tendencies that had arisen among Australian academics from contextual pressure to teach and publish (Feng, McCormack and Barnett 2015). Research activity, with its focus on producing academic papers, was a gateway to promotion (Finkel 2014); it fuelled academics’ intrinsic goals and created a highly individualized culture. The narrative of competition portrays academics in an effort to disguise their true intentions towards new international staff and hide the extent of their research activities (Martin 2011; Christopher 2012). Morning tea recalls one such episode, where I was to experience competitiveness that led to my labelling as neophyte and competitor for time.

Morning tea It was the regular twice-monthly morning tea, but the first time I had attended. I  was taken aback by the mixing of social hierarchies. It was the perfect

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opportunity to cross-examine the newcomer. Unlike the etiquette practiced by UK academics, where one only really talked about one’s latest research, my new colleagues only wanted to know all the details of my personal journey. I  was bombarded with questions. I  somehow ended up being cornered by the selfappointed enforcer. There was nowhere to hide. This time someone did want to know about my office activities, in particular, what was I actually doing with my time. I explained that I was preparing to start teaching, reviewing available resources, designing new lectures and seminars, and working on a research manuscript. Too late I realized my mistake. Without warning, the interrogation began. Why wasn’t I being given marking: everyone else was, so why shouldn’t I be? It was the first transgression.

During Morning tea, through the relaxing of social norms, I reluctantly become aware that ‘the socially constructed rules that govern personal interactions vary across cultures’ (Kissman 2001: 425). The informality and conviviality of the event, well-meant warmth of welcome, and dissolving of the hierarchical boundaries evoked a heightened sense of insertion. Later, I realized that there was an inauthenticity to some of the collegial gestures of friendship and support that simply masked personal agendas about who could be either a ‘pawn or prawn’ and be manoeuvred to benefit others (Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010). The inside story of Morning tea hints at self-serving needs and covert envy. The discourse attempted to construct an academic identity that positioned the newcomer as apprentice, based on the stereotyping of my character, ways of thinking and beliefs (Deaux 2001). Unprepared for the disorientating experience of social categorization as both a resource and a competitor, I reflected on the experience of the metropolitan universities I had worked at in the UK. There the leadership had been keen to develop new staff ’s talents. I had experienced relative power and the ability to steer my career, more or less, in a direction that was to my liking. Yet, here, as an international academic, I was expected to strictly adhere to the normative logics and practices of the department (Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010).

The narrative of concern As I gradually uncovered others’ coping strategies, I was forced to look inwards at how my values and beliefs were holding me back from concentrating on the types of products that counted towards building a career as an academic. The narrative of concern sees high-flying career academics and established researchers who, secure in their abilities, felt compelled to share unwanted advice with those

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intent of pursing teaching over research. You just concentrate on your research conveys the method of these individuals.

You just concentrate on your research Looking up briefly from the computer screen, agitated and dishevelled, my colleague explained that research time was to be carefully guarded, and that I  should do the same. Still keen and eager to contribute, I  mentioned getting involved with students online to further their learning. Against my expectations, I was told that I didn’t need to, as the students could learn on their own. The online learning platform provided access to all the resources they needed (except the lecturer). I recall hearing, ‘You just go away and get on with your research’. The response seemed to justify personal action. I never took the advice and I paid a high price for it.

The vignette’s plot offers a glimpse of the unsought discourse. Its intersection with the discourse and practice of the teaching academic was to cause tensions among colleagues (Harman 1989). In less direct ways, I felt the impact of this intersection deep inside and was forced to hide my true feelings on many occasions. I had been assigned a particular identity, and with this an invitation to in-group membership. The assumption was that their values and beliefs were the same as those underpinning my practice. I  had made an equivalent but opposite assumption based on my experiences in the UK. There, I had observed colleagues who expressed genuine interest in the quality of students’ learning experience and this lived out through their actions for example, giving guest lectures, providing advice to students seeking expert opinion in areas such as research methods. I found this encounter difficult as I partake in the contemporary academic discourse that describes research and teaching as mutually reinforcing concepts integrated through the ‘ideas about what universities do and what they are for’ (Brew 2006: 3). For me, teaching involves working with learners to both explore and create expert descriptions of phenomena. Instead, I  had encountered the view that students’ learning was detached from the discovery learning and research practised by scholars, despite inhabiting the same conceptual space (Boyer 1990). As before, instead of adopting the norms of practice, I digressed and continued putting as much effort into teaching as I  always had, taking a social constructivist approach to online teaching. I  actively sought to engage students in discourses of the discipline that enabled the personal construction of knowledge (Anderson and Dron 2011).

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The narrative of deficit I strongly believe that higher education should be ‘a transformative process that supports the development of graduates’ (Gibbs 2010: 2). The narrative of deficit conveys how, in the university environment, it can be uncomfortable to become aware that a colleague’s beliefs about students’ intellectual abilities are very different from one’s own. Opinions on students and learning are often divided and reveal deficit views of individual students based in stereotyping of particular groups (Tienken 2013). For example, the inside storying of Good luck with that recounts such a disconcerting experience.

Good luck with that I sought refuge with a colleague with whom I  believed I  had permission to speak freely. I’d carefully tested the waters with this colleague when I arrived, to gain an idea of what was accepted in the department. I bemoaned the lack of intellectual challenge for students that I witnessed. I expected to gain some solace. I laid forth my plans for a new assessment that would involve students as active participants in making sense of subject content. By enhancing the connection between research and students’ learning they would not need to rely on me to transmit subject content. (It would also relieve some pressure as when I arrived, I had been unceremoniously handed the module with few resources). The redesigned task would require a presentation of their conceptual framework. Eyebrows raised and hand on hips, I recall my colleague saying, ‘a theoretical framework . . . good luck with that’ and then added ‘the students here can’t even do presentations . . . they just read from a set of notes’. Taken aback, I wondered if I had got teaching all wrong. How could these students be so different from others I  had taught? This can’t be true? In the UK, I had provided intellectual challenge to students, and they had responded positively. Confronted by the deficit view of the students I  was teaching, I  finished the uncomfortable conversation and left the office. It niggled for a while, but I continued with my plans.

Good luck with that was an encounter that tested my belief in my teaching ability and its potential to positively impact student learning. It could be argued that those who succeed in research are perhaps the highest level of learners and therefore find it difficult to identify with students for whom academic study is challenging. In the UK, such lack of empathy might be linked to classspecific teaching beliefs of university teachers, but in Australia, where society is

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perceived from the outside as more egalitarian, I did not expect to encounter such attitudes. I felt bewildered by the empty certainty of my colleague’s experienced facts. It seemed that each time I stepped into the discourse I was uncovering the misalignment with preferred identity and practice. However, the lament over the students’ inability to perform the set task said more about how the individual’s own beliefs about teaching and learning are core to their pedagogic identity and relationship with students. The vignette also illustrates the reproduction of cultural hierarchies through a single narrative. The incongruity of the suggestion and the academic’s perception of their role momentarily revealed the underlying decay of the prevailing pedagogic orientation that was ‘stuck in a time-warp’ (de Zilwa 2007:  564). In the new context, inflexibility and resistance to change meant that there was little external orientation to national and international education agendas from many of the academics I  encountered, as is illustrated in the following vignette.

That wouldn’t work here The context was a staff meeting, where we were asked to get into groups. The topic of discussion was designing alternative assessment modes for indigenous students. I  offered the benefits of my experience gained from working in UK universities, explaining that in one university students had been given a choice of assessment mode. Before I  went any further, I  recall the response. ‘That wouldn’t work here in our modules and with our students.’

In the metropolitan academic culture I  had left, the narrative of support practiced by teacher educator colleagues had shielded me from such discourse. There, I  had experienced the widening participation agenda and, with this transition, the changing of the dominant narrative about teaching and learning. Around me, colleagues had transformed their ways of thinking, enabling the proliferation of assessment practices that could capture knowledge, skills and understanding demonstrated through different modes of representation. I had flourished as I experienced a shared identity and strong sense of group membership. As time went by, and with each intersection, the tension between teaching and research brought with it a barrage of emotions from those around me. Fear was thinly masked in the academic discourse, but erupted in the teaching and assessment practices through distinct survival behaviours (Buchanan, Gordon and Schuck 2008).

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The narrative of fear During the last two decades, benchmarking using student evaluation surveys has become nationwide in Australia (Tucker 2013), accompanied by the ‘shift from voluntary to mandatory use of surveys’ (Shah and Nair 2012). Students’ feedback on their experiences of teaching and learning is now used as a key performance measure in many universities. In Australia, the use of surveys is in response to the government’s introduction of performance-based funding (Shah and Nair 2012). In the UK, the National Student Survey (NSS), based on the Course Experience Questionnaire developed in Australia (Ramsden 1991), never impacted my practice and I  was never subjected to intense pressure to achieve exceptional student evaluations. After I left the UK in 2012, this changed, as that year a fall of 54,000 applicants (14 per cent) in the HE system in the UK led to scores from the NSS being used to refocus institutions’ teaching provision (Pickford 2013). In the new academic context I  entered, the student evaluation system was much more advanced. The aptly named ‘Corporate Intelligence Unit’ administered the institution’s internal evaluation instrument to monitor aspects of the student experience at the module level. Upon arrival, I was immediately told that failure to achieve exceptional student evaluations could result in dismissal. I was never able to accurately determine whether this was part of an organizational myth (Clark 1972) or a legend that existed among certain groups of academics. Yet, some staff felt it was their duty to pass down the narrative of fear to newcomers, as if it only really applied to them. Just don’t fail anyone is a cautionary tale of the effects of corporate managerialism in Australian universities (Anderson 2006; Christopher 2012). The narrative contextualizes the effect student evaluations were to have on the relationship between the teacher and the student.

Just don’t fail anyone The bookshelves were crammed with texts and the office chairs arranged for consultation. Interactions with my colleague had an air of formality. It was a way of sustaining the hierarchical power relationships. It didn’t matter. Being British, I was used to such formalities. Assuming the familiar protocols, I asked about marking, trying to establish the boundaries of practice. It seemed to be going well, or so I thought. Just at that moment, I recall receiving the unwelcome aphorism ‘I don’t mind what you do, just don’t fail anyone’. Somehow, on the outside, I managed to appear unfazed, while inside I squirmed with unease and disappointment. It took me a second to come to. Pause and rewind . . .

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Just don’t fail anyone depicts the emotional response of fear that led academics to the subversion of quality assurance processes (Tucker 2013; Anderson 2006). The vignette illustrates the dissonance between institutional policy relating to assessment and grading (de Zilwa 2007), and the quality assurance procedures practised by the academic, reflecting that for many academics ‘pursuing their own goals took precedence over pursuing the academic unit’s goals’ (de Zilwa 2007: 564). I understand this pressure as I experienced it. Yet, the way I dealt with it was different, and without compromising the quality of teaching. I did exactly what I was told not to do and applied assessment criteria without compromise. I  still attained good student evaluations and weathered the internal disquiet when receiving comments that were negative. Just don’t fail anyone also illustrates movement across resident territories I  mediate as an international academic. Newly established relations, commonalities, and expectations of performance are turned upside down. Again, I stood at a now familiar crossroads: one path led to a new social identity that provided membership of the academic context; the other to the maintenance of preferred identity and the values, beliefs and boundaries that came with it. The decision had been simple, and I never looked backed. The international experience swiftly became a test of endurance as I entered a prolonged period of face-to-face teaching that was to take up much of my working hours. In rural regional Australian universities, teacher educators typically experience large class sizes and associated teaching and marking responsibilities. As is often the way with international academics, I was expected to teach and become expert in subjects disconnected from my immediate research specialism (Shaikh 2009; Green and Myatt 2011). The conditions gave me little hope of writing up research, and I never was able to carve out research time as proficiently as those around me (Green and Myatt 2011:  39). Others must have been feeling the same pressure? I marvelled at how they were coping. How were they surviving, and seemingly thriving? I listened more closely.

The narrative of the casuals ‘Buying out your marking’ and, sometimes, ‘buying out teaching’, was the mantra. The discourses of the community coalesced as the narrative introduced me to a group of transitory academics, categorized as the casuals, and less flatteringly identified as the ‘bodies’, that were ‘a floating pool of contingent labour located on the boundaries of ’ the university (Ryan et al. 2013: 163). Substitution was all around me, but I never really gauged the full extent of it until much later. It is

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estimated that temporary academic staff account for 50 per cent of the overall teaching load in Australian universities (Ryan et  al. 2013; May et  al. 2011). The employment of casuals was an efficient way for the organization to cope with massification and high student numbers (Percy et al. 2008; Larkins 2011; Klopper and Power 2014) that was ‘placing greater demands on academics’ time, and likely competing with research demands for limited resources’ (Li, McCormick and Barnett 2015: 584). The use of ‘deprofessionalised’ academics (Kimber and Ehrich 2015) to cope with these demands sent a message that in comparison to research, teaching and, in particular, marking, was a tedious and second-class activity. I witnessed a general lack of awareness among colleagues that many temporary academics felt lost when teaching. It was unsettling, and while the UK reflects the same trend of increasing employment of sessional staff, my experience as a ‘Visiting Lecturer’, for one term at a post-1992 university, was very different and reflected the approach I adopted to working with my temporary colleagues. When I was provided with casual support for teaching and marking, rather than leave colleagues adrift (Smith and Coombe 2006: 53), I allocated time each week to meet with them and discuss the key concepts to be covered in the coming week’s teaching and the assessment activities. In the teaching context I entered, unlike my previous experiences in the UK, there were no programme meetings, no year meetings and limited interaction between staff teaching different modules. This separation was paralleled in the academics’ focus on their own research speciality, meaning lack of integration and fragmentation in courses (Harman 1989). It is no wonder then that isolation and a sense of cultural dislocation are experiences reported by other international staff in Australian universities (Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010).

Moving on A year later, I  relocated to the university’s central teaching and learning department. With the role and position change was the opportunity to create a new identity within the institution and open spaces for counter-narratives. I was removed from the discursive tensions of the education department, and my practice fell entirely within the encouraging discourse of academic development. Cultural crossings still brought intersections, but the shifted power relations and agency that came with the change provided the opportunity to positively impact pedagogy and practice, and by extension student learning, across the wider

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university; this finalized the transition and moving on. Newly established power and pseudo-acculturation meant the experience was empowering and contrary to that reported by other new international academics (Jiang et al. 2010). The role of academic developer finally offered an entry point into the discourse and practice of academics who were open to change.

Implications Although it would be difficult to apply the interpretation of these experiences and events to other Australian universities, the discourses may be recognisant of other Australian institutions, and perhaps institutions in other countries (Shaikh 2009; Jiang et al. 2010; Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010; Green and Myatt 2011; Thomas and Malau-Aduli 2013). The narrative highlights challenges for new international staff accepting posts in the country’s universities. The analysis of the different discourses functioning in the narrative suggests that academics should be proactive in identifying whether the contexts and cultural variations existing in Australian universities are supportive of new international staff. The following are suggested strategies for anyone seeking to embark on an international teaching expedition. First and foremost, the individual should try to build as accurate a picture as possible of the institution’s dynamics and the dispositions of the specific department they are considering entering. These days such information may be gleaned through a simple internet search using key words connected to the institution’s and department’s name. Personal experience demonstrates that the phenomenon of the six degrees of separation and short chains of acquaintances mean that small-world networks (as described by Leonesi 2015) increase the chance of us each having a connection with someone in the country or institution of interest, who can provide authentic accounts of local events, behaviours and practices. When such intelligence is gathered, it can prepare the individual to dismiss the institution of interest, or pursue and strategize to proactively experience the predicted transitions in academic identity. In hindsight, I  can recall that I  had been unaware of the high turnover of international academic staff in the department I  entered that reflected a sector-wide trend (Saltmarsh and Swirski 2010). In discussions with colleagues following my first year at the institution, I  realized that I  would have benefitted from having a mentor as described by Buchanan, Gordon

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and Schuck (2008), preferably another expatriate academic. International academics need to know that someone is genuinely interested in supporting their career and can provide a degree of stability to reflect on experiences. In addition, mentoring can help university leadership to find ways to utilize their talents and skills as teachers and researchers that will benefit the institution and support student learning. Finally, it is advisable to read the institution’s teaching and learning strategy with a view to ascertaining the currency of thinking illustrated in the types of teaching practices and assessment strategies promoted. In the UK, I had avidly followed the work of Angela Brew, from Macquarie University, that envisages the relationship between research and teaching as linked through discovery learning. I  arrived in Australia expecting to find research-informed teaching fully embedded in the curriculum; it was not even on the horizon. If you expect to find yourself teaching in your area of research, think twice and consider whether you are prepared to start all over again. Ultimately, consider whether internationalization and the romantic notion of the international teaching experience will do more damage than good to your academic career.

References Anderson, G. (2006), ‘Assuring quality/resisting quality assurance: Academics’ responses to “quality” in some Australian universities’, Quality in Higher Education, 12 (2): 161–173. Anderson, T. and Dron, J. (2011), ‘Three generations of distance education pedagogy’, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12 (3): 80–95. Boyer, E. L. (1990), Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Brew, A. (2006), Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buchanan, J., Gordon, S. and Schuck, S. (2008), ‘From mentoring to monitoring: the impact of chancing work environments on academics in Australian Universities’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 32 (3): 241–250. Christopher, J. (2012), ‘Tension between the corporate and collegial cultures of Australian public universities: The current status’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 23: 556–571. Clark, B. R. (1972). ‘The organizational saga in higher education’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 17 (2): 178–183. de Zilwa, D. (2007), ‘Organisational culture and values and the adaptation of academic units in Australian universities’, Higher Education, 54 (4): 557–574.

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Deaux, K. (2001), ‘Social identity’, in J. Worrell (ed.), Encyclopedia of Women and Gender (Vol. 2), 1059–1067, San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Erkkila, T. and Piironen, O. (2015), ‘Autonomisation and individualisation: Ideational shifts in European higher education’, in L. Evans and J. Nixon (eds), Academic Identities in Higher Education, 47–62, London, Oxford: Bloomsbury. Feng, Li, E., McCormick, J. and Barnett, K. (2015), ‘A comparison of Chinese and Australian university academics’ valence for teaching and cross-disciplinary research’, Higher Education, 69 (4): 583–605. Finkel, A. (2014), ‘Powering up citations’, Nature, 511: S77. https://www.nature.com/ articles/511S77a (accessed 8 January 2018). Gibbs, G. (2010), Dimensions of Quality, York, UK: The Higher Education Academy. Green, W. and Myatt, P. (2011), ‘Telling tales: A narrative research study of the experiences of new international academic staff at an Australian university’, International Journal for Academic Development, 16 (1): 33–44. Hall, S. (1996). Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage. Harman, K. (1989), ‘Professional versus academic values: Cultural ambivalence in university professional schools in Australia’, Higher Education, 18 (5): 491–509. Hunter, S. V. (2009), ‘Analysing and representing narrative data: The long and winding road’, Current Narratives, 1 (2): 44–54. Jiang, X., Di Napoli, R., Borg, M., Maunder, R., Fry, H. and Walsh, E. (2010), ‘Becoming and being an academic: The perspective of Chinese staff in two research-intensive UK universities’, Studies in Higher Education, 35 (2): 155–170. Kimber, M. and Ehrich, L. C. (2015), ‘Are Australia’s universities in deficit? A tale of generic managers, audit culture and casualisation’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 37 (1): 83–97. Kissman, K. (2001), ‘Deconstructing the journey from assimilation to acculturation in academia’, International Social Work, 44 (4): 423–432. Klopper, C. J. and Power, B. M. (2014), ‘The casual approach to teacher education: What effect does casualisation have for Australian university teaching?’, Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39 (4): 101–114. Knight, P. T. and Trowler, P. R. (2000), ‘Department-level Cultures and the Improvement of Learning and Teaching’, Studies in Higher Education, 25 (1): 69–83. Larkins, F. (2011), ‘LH Martin Institute – Insights Blog – Academic staffing trends: At what cost to teaching and learning excellence?’, LH Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management. Available online: http://www. lhmartininstitute.edu.au/insights-blog/2011/10/65-academic-staffing-trends-atwhat-cost-to-teaching-and-learning-excellence (accessed 18 July 2016). Li, F. E., McCormick, J. and Barnett, K. (2015). ‘A comparison of Chinese and Australian university academics’ valence for teaching and cross-disciplinary research’, Higher Education, 69: 583–605. Leonesi, S. (2015), ‘The mystery of six degrees of separation, part 1: From order to random’, Lettera Matematica, 3(3): 121–127.

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Martin, B. (2011), ‘ERA: adverse consequences’, Australian Universities Review, 53 (2): 99–102. May, R., Strachan, G., Broadbent, K. and Peetz, D. (2011), ‘The causal approach to university teaching; Time to re-think?’, in K. Krause, M. Buckridge, C. Grimmer and S. Purbick-Illek (eds), Research and Development in Higher Education: Higher Education on the Edge, 188–197, Brisbane, Australia: HERDSA. McLean, N. (2012), ‘Researching academic identity: Using discursive psychology as an approach’, International Journal for Academic Development, 17 (2): 97–108. Monrouxe, L. and Poole, G., (2013), ‘An onion? Conceptualising and researching identity’, Medical Education, 47: 425–429. Olssen, M. and Peters, M. A. (2005), ‘Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From free market to knowledge capitalism’, Journal of Education Policy, 20 (3): 313–345. Percy, A., Scoufis, M., Parry, S., Goody, A., Hicks, M., Macdonald, I., Martinez, K., Szorenyi-Reischl, N., Ryan, Y., Wills, S. and Sheridan, L. (2008), The RED Report: Recognition, Enhancement, Development & the Contribution of Sessional Staff Teachers to Higher Education, Sydney : Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Pickford, R. (2013), ‘Leadership of the National Student Survey for enhancement’, Quality Assurance in Education, 21 (4): 344–358. Ramsden, P. (1991), ‘A performance indicator of teaching quality in higher education: The course experience questionnaire’, Studies in Higher Education, 6 (2): 129–150. Ryan, S., Burgess, J., Connell, J. and Groen, E. (2013), ‘Causal Academic Staff in an Australian University: Marginalised and excluded’, Tertiary Education and Management, 19 (2): 61–175. Saltmarsh, S. and Swirski, T. (2010), ‘ “Pawns and prawns”: International academics’ observations on their transition to working in an Australian university’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 32 (3): 291–301. Shah, M. and Nair, C. H. (2012), ‘The changing nature of teaching and unit evaluations in Australian universities’, Quality Assurance in Education, 20 (3): 274–288. Shaikh, S. (2009), ‘A survey of migration of academics in Higher Education and their impact on host institutions’, Reflecting Education, 5 (1): 16–30. Smith, E. and Coombe, K. (2006), ‘Quality and qualms in the marking of university assignments by sessional staff: An exploratory study’, Higher Education, 51 (1): 45–69. Smith, K. (2009), ‘International teaching experiences: An under-explored territory for transformative professional development’, International Journal for Academic Development, 14 (2): 111–122. Tajfel, H. (1981), Human Groups and Social Categories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1979), ‘An integrative theory of intergroup conflict’, in W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 33–47, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company: University of Michigan.

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Thomas, S. L. and Malau-Aduli, B. S. (2013), ‘New international academics’ narratives of cross-cultural transition’, International Journal of Higher Education, 2 (2): 35–52. Tienken, C. H. (2013), ‘Neoliberalism, social Darwinism, and consumerism masquerading as school reform’, Interchange, 43: 295–316. Tucker, B. M. (2013). ‘Student evaluation to improve the learning experience: An Australian university case study’, Educational Research and Evaluation, 19 (7): 615–627. Zhou, Y., Jindal-Snape, D., Topping, K. and Todman, J. (2008), ‘Theoretical models of culture shock and adaptation in international students in higher education’, Studies in Higher Education, 33 (1): 63–75.

8

Examining Pedagogical Autonomy in International Higher Education Systems Anesa Hosein University of Surrey, UK

Introduction My first foray into teaching at the higher education (HE) level was after completing my undergraduate degree. I  thought, at the time, that teaching at the HE level, although scary, was not difficult; all I  needed to do was tell the students about the content that was on the module outline and to ensure that they felt confident in tackling their examination questions. I certainly did not think this approach varied from institution to institution or country to country. Neither did I, at the time, realize that my beliefs and values about learning and teaching would change over time through exposure to various teaching contexts, exposure to different beliefs about the purpose of HE, and advances in pedagogical practice. In this chapter, I reflect on my journey of my developing teaching practice and on how this has changed through my exposure to teaching in three teaching contexts, two in British postcolonial countries (Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago) and one in the UK. To frame and analyse my teaching journey, I  have borrowed from three frameworks: (a)  autoethnography; (b)  a systems approach; and (c) self-determination theory. First, as my teaching journey is over a period of almost twenty years, I have used autoethnography as a way for encapsulating this experience. Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011: 1) define autoethnography as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’. While I have mainly relied on my personal memories for reflecting on my teaching journey (see Chang 2008, for issues on using personal memories),

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I  have corroborated these, where I  can, with my personal blogs, emails, web pages and documents. Inevitably, my reflections on my teaching journey will be influenced by different stages of my career, my level of experience, the type of institution and the country (Prosser et al. 2003; Stes Gijbels and Van Petegem. 2007; Geschwind and Broström 2015; Hosein 2017). Therefore, my analytical narrative is shaped by my development as a teacher and the specific contexts within these various time periods. Second, HE and its various structures are complex and varies depending on country and institution. I  selected a systems approach for simplifying this complexity and defining my units of analysis based on my perception of the similarity among these three country contexts (see Checkland and Holwell 1998 for more on this approach). I  have demarcated three systems (see Figure 8.1): the HE system (representing the university); the school education system (representing primary and secondary education for children between the ages of 5–18  years); and the person (academic) system (representing an academic staff ’s personal life outside of HE, i.e. me). I have further simplified the HE system into four main elements (Figure  8.1):  the person/academic who is teaching (the academic’s life within HE, i.e. me); the learning support structure that is provided, such as the virtual learning environments (VLEs); the curriculum; and, lastly, the student body. Finally, I  use the framework of self-determination theory (SDT) for reflecting on my teaching practices within the HE structure. SDT suggests that there are three basic psychological needs of a person and, if thwarted, this can affect their intrinsic motivation and, in turn, their job satisfaction (see Shin and Jung 2014). These psychological needs are feelings of autonomy, relatedness and competence (see Deci and Ryan 2008 for more information). I will be reflecting on my feelings of pedagogical relatedness (see Prosser et al. 2003 for a similar concept called pedagogical dissonance/consonance), that is, how connected I  feel to the pedagogical approaches used in my various institutions and how this affects my feelings of autonomy and competence in my pedagogical practice. Through the autoethnographic approach, I  identified four main themes which affected my pedagogical relatedness as I transitioned between different institutions and countries. I have arranged these themes based on my interactions with the structures in the HE systems based on Figure 8.1. These themes are the HE curriculum structure, student body structure and schooling system (diverse classrooms), the learning support structure (virtual learning systems, VLEs), and the intersection between HE and personal systems boundaries (work-life

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School Education System

shapes

affects (Teaching) Academic

shapes

Student Body

utilises

shapes

Curriculum

supports

supports

Learning Support

Higher Education System

Relationship My Issues with Pedagogical Relatedness

Figure 8.1 Systems affecting my pedagogical relatedness

balance). Although I have taught a range of subjects, I will mainly contextualize my experience of the teaching of mathematics-related subjects, as disciplines can sometimes have an impact on the teaching approaches (Lindblom-Ylänne et  al. 2006 Stes, Gijbels and Van Petegem 2007; Stes and Van Petegem 2014). Before embarking on my reflections around the themes, I have provided some background to my teaching.

Teaching background and context I first taught mathematics to engineering and science undergraduate students at the University of Guyana (UG, Georgetown, Guyana, South America/ West Indies) for two years full-time as an assistant lecturer (1999–2001) after

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completing my BSc in physics at the same institution.1 At the University of West Indies (UWI, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies), while completing my MPhil in manufacturing engineering, I taught mathematics to engineering students for three years part-time (2001–2004) as a postgraduate tutor. Finally, after my PhD in educational technology at the Open University2 (UK), I taught both mathematics and education to education studies students at Liverpool Hope University (LHU, Liverpool, UK) for just over two years (2010– 2013), where I  also earned my Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) through a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP). I  started at LHU as a postdoctoral teaching fellow and eventually became a lecturer after one year in the post. My initial pedagogical beliefs and approaches were most likely first formed during my exposure as a student at UG, and then as a teacher there. Therefore, my initial feelings of pedagogical relatedness will be using this period as a reference point. Both UG and UWI had degree awarding powers since the 1960s, while LHU, although in existence since the 1800s, only achieved degree awarding powers in 2005. Both UG and UWI are products of the British colonial system, with their degree awarding powers coinciding with the period that their host countries received independence from the UK. For example, in 1948, UWI began as a university college of the University of London, servicing the West Indies, and gained independent university status in 1962, when Jamaica also gained its independence. In contrast, UG was established in 1963, three years prior to Guyana’s national independence, after no longer wishing to contribute to the UWI system. Unlike LHU, UWI and UG were the main HE institutions available in their respective countries. Finally, in all three countries, the HE system followed a semesterized pattern of teaching (two blocks of fifteen weeks per academic year), although LHU used a mixture of trimesterized (three blocks of teaching per academic year) and semesterized patterns depending on the programme. The term ‘course’ is used in UG and UWI, whereas the term ‘module’ is normally used in the UK to represent a subject taken over either one semester or three trimesters. I will use the term ‘module’ for consistency. In my reflections, while I may reflect on a country or institution, it is important to note that country and institution are conflated with each other. 1

2

I was also schooled at the primary and secondary level at institutions in Trinidad and Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Guyana and was accustomed to learning within different educational systems. The Open University is a distance and online university.

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Reflections on teaching In this section, I explore how my feelings of pedagogical autonomy, relatedness and competence change depending on the context (these are summarized in Table 8.1).

Higher education curriculum structure In all three universities, I experienced different levels of pedagogical autonomy with respect to curriculum design. At UG, although unaware of pedagogical theories and curriculum design, I had full pedagogical autonomy to design my modules (including content and assessments). These inevitably reflected my pedagogical values and beliefs, which were to help students develop confidence in what they were studying, and to help them to recognize the applications of what they learned to real life. At UWI, the broad content and the final assessment was decided by the module leader, but I had the pedagogical autonomy to determine the lecture content and the assessments related to my lectures. Therefore, based on these two experiences, I thought this level of autonomy was the norm across the HE sector, which was why I felt disconnected to the LHU process when I first arrived. At LHU, I had various levels of autonomy, depending on whether I was the module leader or part of a team. Initially, when I joined as part of a team, I was allocated the lesson plan and had little flexibility on changing the content except for reordering the information and emphasizing different points. Ironically,

Table  8.1 Initial feelings of pedagogical relatedness, autonomy and competence at UWI and LHU with reference to UG Institution/ Theme UWI Relatedness Autonomy Competence LHU Relatedness Autonomy Competence

Curriculum

Diverse Classroom

VLEs

Work-Life

Same Lower Same

Same Same Same

Same Same Same

Same Same Same

Lower Lower Lower

Lower Lower Lower

Same Lower Same

Lower Lower Same

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it appeared to me that as my teaching career was advancing, the contexts contributed to me feeling as if my pedagogical autonomy was decreasing, a point I remarked upon when I first started teaching at LHU: I just have to regurgitate the materials someone else created . . . I might as well be a well-titled graduate assistant. As a demonstrator/ tutor, I had more autonomy – I created the materials and taught it. (Private blog, 7 September 2010)

As a module leader at LHU, my autonomy in designing and creating modules was limited, mainly due to the time required for quality assurance processes such as validation, which arose in the 1990s because of the Dearing Report (see Dearing 1997). The validation process in the UK seeks to scrutinize modules to ensure that they meet the UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) subject benchmarks and follow the constructive alignment theory (CAT) for curriculum design (see Biggs 1996). In the CAT approach, the curriculum is driven by learning outcomes and is designed for students to achieve the minimum level of higher order thinking skills at the end of a module (Bloom 1956; Krathwohl 2002). The validation process usually takes place a year before the module is first delivered, with only limited changes to that module in a five-year period. As part of the validation process, the assessment types at LHU were often specified and could only be changed through additional scrutiny, that is, more quality assurance paperwork. In contrast, at UWI and UG, the curriculum design process was highly agile, where content and assessments were decided at the beginning of the semester without any due process such as through a validation panel. Unlike at LHU, the curriculum design agility at UWI and UG incentivized me to change and test different assessments or content to fit the needs or interests of the incoming student cohort. This agile process was engendered through a syllabus pedagogical approach. In this approach, the curriculum is based on covering subject areas and topics, that is, it is content-driven. Although learning outcomes are used in the syllabus approach, these are related to the content covered rather than in achieving higher levels of thinking. Further, unlike the UK’s QAA subject benchmarks, there were no national subject standards in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, and my modules’ content was benchmarked against description of similar modules from the United States and the UK, which were readily available via their prospectuses (housed in the library) and online. At UG and UWI, although there was a flexibility in covering topics in the module based on students’ strengths and time available (e.g. if students were unable to understand calculus, more time may be spent on this), there was also

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a danger that some topics were rarely covered in depth, or just mentioned to indicate that the content was covered, without providing students with any real understanding of the content. However, as there was agility in module design at UG, there was always a likelihood that the topics not covered in a previous module could then be covered in a later module. Initially, the lack of flexibility in changing and developing modules at LHU reduced my feelings of pedagogical relatedness. The system of creating and redeveloping modules constrained my sense of pedagogical autonomy as it was confined to the validation processes shaped by the CAT framework. These scrutiny procedures impinged, I  felt, on valuing my professional judgement and academic authority. These sentiments about the CAT framework have been voiced previously by other academics (see, for example, Knight 2001; Biggs 2014). After a year at LHU, having completed the PGCAP and growing more pedagogically competent with the LHU environment and CAT approach, I  was asked to help develop the mathematical pathway in education. My pedagogical beliefs and practice had by now changed; I  began to develop stronger feelings of pedagogical relatedness with the CAT system as I  was indoctrinated into it, as pedagogically, it allowed the lecturer to consider the holistic learning of the students and provide them with a clear sense of what was expected from them. However, I did think that the CAT system allowed for ‘gaming’ the system, that is, in knowing how to fill in validation forms to ensure that approval is gained: It has been a useful exercise in understanding how the aims and objectives need to be aligned with the pedagogy. Also, what has been useful in moving my career forward, I think, is understanding how to play the ‘political’ game in course designing. (PGCAP Assignment: Critical Reflection on Course Design, July 2011)

I also found myself criticizing the systems of UWI and UG and thinking of them as ‘backwards’ in terms of pedagogy. I was thus becoming pedagogically assimilated into the HE system in the UK (Berry 1997); I  was discarding the old and accepting the new and learning to play by the rules of the system and, through this, increasing my feelings of pedagogical relatedness. My assimilation or acceptance of the CAT pedagogical approach could be because I was from a former British colony, in which the British education is sometimes held as being advanced or the ‘gold’ standard (see Walker 2014). I may have felt that the pedagogical models I knew before in the postcolonial countries of Trinidad and

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Tobago and Guyana were not advanced, and the one I was exposed to in LHU was the ‘correct’ or best pedagogical model, and therefore I was more disposed to achieving pedagogical relatedness with the British model. However, the more likely scenario was that, as pedagogical and quality assurance practices such as the CAT approach have been growing in prominence across the globe (see Biggs 2014), I would have engaged with these pedagogical theory and practices eventually, regardless of country or institution. For example, UWI now runs a Postgraduate Certificate (PGCERT) in Teaching and Learning and has a quality assurance process.

Student body structure and schooling system: diverse classrooms Whilst I  was becoming more pedagogically competent in LHU’s approach to curriculum design, I was simultaneously faced with the need to be pedagogically competent in teaching a diverse classroom:  not diverse in terms of religion, ethnicity and gender and so on, as this was a norm for me, coming from the culturally and ethnically diverse communities of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Instead, I faced a classroom with students who had diverse knowledge backgrounds, which was surprising as all three countries had a similar schooling pattern, owing to a similar educational past. At the secondary school level, students earned qualifications in various subjects, including mathematics and English language, through a compulsory general certificate of secondary education (GCSE) at 16  years of age and then again through an optional advanced certificate of secondary education (ACSE) at 18  years of age. Students’ entry into university is determined by these examinations. At UG and UWI, good passes in mathematics and English language at the CSE levels were compulsory (Grades A  to C);3 however, at LHU, this requirement varied depending on degree programmes. In Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, entry into the only major university was highly competitive and meritocratic; the students at UG and UWI predominantly had good passes (A and B grades) at both CSE and/or ACSE level in mathematics and other subjects. Thus, in these classrooms, most students’ subject knowledge and educational backgrounds were homogenous. Compared to the premier UK institutions (as well as UG and UWI), many students at LHU accessed the

3

In both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, GCSEs are run by the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) and the subjects are graded by numbers (1 to 3). I have used letter grades (A to C) to be consistent with the UK system.

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institution through widening participation (WP) routes (see Hoare and Johnston 2011 for discussion on widening participation routes), which often meant their entry grades were more variable. Therefore, when I  arrived at LHU, I  was pedagogically unprepared for the differences in the students’ level of mathematical knowledge. At UG and UWI, my classroom was made up the ‘mathematical majority’; most of my students understood basic mathematical concepts. They were also intrinsically motivated to learn mathematics, which meant they required less support and could follow and engage in the mathematical principles and concepts via worked examples on the whiteboard. At LHU, my classroom was made up of the ‘mathematical minority’, that is, most of my students were uncomfortable with basic mathematical principles, which I noted: the students who I am teaching mathematics to, chose to do this option/ pathway. It was my belief (maybe erroneously!) that these students were confident in the mathematics subject matter otherwise they would not have chosen it. (PGCAP Action Plan for Supporting Student Learning, January 2011)

I faced my strongest feelings of pedagogical disconnectedness in this situation. I felt that my LHU students did not have a right to be in these classrooms. I was discontented as I  thought I  was provided with unfair circumstances which I had no control over. It was unlikely that these students would understand the advanced topics within the limited time if I also had to teach the fundamentals, considering mathematics has a hierarchical knowledge structure (see Young and Muller 2013). In this situation, I  was concerned about teaching ‘properly’, that is, providing the content to the student. After several discussions with one of the senior mathematics teacher and an academic developer, I began to have a conceptual shift on how I  approach teaching. They had both provided similar advice, one advising me that ‘coverage was almost always the downfall of a new lecturer’ and the other rhetorically asking me ‘What is more important – that the students learn what you were teaching well or that you covered the topics and the students don’t understand anything you taught?’ (see also Clynes 2009, who had similar issues). I had failed to consider the backgrounds of my students, their diverse lives and how I could support them in developing their confidence in mathematics. I was being teaching-focused rather than student-centred in my pedagogical approach (see Samuelowicz and Bain 2001 for a discussion). I realized, as a teacher, that if I valued and put my students’ understanding at the centre of my teaching, the diverse

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backgrounds became a trivial issue. I, thus, began to shift towards being student-centred, for example: I have to also be careful making assumptions of my students’ abilities and to possibly first judge where their current learning levels are. . . . I  also have to make the judgement call between when it is necessary to spend time covering mathematical topics and ensuring students understand a topic thoroughly . . . I think one of my problems with this is that I see myself as the imparter of all knowledge but instead I  should probably work towards the students creating their own knowledge. (PGCAP Action Research Project, September 2011).

As I  became assimilated into the teaching culture of LHU, my feelings of pedagogical relatedness had grown, due to my mentors (see Thomas and MalauAduli 2013) as well as the PGCAP programme. This had given me feelings of competence in teaching diverse classrooms and the recognition that I  had autonomy in deciding how I chose to teach; I did not have to adopt a teacherfocused approach.

Learning support structure: technology and virtual learning environments While, thus far, I  have raised issues surrounding my lack of pedagogical relatedness within the HE system, within the learning support structures, I fared better. In this section, I  limit my discussion mainly to the learning support structures of VLEs. Undoubtedly, over the period I  have taught, the use of technology in the different HE contexts has changed. For example, the internet was only introduced in Guyana in the late 1990s. Therefore, when I  began teaching at UG, the technology was mainly confined to the use of software packages, namely, Microsoft Office, in computer laboratories. I never used these packages during class but rather only as a tool for preparing assessments and tutorial sheets for students. However, I  was fascinated with the internet and embraced it fully. I had set up my personal website in 1998. In 2001, for a summer module, I explored the internet for teaching; this was my first foray into blended learning. I used it mainly as a repository, where I placed the module description/ outline and tutorial sheets online and also published students’ grades. However, at the time, I did not consider the ethics of publishing students’ grades online on an unsecured server. Rules and regulations about internet ethics were still in their infancy in relation to students’ data. Concurrent with this time, VLEs were already being introduced in British universities and used in online learning

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(e.g. the Open University had introduced the FirstClass VLE in the early 1990s). When I  moved to UWI, part of my teaching required me to teach students mathematics using software packages (which later led to the research idea for my PhD), and this was one aspect of my technology use within my teaching practice. However, in 2004, when I  taught the module ME30B:  Engineering Management, where I had the most flexibility and autonomy at UWI, I returned to my blended learning approach. Although UWI at the time was introducing its new VLE, WebCT, it was not widely used or understood by lecturers; further, being only a postgraduate tutor, I did not have access to WebCT for the module. I, therefore, again used my personal website for blended learning, and, this time, I used it more extensively. I placed external resources, solutions to problems and my first set of online learning materials. I essentially had created my own VLE, although quite basic, albeit without discussion forums (see Figure 8.2). Therefore, when I began teaching at LHU, I found myself embracing the use of VLEs for blended learning in my teaching, and in this instance the VLE Moodle. I felt a strong level of pedagogical relatedness, as my belief in using technology to teach was matched up with the practices at LHU: though I should acknowledge doing a distance learning MSc and a PhD in educational technology at the Open University possibly made me even more accepting of teaching and technology. I  was keen to try out the different tools that Moodle offered, including the integration of Web 2.0 technologies such as Twitter, YouTube and the use of discussion forums for my blended learning groups, and this reflected my earlier enthusiasm for the use of the internet in teaching, almost ten years prior. I had

ME30B Hello students of 2003/2004!! Update: Your results for your test and coursework here Update (1): You can access the make-up assignment here. Submission date is 23rd April. Update (2): The make-up test given on Friday 23rd April, 2004 is available here. Here is some information you can use during this course. 1. Linear programming questions: Linear programming formulation questions and their excel solver solutions can be found 2. Tutorial No. 1 Sheet - A Lindo printout (solution and sensitivity analysis) for a LP problem 3. List of Students - The list of students, groups belonging to, and tutorial session (the hyperlink has been removed) 4. Assignment 1 Results - The unofficial results for assignment 1. The marks may change. (Some marks have been changed ) 5. Guide to LP Formulation - a 6 step guide to formulating simple LP problems

Figure 8.2 Blended learning website for ME30B: Engineering Management

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strong feelings of technological competency which allowed me to embrace this approach, as indicated by my blog entry: I’m a bit excited about the new courses I  would be teaching. Just discovered there is personal response system (clickers) available – I just want to find some way of incorporating this into the class . . . of course, this should be teaching led not technology led . . . But somehow or the other, I’m going to get the technology in. (Private blog, 9 September 2010)

Technology in this instance was universal and sweeping throughout the world; there was no unexpected disparity between countries, except for earlier adoption. Therefore, I was open to integrating my old pedagogies with the new pedagogies with regards to technology. Although I wanted to adopt technologies such as clickers at LHU, this desire was tempered by the limited space in the curriculum. Therefore, my technology enthusiasm was dampened in an attempt to conform to the expectations or norms of the pedagogical approaches of the institution. This is unlike when I was in UG or UWI, where when I had an idea for incorporating technology, I could use my autonomy to execute it. However, I should acknowledge at that time in UG or UWI, perhaps technological ideas were few and simple to implement.

Higher education and personal systems boundaries: work-life balance With technology, my personal interests were crossing the boundaries and influencing the way I taught. Similarly, HE systems were influencing the way I perceived and lived my life outside of academia. My feelings of relatedness to the pedagogical culture within the institutions were dependent on my perception of an academic’s life. My perception of the academic teaching life in the UK was formed when I was at LHU since being a PhD student at the Open University did not expose me to this aspect. Through conversations and observations, I felt that LHU academics thought it was natural not to have a work-life balance and that there was an expectation that I should be working on weekends and evenings as well as during the day. This was completely different from how I had formed my perception of academic life at UG and UWI. At these two institutions, the positive aspect of the academic’s life was the flexibility of the job, that is, no set time to come in or leave, but an expectation that the roles and responsibilities were accomplished in whatever manner that suited the academic. This meant that while I may have worked on

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evenings or weekends at UG and UWI, I felt that these were choices I made to accomplish my job, as I could easily have accomplished these tasks during the work day as well, that is, I had intrinsic motivation towards my teaching (Ryan and Deci 2000). Perhaps these feelings stem from the roles I  had. At both UG and UWI, my main role and responsibility were teaching and its related administration. At LHU, my responsibilities in teaching, conducting research and the administration related to teaching felt more complex than at my previous institutions. The complex responsibilities at LHU may be a reflection on my job grade, for which I  was required to undertake a range of additional administration and teaching (such as quality assurance boards) and also be able to deliver research outputs that is inherent in the UK research culture (see van Dalen and Henkens 2012). The major difference in my roles between the UK and in the West Indies was the need to conduct research, as a British academic’s career progression is determined by their research outputs (the ‘perish or publish’ dogma) (see van Dalen and Henkens 2012). LHU wanted me to use my time to promote a good student experience (e.g. 550 hours for teaching vs 200 hours for research per year), but wanted to judge my progress on my research outputs. At LHU, I had to adjust my pedagogical values and beliefs to a value system which I did not relate to, that is, where my students’ learning was no longer the only priority but rather a deterrent to developing my research. For example, I wrote: Well, I think given the position I am in – I need to push my research because I am obviously not going to be niched or valued lecturer. I really need to get some papers published and also get some research going. (Private blog, 7 Sept 2010)

Hence, to progress my career, my research had to be completed either at the expense of my teaching and administration or on my personal time. I felt that my autonomy over both my professional and personal time was taken away from me at LHU and in the UK environment because of the need to increase research outputs. I  felt that, on one hand, UK institutions wanted to promote a good student experience but, on the other, were creating circumstances that inhibited the exploration or innovation in creating this good student experience because of the demand for research outputs (see Hosein 2017 for a longer discussion on the research-teaching nexus). This feeling of disconnectedness with a pedagogical culture that encroaches onto my personal life still continues for me, and I have had to consciously manage the work-life pressures in the HE work environment in the UK.

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Reflections and implications When I first started working at universities in the UK, I expected the teaching to be similar to my previous teaching experiences in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, considering that all three countries shared a similar schooling system and history. While I  may place my feelings of pedagogical disconnect on differences between the countries, it appears to have stemmed from my expectations of academic life and educational systems, the changing HE practices during the long gaps between my teaching positions and the student body composition at the various HE institutions. These combined reasons are perhaps why my feelings of pedagogical relatedness were more strongly challenged in an institution in the UK environment, where all of these variables were different to what I was previously accustomed to (see also Shin and Jung 2014 for issues about academics’ autonomy in different countries). Although, initially, I  may have faced feelings of pedagogical disconnect, I  was able to adapt and learn from my experiences  – for example, working at LHU led to me using different teaching practices, such as becoming more student-centred, developing modules using CAT and strengthening my technology-enhanced learning approaches. My beliefs about an academic’s life, however, continue to be challenged with regards to work-life balance. Further, it appears that the concept of pedagogical relatedness is not unidimensional, that is, while there may be an overall feeling of pedagogical relatedness, it is dependent on the extent that the academic feels pedagogically related to separate aspects that make up the full experience. For me, like other academics, it appears that my pedagogical relatedness is strongly associated with my sense of pedagogical autonomy (see, for example, Shin and Jung 2014) rather than my feelings of competence (Table 8.1). If there are similar academics, like myself moving to universities in different contexts, then perhaps it is incumbent that the institution tries to ensure that new academics have a sense of autonomy in most aspects of their pedagogical duties. This is possibly even more the case if the academics have had a long break between teaching appointments or are changing academic cultures as they may be unaware of how much a person’s autonomy may be (un)constrained by the changing HE landscape (see, for example, Tomlinson 2016). It is, therefore, also incumbent on new academics, possibly working with academic developers or mentors, to articulate their expectations of academic life in relation to the university and their students, so as to identify areas of disconnect and to create strategies to help them have a sense of autonomy and competence in the new environment.

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References Berry, J. W. (1997), ‘Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation’, Applied Psychology, 46 (1): 5–34. Biggs, J. (1996), ‘Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment’, Higher Education, 32 (3): 347–64. Biggs, J. (2014). ‘Constructive alignment in university teaching’, HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 1 (5): 5–22. Bloom, B. S. (1956), Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: The Cognitive Domain, New York: David McKay Co Inc. Chang, H. (2008), Autoethnography as Method, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Checkland, P. and Holwell, S. (1998), Information, Systems, and Information Systems: Making Sense of the Field, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Clynes, M. P. (2009), ‘A novice teacher’s reflections on lecturing as a teaching strategy: Covering the content or uncovering the meaning’, Nurse Education in Practice, 9 (1): 22–27. Dearing, R. (1997), Higher Education in the Learning Society, The Report of the National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education, HMSO: Norwich. Deci, E. L. and Ryan, R. M. (2008), ‘Facilitating optimal motivation and psychological well-being across life’s domains’, Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 49 (1): 14–23. Ellis, C., T. E. Adams and Bochner, A.P. (2011), ‘Autoethnography: An overview’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12 (1), Art. 10. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 (accessed 8 January 2018) Geschwind, L. and Broström, A. (2015), ‘Managing the teaching–research nexus: Ideals and practice in research-oriented universities’, Higher Education Research & Development, 34 (1): 60–73. Hoare, A. and Johnston, R. (2011), ‘Widening participation through admissions policy – a British case study of school and university performance’, Studies in Higher Education, 36 (1): 21–41. Hosein, A. (2017), ‘Pedagogic frailty and the research-teaching nexus’, in I. M. Kinchin and N. E. Winstone (eds), Pedagogic Frailty and Resilience in the University, 135–49, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Knight, P.T. (2001), ‘Complexity and curriculum: A process approach to curriculummaking’, Teaching in Higher Education, 6 (3): 369–381. Krathwohl, D. R. (2002), ‘A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview’, Theory into Practice, 41 (4): 212–218. Lindblom-Ylänne, S., Trigwell, K., Nevgi, A. and Ashwin, P. (2006), ‘How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching context’, Studies in Higher Education, 31 (3): 285–98.

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Prosser, M., Ramsden, P., Trigwell K. and Martin, E. (2003), ‘Dissonance in experience of teaching and its relation to the quality of student learning’, Studies in Higher Education, 28 (1): 37–48. Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000), ‘Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, American Psychologist, 55 (1): 68–78. Samuelowicz, K. and Bain, J. D. (2001), ‘Revisiting academics’ beliefs about teaching and learning’, Higher Education, 41 (3): 299–325. Shin, J. C. and Jung, J. (2014), ‘Academics job satisfaction and job stress across countries in the changing academic environments’, Higher Education, 67 (5): 603–620. Stes, A. and Van Petegem, P. (2014), ‘Profiling approaches to teaching in higher education: A cluster-analytic study’, Studies in Higher Education, 39 (4): 644–58. Stes, A., D. Gijbels and Van Petegem, P. (2007), ‘Student-focused approaches to teaching in relation to context and teacher characteristics’, Higher Education, 55 (3): 255–67. Thomas, S. L. and Malau-Aduli, B. S. (2013), ‘New international academics’ narratives of cross-cultural transition’, International Journal of Higher Education, 2 (2): 35–52 Tomlinson, M. (2016), ‘Student perceptions of themselves as “consumers” of higher education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38 (4): 450–467 Van Dalen, H. P. and Henkens, K. 2012. ‘Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 63 (7): 1282–1293. Walker, P. (2014), ‘International student policies in UK higher education from colonialism to the coalition’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 18 (4): 325–344. Young, M. and Muller, J. (2013), ‘On the powers of powerful knowledge’, Review of Education, 1 (3): 229–250.

9

Pedagogy of Academic Mobility Judith Enriquez-Gibson Liverpool John Moores University, UK

Introduction This chapter proposes the concept of ‘other thinking’ where otherness is positioned from within, instead of outside or opposite the dominant culture or host nation. Drawing from critical pedagogy and place-based approaches, it considers how academic mobility itself is a process of othering. In this autobiographic account, I explore otherness through the ‘eyes of the beholder’, while problematizing the monoracial tendency to impose identity and status based on my place of origin and ethnicity. To do this, the pedagogy I  attend to refers to the process of (un)becoming the other by transgressing the binary logic of the neocolonial forces of globalization and immigration. It argues for the need to decolonize the focus of pedagogy from the globalized theoretical discourses of the corporate university to the particular lived experience or experiential dimension of critical pedagogy. I  have become a neo-liberal and colonized subject as a non-EU/UK migrant academic. I  could not escape the prescribed consciousness of the West and the coloniality of my being. However, I can replace and move my identity to an ‘other’ within. Such boundary-making could become a ‘subject matter’ to replace and reposition various disciplinary perspectives and discourses of educational research and practice.

Here I am struggling to accept myself as an academic. Although everything about my educational preparation says that I am on track to become a notable professor [maybe] with a respected research agenda at some venerable institution, there is a lead in my belly. (Rolling 2004: 869)

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These words could have easily been my own. In fact, I utter them to introduce where I  am  – in Liverpool, England, at least seventeen hours away from my birthplace, San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines, by air travel. It has been more than twenty years since I lived there. Now, I am here. For some, I am away from home, and yet I do not feel the same. The distance and difference brought about by my academic mobility over time have estranged me to such an extent that there is really no going back ‘home’. As a migrant academic, I have become homeless, not because I lived far away from my birthplace, but because, here in the UK, I have become aware of an irreplaceable and unshakeable minority identity that is imposed upon me and imprinted on my skin. I am simply an ‘other’, lacking the visible features of the ‘locals’, or the familiar persona of a university scholar, or the look of someone the predominantly white cohort of students could easily identify with. It is this otherness that I  would like to reposition and replace within the UK, my ‘host’ nation. My mobile subjectivity and ‘fixed’ identity do not conform. The following common-sense assumptions simply do not apply to my identity. First, it is categorized by race, inscribed in my skin colour and place of origin. Second, it emphasizes ‘there’, an absent place, rather than ‘here’, where I am. Finally, it assumes that my identity is a definite form, singular and coherent. To appreciate the othering of academic mobility as a kind of place, these assumptions or seemingly common-sense realities must be undone or done differently. The imposed identity of an other is based on an essentialized caricature of my place of origin and Eurocentric prejudice related to the Orient. Such cultural representation has served and continues to serve as an implicit justification for monoracial identifiers. Crucially, it legitimizes the idea of race itself (Maldonado-Torres 2007). The academic story of non-EU/UK migrants similar to mine has been told and shared by fellow UK academics in the study conducted by Willis and Hammond (2014). The study has highlighted the difference in the education system between host and home countries. The academic culture is experienced to be more commercialized, where learners-are-consumers logic applies in British universities. This is evident in student attitudes and institutional operations that are very much intent in getting high National Student Survey (NSS) scores. To fit in a UK institution, an international academic has to navigate the local social structure and develop tools and strategies to meet expectations to cope and be like the locals, and yet one could never be one of the locals. As acknowledged by Trahar and Hyland (2011), there is a continuing tendency to view internationalization from the ‘host’ perspective and standard. Aside from

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the dislocation due a decision to move from one’s country to another, there is dislocation in being given a migrant or alien status as soon as the nationstate border is crossed. I  became an other ‘here’. There are visible markers of otherness, my skin tone, hair and accent, that could not be undone by my education, values, skills and potential or even an actual change of accent. This form of othering, naturalized by race, has become the territory of identity. At the same time, it becomes the occasion and space for what I call in this chapter ‘pedagogy of academic mobility’. This pedagogy is framed within critical theory, with the voices of Paulo Freire (1970) and bell hooks (1994) ringing in my ears. It is about self-actualization in my colonized subjectivity and otherness in the rhythms of the habits of my experiences both here and elsewhere. Pedagogy of academic mobility is about the movement of the other, in this account, of a nonUK/EU migrant academic. It expands the notion of place in ‘place pedagogies’ written about by Gruenewald (2003) and in the ‘place-becoming’ (Somerville 2010) that happens through academic mobility. Absent and distant places are never left behind; they are also inscribed in my colonized (body-) consciousness. Academic mobility has not been taken up pedagogically. It should be. It is a provocative and productive tool for ‘other thinking’. In response to otherness, we have to ask: How might academic mobility decolonize and relocate the way I teach towards less hegemonic visions of knowledge production?

Autobiographical account of the other To throw light on the challenges, disorientation and position of the other and to bring the question of the other into mainstream discourse towards a pedagogy of the other, I attend to my own personal experiences as a migrant academic. It is both an autobiography inasmuch as it is about me and an autoethnography as I locate my academic story within the bounds of ‘Western’ culture, mostly in the UK. I repeat, this is about me, and it is personal and subjective. In saying this, I would like to enlist Roth’s emphasis that instead of seeing the first-person method as ‘ways of retreating into personal, inner subjectivity, we should adopt it as a way to establish and stabilize intersubjectivity’ (2005:  15). Let it be clearly understood that its objectivity could not be found or established by depersonalization or impersonal arguments, and its rigour could not be denied or countered with an essentialist understanding of identity that defines otherness or the other. Rather than pretending to create an objective and decontextualized pedagogy and knowledge, this account acknowledges the relational positioning

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and meaning-making that I have theorized and constructed from a particular standpoint, where the line of otherness is drawn. More importantly, this line is where I have found myself at the edges of academic qualifications and practices in the West. All too often, stories and pedagogic practices transcribed from interviews appear to be disembodied and rendered lifeless, represented as excerpts of ‘voices’, mostly thematized, organized and analysed by well-educated minds. This account, in contrast, is about embodied encounter, my body among bodies, in an academic experience of mobility. I focus on lived experience to create a place for a critical pedagogy that recognizes the placing that is brought about by academic mobility. Pedagogy is about places and our relationships to these, not just in terms of the geographical but also in terms of the personal and experiential. Place could refer to people identified and defined by race, gender and ethnicity. As such, place is not just about roots or rootedness, but also about routes of mobility. ‘Pedagogy as a social relationship is very close in. It gets right in there – in your brain, your body, your heart, in your sense of self, of the world, of others, and of possibilities and impossibilities in all those realms’ (Ellsworth 1997: 6). My very identity becomes the occasion or moment to confront otherness and to propose a pedagogy that is framed and encountered body-experiences. We know that identities are constantly shaped and reshaped, and they are best understood as situated in spatio-temporal moments. This account consists of moments that are replaced to transcend the dichotomies of inside/outside, local/global, white/ non-white, native/other and any other thing that places me on the other side of an invisible boundary line. I  share moments of being:  that of ‘an Atenean’ (described later); as someone actually ‘made in the UK’; and how I have become a ‘white other’. These multiple identities are organized unequally in relation to the access of identity-building resources – with the spectrum of possible categories that have been produced – name, accent, physical appearance, and PhD degree from Aberdeen. My identity/identities are also stratified. Identity in one space may not be readily converted into its counterpart in another space. Evidence of differentiation is captured in the UK compatibility measure of my four-year undergraduate degree, an honours degree from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, which was ‘valued’ as an ‘ordinary degree’ in the UK. I do not intend for these analyses and contentions to be final and totalizing in my discussions. I simply suggest that place and mobility have both relocated me. Movement changes my place and placing and yet, I am always confronted and challenged with my place of origin as if permanently fixed in position based on

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monoracial identifiers that have nothing to do with my experience or realities that have moved me here. Institutional practices situate and orient the academic work of its members through particular ways of teaching, learning, assessing, thinking, communicating and relating. They are increasingly serving a neoliberal order and managerialist agenda that insists upon standardized practices. This chapter aims to contribute to the experiential dimension of a critical pedagogy of academic mobility and to reflect the implications of what it means to be situated as an other and to move as an other within and beyond dualistic perspectives and monoracial ideologies. My experience is logged in this chapter from memory. It is a remembrance that allows me to narrate retrospectively and repeatedly a pedagogic testimony of academic mobility. It engages multiple locations of memory and experience. It addresses diverse and shifting standpoints to teach and learn inclusively, analytically and experientially. It is organized in the following ways:  first, I  provide vignettes of academic experiences of otherness beyond an inside/ outside perspective  – an Atenean identity that was made by a medium of instruction that was predominantly delivered in the English language and a curriculum content that was undeniably ‘white’, Western and Catholic (this was true throughout my Philippine education); a British identity made not by race, ethnicity or citizenship but by my postgraduate English degrees, namely, an MA from the University of Leicester and a PhD obtained through a fulltime studentship from the University of Aberdeen; and lastly, a provocation and self-awareness that I have become a ‘white other’, an identity that has given me the ability and opportunity to be a mobile, migrant academic. Then, I describe the kind of pedagogy that closely speaks to my academic experience as an international student and migrant academic in the UK. This proceeds with an exploration of each of my identities as bracketed and contained in limited ways in this chapter to question the grand and colonized narratives of transnational identities of mobile and migrant academics towards a critical pedagogy. The response I would like to pursue is found in the notion of ‘other thinking’ and the value of grounding pedagogy in experience. Other thinking is discussed in relation to an identity politics that is embodied and in tension with my ethnicity and place of origin. In its autobiographical account, this chapter raises and encounters the possibility and politics of the reductive and prescriptive tendency of postcolonial epistemology, which is paradoxically neocolonial. I  acknowledge my biased position as someone who has become a neo-liberal and colonized subject. There is a need to decolonize by replacing or relocating the focus of pedagogy from the globalized theoretical discourses of the academy

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to the particular lived experience or experiential dimension of critical pedagogy. I could not escape the coloniality of knowledge and of my being that MaldoradoTorres (2007) speaks about, but I must recognize that it is a position and place that has given me the license to move and discover the ‘other’ position such movement brings when I make it to other places. As he says: ‘Coloniality refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration’ (2007: 243).

I am an Atenean We will dare you to discover a larger vision of yourself and our world. We will challenge you to do ‘the things of greater worth’ because we know you are more than what the grade-givers of this world make you out to be. We do this because the Ateneo is more than just a school. (Welcome Statement on the Admissions page of Ateneo de Manila University, http://www.ateneo.edu/admissions)

The Ateneo de Manila was founded in 1859 by Spanish Jesuits. It is one of the oldest universities in the Philippines. Dr Jose Protacio Rizal, the national hero, was among the first graduates of the Ateneo. It is a fee-paying institution rooted in Catholicism and based on liberal education. It is, I admit, elite. To become an Atenean requires passing an admissions exam. Based on my experience, it is the toughest test I ever had to do in my life. I graduated in 1994 with an honours undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Science, majoring in computer science. The Ateneo could be a lot of things, but one thing I was sure of when I was a student there was the fact that I was among the brightest. Being an Atenean is not just an affiliation or a label; it is a status, and all my Jesuit professors would say that such status assigns a social responsibility for the less fortunate. Who would have thought that such status and excellent positioning of my academic rigour and educational value would be positioned differently, and that its academic excellence could not be retained and recognized? In 2005, I requested a ‘Statement of Comparability’ for my undergraduate degree from UK National Recognition Information Centre for the United Kingdom (NARIC), a national agency for the recognition and comparison of international qualifications and skills. The assessment letter states that my four-year full-time honours degree from Ateneo de Manila University ‘is considered comparable to British Bachelor (Ordinary) degree standard’. The letter further states that the assessment ‘although based on informed opinion, should be treated only as

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guidance’. I am an Atenean, displaced not only in terms of place but also in terms of the academic worth of my undergraduate degree. My Atenean identity is elite, but I  do not look it. This elitism defines my high expectations and an intellectual value that dares to aim high, to not fit the mould, to be different and to be worthy in unmeasurable ways. Such noble aspirations are not shared where I am, at least not in the same way. My elitism is misunderstood and taken to mean something else through my other positioning, usually misinterpreted as my lack of understanding of the pedagogic practice or the cultural literacy in the UK. My colonized identity is white and my education was Westernized and yet, my skin becomes a boundary of difference for my pedagogic place and ability. As an Atenean, I was trained to question and reflect and not to simply accept the state of affairs in any situation. I have embraced the possibility and risk of changing my mind and my ideas about things. There is a sense of pride that comes with my university motto to always ‘aim high’. This has been inscribed in my identity in ways that I did not know. When I started my teaching profession, I quickly realized that the academic expectations I had strived for in Ateneo, and the desire to achieve high with risk and without a guarantee, is not something I could necessary expect from my own students. In fact, for the sake of widening participation and inclusion, I  have to learn to adjust my expectations. The devaluing of my Ateneo degree would suggest that the academic rigour of Ateneo was not on par with comparable undergraduate degrees, and yet as an Atenean of seemingly lower academic standing, I  have found myself making academic adjustments to meet student needs. I have to come to terms with the fact that the university has become a place for the non-academic, the vocational and the ‘world of work’. Based on forty years of research, Graham Nuthall, in a Jean Herbison Lecture in 2001, has confirmed that teaching and learning is a matter of cultural tradition rather than evidence-based practice and how much of what we believe about teaching is a matter of folklore rather than research. The Atenean tradition of holistic education is within me, but I could not find its place here. It is a challenge to stay in love with learning in teaching. My cultural tradition, including my academic background and achievement, which to a large extent gave me the opportunity to be part of the UK academic community, has no legitimacy in other places and universities. They must be set aside and forgotten. I have to submit to the system of domination and capitalist culture of pedagogical practices that are far from being transformative and critical. Coming from a poverty-stricken country in the East, the value of education is more than a right

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but a gift. Education in the Philippines is a legacy and inheritance that families and parents could give their children and the next generation. For this reason, students are motivated with a tangible goal to better their lives. It is not the same here in the UK. It does not seem to be, anyway. What matters is more about the numbers or data that could be tracked and recorded in management and information systems. The measure that has to be satisfied relates to meeting retention and degree classification targets. It matters less what knowledge and understanding numbers or marks represent. I have to agree with Nuthall (2001), such data records are used as the primary evidence about student learning and student engagement. In fact, he further argues, that the more or higher the numbers we could track and record, the closer teaching is deemed excellent. The educational values I would like to uphold return to the opening quote of this section: ‘to dare to do things of greater worth’. This is simply muted and has become the very source of academic dissatisfaction. Furthermore, there are times that I  have been confronted with the unspoken racial assumption that it is my otherness, my lack of experience in the UK educational system that serves an explanation for this dissatisfaction or my lack of suitable pedagogic strategies. The pedagogy that I  value is a practice of reflection and inquiry. When I  share teaching sessions with colleagues, I  find myself in puzzlement and perhaps in shock to witness the exercise of control, usually by assuming a domineering stance. I have realized with resistance that I have to become the kind of educator I did not want to become. My Ateneo education with its liberal and holistic approaches did not inspire this in me. Secretly, I  feel my Ateneo education is ‘better’, contrary to what the NARIC measure had suggested. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that UK education is ‘worse’. My argument is simply to question the value of degree comparability, which has no basis except a deep-seated bias that maintains a system of domination and supremacy. I am perplexed as to why I could not expect the same academic rigour expected of me from the Western or Westernized institutions that made me the migrant academic that I am.

‘Made in the UK’ My identity is a confounding assemblage. It is made of diverse pieces evoked by the Catholic religion, a legacy of nearly 400 years of Spanish colonization, an inheritance of nearly fifty years of American rule, a nation under Marcos’s dictatorship for twenty years and under martial law for nine years, and a Western

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education. More significantly, my academic achievements, status and mobility as a UK academic bear the weight of my prescribed colonial history and submission to the neocolonial and neo-liberalist agenda of globalization. Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy argues that the oppressed or the colonized become dual beings. That is to say that the oppressor or the colonizer is found within the colonized through prescription, which is the transformation of one’s consciousness to conform to the prescriber’s consciousness (Freire 1970). I could accept and recognize that my choice of completing UK degrees was prescribed by my colonized identity, the colonizer-other within me. However, my postgraduate qualifications do not transform my race, gender and ethnicity. Through the course of my teaching career in the UK and elsewhere, I have realized that in most cases, my doctoral degree or overall academic standing does not matter, except to gain legitimacy to supervise postgraduate students or to teach in postgraduate programmes. Before obtaining a high-skilled work visa, it matters that I  am able to demonstrate that I  have the expertise that is ‘comparable’ to the locals. My successful employment has to be evidenced on the basis that there is no local who could fit the job I applied for. In short, I have to be the best candidate. It never did occur to me that the selection process does not necessarily apply to locals. A terminal degree is not a nonnegotiable condition or essential criterion to teach in higher education (HE). I have had colleagues without doctorates in the university departments where I  have worked. For a migrant academic, my entry clearance and work permit must be verified with advanced skills and qualifications. This does not bother me. However, this academic standing is merely required in a set of selection criteria and not necessarily recognized in my academic work. In fact, there have been situations where there is dissonance and disorientation about my presence and place in institutions and my academic status in tertiary education. In short, despite my UK (white) qualifications, I  remain an institutionally marginalized other. My academic experience is denied any authority vis-à-vis the cultural literacy that is required to teach in HE institutions. Furthermore, my academic knowledge is, as I have realized, not as important as my demonstrable ability to teach through a successful application for a Higher Education Academy (HEA) fellowship. To this end, I worked to become an HEA senior fellow, mapping and aligning my academic experience to four main descriptors in three dimensions of expertise, namely, areas of activity, core knowledge and professional values. It is a required recognition of one’s professional development. It is a certification of one’s ability to teach. Regardless of race, class or gender, all academics are subjected to this same vision of conformity to a dominant cultural literacy and standardized

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professional development framework. My pedagogic practice is also evaluated by NSS results, where the authority of academic scholarship and experience is superseded by the authority of ‘student engagement’. Consequently, in ways unknown to me, an identity crisis begins – What does it mean to be an academic ‘here’? I am ‘made in the UK’. My education is not neutral. It is undeniably white. Its whiteness is acknowledged and accepted as a valuable resource. My mobile subject is an entirely different matter. To be other is to be inferior. My colonized status and Western education do not diminish the gap of otherness between me and my ‘native’ academic colleagues. My whiteness leaves no marks on my skin. It does not alter my appearance. When the body itself is marked with the social stigma of race, gender and class as a symbol of difference or nonconformity, educational qualifications and academic experience are still marginalized: Thus the body has an identity that coincides with its essence and cannot be altered by moral, artistic, or human will. This indelibility of corporeal identity only furthers the mark placed on the body by other physical qualities – intelligence, height, reaction time. By this logic, the person enters in an identical relationship with the body, the body forms the identity, and the identity is unchangeable and indelible as one’s place on the normal curve …this fingerprinting of the body means that the marks of physical difference become synonymous with the identity of the person. (Davis 1995, cited in Rolling 2004: 881)

Within a white and colonized curriculum, my Ateneo education was the closest to having an education that gave me the freedom and encouragement to discover and decide for myself what becoming was worth pursuing. This same passion and disposition have been denied me, silenced to otherness in another place. I could only aspire to a critical pedagogy as described by Paulo Freire and bell hooks. A  pedagogy of academic mobility welcomes ‘other thinking’ based on non-white histories, cultures, experiences and identities. And its place is not only about the local, fixed geographical location with a postcode or geographical coordinates. Place is movement. At the same time, movement has placed me as the other. This is my experience as a non-UK/EU mobile academic.

White other The political and relational aspects of my identity here are not visible. My rootedness in my own academic biography in a white curriculum is not

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acknowledged, unless it is verified and certified to fit the ‘teaching excellence’ or ‘cultural literacy’ framework of Eurocentric standards. My identity has been fixed for me, that is, placed not only outside the nation, but also outside the education system I myself was and still am a product of. This border of otherness cannot be simply crossed. My academic expectations are deemed misplaced and unwelcomed because I  am simply not ‘from here’, and yet my relocation and the number of years I have been here would prove to the contrary. Academic mobility, when confronted with race, is not an invitation to stay or to belong to the ‘local community’. As a migrant academic, I have experienced what Lionnet (1991) noted as ‘a chain of destabilizing experiences that undermine forever [a] sense of belonging to a specific place’ (cited in Gatson 2003:  42). These dislocations from an unexamined and imposed expectation in terms of my academic participation in a UK institution ‘marginalized’ the very aspect of my academic biography which formed the basis of my academic suitability and mobility in the first place. I  refuse to engage in an either/or mode of thinking. Admittedly, this would not sit comfortably with single-race identifiers or attempts for a unified racial identity. On the one hand, I am the other because I am an Atenean and white because I am ‘made in the UK’. I accept my otherness and from within it, it is safe to transgress (hooks 1994). And my transgression is this, on the account of both of my education and transnational experience: I am a ‘white other’. I can teach with this skin. A nonessentialist identity of white other is relational, fluid and in process. Its process could be a ‘subject matter’ in critical pedagogy, wherein the analytical intermingles with the experiential in equal terms and when (I do mean temporally) the subject is not easily objectified for the sake of knowledge transfer or transnational identity capital. Being ‘white other’ is not going to relocate me away from the margins. It is not another racial category. Instead, it is a ‘third space’, a place with(in), where I  can proceed with a pedagogy that replaces my otherness towards a process and experience of (un)becoming. Placing my experience of ‘white otherness’ at the centre of pedagogy disrupts the constructed boundaries lived through the politics of skin tone. Though, ultimately, my otherness outweighs my whiteness – despite the fact that as an academic, the measures and qualifications that brought me here and made me an academic in the UK have everything to do with my white qualifications, white language and white academic mobility. I relocate this placing and confront racial inequality with a pedagogic practice that values other thinking.

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Other thinking Neoliberal agendas exert even more control over space, time, curriculum and assessment. To develop a critical pedagogy of place with academic mobility, place and mobility need to be reinterpreted. Place is not just a fixed geographical location, and movement is not just a positional change between two or more spatial locations. Instead, they are dynamic and relational in such a manner that movement places and place moves. In contrast to essentialist or mechanistic approaches, the view of relationality encourages us to see that academic mobility shapes spatial and bodily experiences. Increasingly, universities are characterized by amplified mobilities of academic staff and students across campuses, cities and countries. This implies expanded and intensified possibilities for accessing and inhabiting multiple realities. However, ‘[m]obility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship’ (Skeggs 2004:  49). Hence, acknowledging and exploring the power relations and dynamics of pedagogic practices is vital, particularly when the principle of academic mobility is placed and imposed upon an other identity. It is at this juncture, or restricted view, that migrant academics must engage in other thinking in their pedagogic practices. Of particular relevance to imposed identity is an investigation of its role and impact in creating effects of both movement and stasis, and uneven distribution of ‘academic capital’ (Elliott and Urry 2010) or ‘transnational identity capital’ (Fahey and Kenway 2010). Accordingly, a pedagogy of academic mobility calls for the development of alternative practices that are positively disruptive to the dominant techno-economic base of institutions that employ mobile academics and simultaneously enact more decolonizing forms of academic work. It is important to consider the placing of mobile identity as a result of cultural practices and social norms that implicate people and knowledge in uneven ways based on race, gender and ethnicity. For instance, in my academic life, my mobile identity is situated simultaneously ‘now here’ and ‘nowhere’ (Friedland and Boden 1994). This chapter proposes the concept of ‘other thinking’. Other thinking is ‘not simply the self “feeling for” or “in consideration of ” the other – because one can feel for the other and feel good about the self, then disengage’ (Bobis 2013: 152). Instead, it entails a fracturing of the positivistic foundation of essentialism, colonialism and modernity. The other within, that is, a migrant academic like me, becomes a ‘subject matter’ that can challenge the neocolonial and neoliberalist agenda in the contemporary university. To pursue this matter, I align my epistemic positioning with the notion of decoloniality, that goes beyond the

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dualistic view of the white/non-white that are fixated to historical projects of imperialism and colonialism. The project of decoloniality is to confront the racial rhetoric and hierarchies that have been put in place by fixed identities of the ‘other’, which are further strengthened by academic mobility itself. Decoloniality must acknowledge the contributions of racialized, colonized and marginalized subjectivities to the production of knowledge and critical thinking (Maldonado-Torres 2007). My academic mobility experience has been colonized many times over by national and international history, economics, and politics. My identity overturns the bitterly adversarial attitude that underpins these global stories. My colonial history and colonized identity have given me mobility. Other thinking evokes self-and-other or self-in-other, instead of the ‘self ’ that is individualistic in the Western sense and, in effect, denies or repositions the other in unequal terms. Accordingly, the pedagogy of academic mobility within experiential dimensions of other thinking can emerge, shift and transform what is ‘already in place’ and what can ‘take place’. Shifting the geography of epistemology and giving authority to experience is crucial to a ‘decolonial move’ of otherthinking. We do not produce rigorous knowledge by adhering to standards, measures and cultural literacies on the basis of the views and needs of only one region of the world, and even less so by a region that has been characterized by colonialist and imperialist histories that have ignored and discriminated other regions. Other-thinking means fracturing essentialist mindsets and relocating knowledge production with experiences, mobilities and places beyond dualistic perspectives and Eurocentric horizons.

Ending In this chapter, place and mobility are interpreted as relational and experiential realities involving an otherness that is fundamentally and inevitably based on the Western image of the Orient. The pedagogy of academic mobility is an experience of boundary-working as an ‘other within’ in at least two ways: within me as a colonized subject and within a nation-state border away from my place of origin as a migrant (white) academic in the UK. In my journey, both academically and experientially, mobility becomes a place. It is the very context for embodied participation with self–other relations. As such, pedagogy and ways of knowing are shaped by the kinds of places and moves which we experience. The particular experience of ‘othering’ has been brought to bear

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in a critical reflection in this chapter that challenges my academic journeys and trajectories. I  continue to navigate the boundary line of my otherness in my academic work. And a pedagogy of academic mobility offers ‘the mobile experiences’ of migrant academics like me alternative resources to invite discussions with ‘other thinking’ and ‘other’ realities that must be decolonized and relocated to less structured or stable states and fixed places. It does so by reflecting critically on the persistent dualistic perspectives and relations between local and global knowledge transfer inequalities in inside/outsider boundaries accompanying academic mobility. Accordingly, a critical place approach to mobility probes into how mobility has been formed, regulated and distributed around different regions, nations and places of origin. My relocations reveal how the formation, regulation, and distribution of pedagogy is shaped and patterned by existing dominant social, cultural, political and economic structures of the contemporary university. Correspondingly, a critical pedagogy explores what understandings of practice and values underpin regulatory and privileged knowledge that exists within institutional systems. My autobiographic evidence shows contradictory things on at least three accounts. First, it shows how my foreign undergraduate degree was devalued, failing to measure up according to the NARIC compatibility criteria. Second, my UK qualifications are tangible proofs of equivalent academic standing, and yet I remain ‘out of place’. Lastly, a white other as a ‘place of mobility’ (not origin) that is not based on race or ethnicity is unheard of though my education and colonial heritage strongly suggest my white qualification. The critical aspect of pedagogy that I would like to emphasize in my initial and rather raw ponderings about the place that academic mobility itself brings to bear in other places, both physical and symbolic, is ‘other thinking’  – the intermingling of both Western and non-Western, white and non-white consciousness by the diversity of cultures that range from the Eurocentric to the Muslim, Hindu, including mixed and indigenous cultures that are well represented where I am now in the West. Other thinking must accommodate and consider ‘other’ places that are distant and absent ‘here’. The pedagogical value of places ‘not here’ must be acknowledged. They are invisible and yet integral and woven into the local rhythms of bodies, cultures, values and traditions of individual identities and knowledge practices. To bring this account to a close, I  return to myself, my (body-)identities. I could not escape my colonized body. I could not deny, nor would I want to, the value and privilege that my Western education has given me. White supremacy has been prescribed into my consciousness, whether I like it or not. And yet,

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I  am denied the status of white privilege based on racial grounds and skin politics. I do puzzle over the power of this bordering to throw me off and impose an imbalance to my academic identity. Writing this chapter has presented me with discomfort and ‘truths’ that I  could not fully articulate. I  have been experiencing an internal struggle that has nothing to do with an intellectual dissonance of pedagogic practice. My experience of dislocation, lived and felt through my corporeal existence, is not a matter of discourse. It matters not just epistemologically, but phenomenologically. Identity is the boundary line of otherness. It is contingent and variable, never fully determined by myself or the transnational arrangements and requirements of institutions or nations or cultural and individual expectations. My place is ultimately not somewhere. It is (t)here – both here and there. Adapting a pedagogy of academic mobility is a way to decolonize and relocate fixed categories and to challenge whiteness as a hegemonic power that oppresses the possibility of becoming and knowing a different identity, in my account as a ‘white other’. To propose a ‘white other’ status for me is an act of transgression in the global terrain, in a world where there is an increasing determination to place me outside and ‘out of the border’ for the sake of national identity, security and economic stability. How easily it is forgotten that it is this same national identity and global economy that has colonized me and pushed me into a whiteness or otherness I did not intend or fully understand.

References Bobis, M. (2013), ‘Confounding light: Subversion and transnational sympathy’, Social Identities, 19 (2): 145–157. Elliott, A. and Urry, J. (2010), Mobile Lives, London: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (1997), Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address, New York: Teachers College Press. Fahey, J. and Kenway, J. (2010), ‘International academic mobility: Problematic and possible paradigms,’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31 (5): 563–575. Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. Friedland, R. and Boden, D. (1994), ‘NowHere: An introduction to space, time and modernity’, in R. Friedland and D. Boden (eds), NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, 1–60, London: University of California Press. Gatson, S. N. (2003), ‘On being amorphous: Autoethnography, genealogy, and a multiracial identity’, Qualitative Inquiry, 9 (1): 20–48.

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Gruenewald, D. A. (2003), ‘The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place’, Educational Researcher, 32 (4): 3–12. hooks, bell. (1994), Teaching to Transgress, London: Routledge Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007), ‘On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept 1’, Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3): 240–270. Nuthall, G. (2001), ‘The cultural myths and the realities of teaching and learning’, New Zealand Annual Review of Education, 11: 5–30. Rolling, J. H. (2004), ‘Searching self-image: Identities to be self-evident’, Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (6): 869–884. Roth, W.-M. (2005), ‘Auto/biography and auto/ethnography: Finding the generalized other in the self ’, in W.-M. Roth (ed.), Auto/biography and Auto/ethnography: Praxis of Research Method, 3–16, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Skeggs, B. (2004), Class, Self, Culture, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Somerville, M. J. (2010), ‘A place pedagogy for “global contemporaneity” ’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42 (3): 326–344. Trahar, S. and Hyland, F. (2011), ‘Experiences and perceptions of internationalisation in higher education in the UK’, Higher Education Research & Development, 30 (5): 623–633. Willis, J. and Hammond, A. (2014), ‘An investigation of the contribution made by international staff to internationalisation of learning and teaching practices within tertiary education in the UK’, Higher Education Academy. Available online: https:// www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/tdg_jackie_willis.pdf (accessed 24 April 2017).

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Towards a ‘Pedagogy of Connection’: ‘Home’ Academic not at Home Maja Jankowska University of Bedfordshire, UK

Introduction In this chapter I reflect, in an autoethnographic manner, on my own positioning as a ‘home’ academic ‘not at home’, attending to some assumptions about European Union (EU) academics in the UK and attempting to make sense of my experience. Therefore, ‘I am both the author and focus of the story, the one who tells and the one who experiences, the observer and the observed, the creator and the created’ (Ellis 2009: 13). I find myself at the intersection of the personal (a Polish migrant), the professional (an academic) and the cultural – crossing borders from Poland to Finland and to the UK, from one academic context and organizational culture to another, and moving between disciplines. I  emphasize my identity as a developmental process, something that is not fixed or complete but continues to evolve over time and across contexts. It can be co-constructed and accelerated in unfamiliar social, cultural and organizational environments (Jankowska and Gaitán 2016), with home and host cultures interacting, ‘cross-breeding’ and providing a platform for a more ‘hybrid’ identity (Sandsted 2011). As my story shows, my identity is socially constructed and I  am labelled by others – as a migrant, a foreigner with a Slavic accent, as an underdog at a professional disadvantage and an alien, neither fully belonging here, nor being a part of there. Although I  may be occupying some ‘in-between’ space that is difficult to identify (Bhabha 1994, 1996), where neither ‘habitus’ nor ‘field’ (Bourdieu 1986) can be taken for granted, the journey so far has been fascinating and rewarding – what I have gained in terms of personal and professional growth has been worth all the difficulties, challenges and constraints. Therefore, within

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this story, I  focus on enablers for personal and professional growth, positive strategies and psychological dispositions  – strengths that I  have developed within this journey. I begin by challenging the label of ‘home’ academic, discussing my background and context for my academic journey, during which I  developed a ‘cosmopolitan’ stance. I  then look at ‘otherisation’ and various points of connections and disconnections and psychological dispositions that can help smooth the transition. Finally, I  discuss ‘pedagogy of connection’ and ‘third space’, engagement with which helped me improve my teaching practice. I  conclude with some key ‘take home messages’, which, hopefully the readers can draw on.

‘Home’ academics? Both university students and staff members coming from within the EU to study or work in the UK are classified as ‘home’ (a term used mainly for fee structure).1 However, it is also suggestive of certain commonalities among ‘home’ students and academics (regardless of where in the EU they come from). In my doctoral work (Jankowska 2014), I  argued that many EU students and academics may indeed feel more ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ than ‘home’ as they come from distinctively different socio-historical backgrounds and pedagogic traditions and in addition often speak English as a foreign language. As Pherali (2012) observes, international academics with English as a second/further language can be seen as double-disadvantaged, encountering both the sociocultural challenge of teaching students of distinct values and beliefs and the professional and linguistic challenges. It may be that due to the geographical proximity, some common European cultural values and my white skin, the commonalities between the native British academics and me are sometimes assumed. This, I argue, is misleading. Over the years, I  have observed that international students and academics who come from former British colonies often find it easier to understand and adjust to the English system of higher education (HE) than many of the EU students and colleagues (English was often the official language of their education and the educational systems they come from were often based on, and still closely resemble, the British system). Yet, perhaps based on usually

1

‘Home students’ pay ‘home’ tuition fees, as opposed to international students whose fees are substantially higher.

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greater differences in geographical, cultural and social characteristics to which Judith Enriquez-Gibson (in this book) refers as ‘inscribed’ in the body (skin colour, race, ethnicity, gender etc.), non-European academics are viewed as more ‘international’ or ‘foreign’. In the next sections, I  attend to my background and some key differences between the host and home institutions, which I needed to negotiate to adapt and be in a position to contribute at my host university.

Background I arrived at the University of Luton (now University of Bedfordshire) in 2006, soon after Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004 and was appointed as a research fellow. This was the first academic job in my career. As I considered myself as a high academic achiever with two degrees acquired in Poland and a scholarship in Finland, I naively thought that the transition would be straightforward. However, my Masters in Applied Psychology diploma certificate was recognized only at the level of Bachelor’s degree. I felt that my academic standing and my ‘cultural capital’ was devalued and I realized that, to progress in the UK academia, I had no other choice but to obtain a further qualification from the UK institution and so I soon embarked on my PhD journey at my host institution. I since learned that this kind of devaluation and discounting of credentials and experience from countries of origin is a standard practice of British regulatory agencies (Fernando and Cohen 2016; Zikic, Bonache and Cedrin 2010). This was the first message of the assumed superiority of British education and there were many more to come, though most were a bit subtler. My experiences as a researcher (both for work and my doctoral research) did not fully reveal the extent of cultural, pedagogic and organizational differences in HE contexts between the UK and my home country (Poland). I  started sensing and reading about the differences in educational systems, but it was not until I started teaching (four years later) when I truly realized that I needed to attend to various pedagogical differences, such as approaches to teaching diverse, widening participation populations of students, studentcenteredness, lower power distance and degree of informality as well as narrow disciplinary focus (as opposed to teaching non-diverse groups which shared prior knowledge, teacher-centeredness, higher power distance and formality as well as broad ‘encyclopaedic’ approach evident in HE in Poland (Jankowska 2011).

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My ‘host’ institution The University of Bedfordshire is an English, post-1992 institution, with an increasingly diverse body of students, whose mission is to ‘create a vibrant multicultural community enabling people to transform their lives’ (University of Bedfordshire 2012). The widening access in terms of aspirations, maturity, nationality, gender, ethnicity, prior attainment and location of the study was noticed as both a strength – providing rich and varied experiences on which to draw and a challenge – in terms of individual needs and priorities (Atlay 2007) Like other universities in the UK, the University of Bedfordshire relies on income from tuition fees and, like many other post-1992 universities, it is teaching-intensive and focused on student experience, voice and satisfaction. There are issues around student attendance (as most of our students work to support themselves throughout the university years), and e-communication and e-learning are particularly important in learning support. Finally, academics are expected to obtain and manage their own funding and remain research active, juggling teaching, research and administrative duties.

My ‘home’ institution During the period as a student, my home university was one of the traditional, state-funded and elitist institutions in Poland. This meant that students had not only no tuition fees but also had access to various scholarships and funds. Access to education therefore was not dependent on material status but on the ability to achieve, and was fiercely competitive (Roberts 2001). Entry to prestigious state universities in Poland has traditionally been highly competitive, with limited places and tough entry examinations (Jankowska 2011). There was little diversity with mainly high achieving, young and almost exclusively Polish students taking the fully-funded places at the state universities. The first year of studies was usually very difficult (referred to as a ‘weeding-out’ year), with the weakest students dropping off. There was little support/pastoral care available, and it was often a matter of survival of the intellectually strongest. The aim was not to widen participation and be student-centred, but to produce the intellectual elite of the country. Such institutions were also very much focused on knowledge production (through research) and re-production through a rather teachercentred pedagogical model. Research was particularly important, and funding

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and administrative assistance was often provided. It is important to highlight that this has since changed, with customer orientation and competition slowly creeping in. The introduction of the Bologna system was aimed at unifying European education (Kwiek 2001; Bateson and Taylor 2004), but many of us EU academics were educated before the introduction of the Bologna system. Hence, as I was exposed to the ‘old’ system in Poland, it is easy to see that my experiences and assumptions of what it means to be an academic in Poland are in direct opposition to what I have observed and experienced in England. Switching to the student-centred, market-driven, fast-paced and very diverse environment in the UK, where education is treated as a ‘commodity’ (Brown and Jones 2007), has required from me a great extent of learning, time, effort, flexibility and adaptability to my new role as a ‘foreign’ academic.

Cosmopolitan? While officially classified as a ‘home’ academic, I  have always seen myself as a ‘foreign’, ‘immigrant’ academic. Such terms, for me, remove the illusion of commonality and familiarity with the local culture (that the term ‘home’ conveys) and resonate with ‘otherness’ in all aspects of my academic work, including pedagogic practices. My allegiance is more towards cosmopolitanism, which ‘includes a stance towards diversity itself, towards the coexistence of cultures in the individual experience’, which ‘entails . . . an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other’ (Hannerz 1990: 239). This stance, in my view, requires a conscious effort (on my part) to engage with, to try to understand and adapt to new cultural contexts  – in this case this new cultural context being twofold:  the broader cultural context of the host society, but also a specific, more local context of an English HE institution committed to a widening participation agenda. Having come from a distinctively different pedagogic system (Jankowska 2011), my survival depended on double-adaptation  – first, to my immediate living environment, and second, to an organization I became a part of. In his discussion of encounters with Maori culture, Reeves observes many individuals from ‘a majority do not appreciate the responsibility of learning about the minority culture’ (2016:  100). It is those people from minorities that ‘have to learn about the majority culture in order to survive and progress’ (2016:  100). Indeed ‘survival’ (first priority) and ‘progress’ (that international

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academics often hope and strive for, e.g. Fernando and Cohen 2016) became important goals for me.

The survival of the ‘other’? International academics, like other migrants, are often considered to be occupying the position of cultural ‘other’. Holliday, Hyde and Kullman posit that we often make use of ‘contrastive others’ to define the ‘self ’. They refer to the theory of deconstruction, according to which ‘things are what they are in terms of what they are not . . . [I]dentity is inevitably exclusive. You are something because you are not something else’ (2004: 156). However, they also warn that such views, to an extent, can be deterministic, leading to cultural essentialism (‘otherisation’ and ‘stagnant’ perceptions of others, often turning into stereotyping). The first encounter of being labelled as ‘other’ came from the demographical information I  was asked to supply for the diversity and equality record. For my ethnicity, I  ticked ‘White other’. Although ‘White other’ could, at a quick glance, pass me as a ‘local’, as soon as I enter any conversation, my accent places me in the ‘others’ category. Every October, I entered the classroom to teach a new intake of first year students, and as I introduced myself with my foreignsounding name, for many impossible to pronounce, I was conscious that they were trying to place me somewhere, in some place ‘there’ (by virtue – not here), to categorize me and to figure out what to expect of me. I try to resist the negative feeling of being ‘misplaced’, for I know that my place is neither fully ‘here’ nor ‘there’, I am neither ‘home’ nor ‘the other’, for I have lived here for over twelve years now and gained most of my professional experience in the UK academia, yet I have not achieved (and will probably never achieve) a full sense of belongingness. I  am a ‘wanderer’  – although I  have ‘gone no further’. I am ‘not quite over the freedom of coming and going’. I am temporarily fixed in a special boundary of my host institution but my ‘position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that [“I did not”] belong in it initially and that [“I bring”] qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it’ (Simmel 1971: 143). My background is always ‘there’ – ‘in the background’, my ‘memories of past experiences pop out of nowhere and keep gate-crashing, both spoiling and enriching [my] present experiences’ (Gaitán and Jankowska, 2016:  24). My past and new knowledge and experiences mingle and permeate each other and, like Hoffman, I  understand ‘there is no turning to the point of origin…’ (1989: 273) as I am no longer ‘pure’. My ideas about education, pedagogy and my

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performance as a lecturer have been modified and hybridized with the ideas and experiences I acquired ‘here’.

Hybridity and identity work – connections and disconnections Categorizing who I am becoming is complicated. My different positions in space and time are not mutually exclusive. My identity is always fluid, co-constructed (both ‘here’ and ‘there’) and continuously reconstructed, sometimes creating a sense of hybridity or ‘double consciousness’ (Sandsted 2011). Complete integration of my different pedagogic viewpoints and positions is not possible. However, I feel I can achieve what Sandsted (2011) calls a partial view that can make an understanding of different (cultural, organizational, disciplinary) perspectives easier (Jankowska 2014). Hence, rather than being ‘home’ and fully integrated, at times, I experience certain ‘hybrid moments’ when ‘double consciousness’ emerges. I  treat these moments as developmental thresholds and positions of ‘insight’ which allow me to ‘cross-breed’ different cultural viewpoints and create what I call ‘common sets’ (for instance, seeing how broad ‘encyclopaedic’ general knowledge, which I obtained in Poland, can provide a solid foundation for a practical application often emphasized in the British system of HE and support my interdisciplinary work). For a brief moment in time I feel settled, but it never lasts long, and then I shift again. And yet again, I interrogate ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’, constantly moving between them (Marginson and Morris 2001), sometimes identifying with one of my perspectives more (connection, e.g. the acknowledgement of the importance of student experience and pastoral care) and at other times, feeling alienated by a perspective or experience I  may not be able to grasp or incorporate into my repertoire (disconnection, e.g. informality of relationships between students and lecturers). The sense of belonging that ‘double consciousness’ moments offer, in my experience, is interspersed with feelings of alienation and sometimes nostalgia for the past life which was less culturally complex.

Challenges and difficulties Much of the literature on migrant workers, and more specifically on international academics, points to the dominant picture of obstacles, challenges and constraints (Almeida, Fernando and Sheridan 2012; Green and Myatt 2011;

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Luxon and Peelo 2009; Salaff, Greve and Ping 2002; Turchick Hakak and Al Ariss 2013). Even though, in accordance with their own internationalization agendas, universities around the globe seek to recruit the best academic professionals from around the world (Brown et al. 2010; Dandridge 2010; Montgomery 2012), the overriding discourse in relation to international staff ’s experiences and chances of career advancement is one of ‘disadvantage’. While my own experiences and research on the experiences of international academics at my host university highlighted that having supportive, accessible mentors (especially those who themselves were foreigners) made a positive difference to staff settling in and learning to navigate the new system (Jankowskaet al. 2014), I am also conscious that questioning and displaying the need for further explanations or support is a sensitive topic (see, for example, interview data in Pherali 2012). Many international academics are often recruited through a competitive process, and they are expected to demonstrate essential high academic and professional standards and ability to adapt and cope with new demands. Pherali (2012) notes that there seems to be a fine line between providing international academics with additional support, and a concern that needing such support may be perceived as undermining professional competence, discriminatory, and highlighting differences and exclusion. By observing and talking to my colleagues, I realized that utilizing more informal support, especially if offered by other, more experienced international academics, is a less professionally threatening strategy than accepting formal support. Reflecting on my journey, I realized that what I truly lacked in the very initial stage of my adaptation to the UK academia was having access to an experienced international staff member who could guide me as ‘even getting info[rmation] from UK natives at a UK university is of limited help, since they cannot assume the outside perspective’ (Equality Challenge Unit 2013:  34). On reflection, I think this was the biggest issue – I did not know ‘what I did not know’, and hence my experienced British colleagues who were willing to assist with any queries were indeed of limited help to me at this stage. Having interviewed several colleagues about their experiences of adapting to HE here, I  realized that I  was largely spared culture shock associated with moving directly between two different pedagogic contexts. My first contract was research-based (and not teaching), and as I  was located in the field of pedagogic research, I had the time to study the ‘field’, get prepared for teaching and rethink my own pedagogic assumptions (e.g. teacher-centred pedagogy, higher power distance and formality, the need for broad ‘encyclopaedic’ general knowledge). Moreover, I occupied a rather ‘sheltered’ position, working within

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a supportive team of colleagues from teaching and learning directorate, who were eager to share their knowledge and experience (although, I was not fully able to draw on these). We had enough resources for all, and it was a few years before I  experienced an open and fierce competition for resources (funding, research time, administrative support), which has now become a daily struggle in academia. However, from early days I realized that collaboration was difficult as I entered an academic landscape that favours individual success, progression and benefit (Gaitán and Jankowska 2016) and where autonomy, individuality, independence and criticality are much more valued than communion, reconciliation, interdependence or harmony (Kegan 1982). Although I  consider myself occupying a space somewhere in between the Western and the Eastern pedagogic traditions, I found the shift from teachercentred to student-centred pedagogy quite challenging. While I  appreciated lesser power distance and more friendly and equal relationships with my students, I found it difficult to conduct informal conversations with students (and staff ) as I lacked local cultural knowledge and could not fully understand ‘gossip’ (about e.g. popular TV shows) and humour. I  also often felt uncomfortable with the local students’ ease of challenging and criticizing their lecturers and the customer-service orientation. I remember feeling alienated and singled out on account of my background and accent. There were instances where I  felt disrespected – mainly by the groups of very young, white British students, who, I felt, judged my academic ability by my accent/ oral expression and, to a lesser extent, by my limited technological proficiency (virtual learning platforms such as Blackboard were a complete novelty to me). In such cases, I felt I needed to ‘prove’ my value. These incidents were particularly stressful and sometimes led to further deterioration in my oral performance and confidence in my teaching skills. I tried to combat my performance anxiety by thorough preparation and repeated oral-rehearsals at home. I now reflect on how this over-preparation and over-rehearsal for lectures maintained my performance anxiety and negatively impacted my well-being. I also lacked the knowledge and experience of the British schooling system, which made me underprepared for understanding the prior curricular knowledge as well as unspoken rules governing student-teacher interactions in the UK. Thus, I  found it difficult to participate in student recruitment events and conduct the role of a personal tutor. Advising students on future careers can be tricky when one is unfamiliar with the host country’s job market (outside academia), and when one does not have many personal links or networks, development of which takes substantial amounts of time and energy. The role of

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a personal tutor also requires understanding students’ lifestyle, culture of family and relationships, which many international academics do not have experience of (Pherali 2012). It took time to develop my confidence in this role as well as build my professional networks. Despite ten years spent in my host institution, I still feel at a disadvantage when it comes to the development of cultural links and connections. At times, I feel powerless and silenced by the business-oriented system –feeling deep down that some of our practices do not serve the purpose of educating independent, autonomous learners. Although I  appreciate student diversity and I  enjoy learning about diverse perspectives that students bring with them, it has been a challenge adjusting to teaching such groups. Having come from the system where diversity was minimal and most students had a shared prior/background knowledge, I needed to be ultra-careful about assuming that students had a certain level of common prior knowledge. Additionally, having been educated in an ‘encyclopaedic system’ which emphasized the importance of having broad general knowledge (Jankowska 2011), I needed to be careful about assuming a shared understanding of certain ‘facts’ and concepts. Unfortunately, there were instances where I pitched my lectures at a level that assumed students’ prior knowledge and, thus, was faced with students’ disengagement or puzzlement. I  also needed to shift from a theory-heavy and memorization-driven model to a much more practical, skill-based approach, making effort to make my lectures more interactive and moving away from ‘feeding’ knowledge.

Strengths Elsewhere (Jankowska 2016), I  argued that psychological dispositions, such as the ability to spot opportunities, turn disruptions into inflections (points in life, which take us in a different direction, altering the course of our lives, bringing feelings of hope, adventure and opportunity, Tobin, 2014) ‘can do’ attitude and agility, are particularly important in the process of adaptation to unfamiliar contexts. I linked these dispositions to my socio-historical ‘baggage’ of a citizen of a ‘post-communist’ country in which people often had to manage with scarce resources. The concept of agility refers to an individual’s ability to adapt to changes in an environment (Stodd 2014) but, in my interpretation, it goes beyond this definition and includes ‘not being afraid to move to new, often challenging contexts and strive for a meaningful interaction . . . [including] seeking entirely new environments to adapt to’ (Jankowska 2016: 44).

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Reflecting on my life (Jankowska 2016), I identified very similar factors that contributed to my personal and professional growth. Having moved between different countries and disciplines for my studies and conducted cross-cultural investigations for my dissertations, I  was already internationally and crossdisciplinary in my intellectual bent, and I think this is another important factor that helped with the process of my own adaptation in the UK. I did not really make a choice to be an ‘international academic’. The decision was rather about where and how I would become one – whether I stayed in Poland or Finland or moved to another country. I knew my interest would remain cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, and I would dip in and out of available contexts, attachments, disciplines (psychology, psychotherapy, education and cultural studies) and languages. This links back to the earlier discussed concept of cosmopolitanism with emphasis on a stance towards diversity and my willingness to explore and engage with other cultures and my ‘insatiable desire to learn’, which manifests itself in wanting to make connections and deal with, understand and preserve the complexity of the world rather than reduce it (Gaitán and Jankowska 2016). I am, in Bourdieu’s terms, a ‘consecrated heretic’, who makes ‘a detour from the “normal” trajectories which lead to simple reproduction (Bourdieu 1988: 107). Cross-boundary movements are hardly ever easy and cause disturbance and discomfort, at the very least, but in my experience, they also help build resilience and a certain degree of ‘toughness’  – also important in adaptation processes. They afford opportunities to broaden my horizon and question my own knowledge and ways of being in the world and therefore they help me develop a more reflexive and questioning stance. The available literature on highly skilled migrants, including international academics, which points to their potential strengths (rather than deficits) highlights similar factors to those I found in the literature on factors contributing to the success of Central and Easter European (CEE) students. Several studies highlight highly skilled migrants’ high motivation (Frieze, Hansen and Boneva 2006), willingness to work extra hard, harder than natives (Ravitch 2002; Pherali, 2012), and adaptability (Zikic, Bonache and Cerdin 2010). Some studies also point to the individuals being able to draw on ‘ethnic capital’ – use a dense network of diaspora for support (Fernando and Cohen 2016). However, in his study, Pherali (2012) found that such dense diaspora community was much weaker among EU academics and my own experience and observations of my EU colleagues confirms it. Similarly, some of the strategies that Fernando and Cohen found among Indian high-achieving academics, such as ‘single-mindedness’ and competitiveness with

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exclusive focus ‘on publishing and research income, without encountering moral dilemmas about compromising teaching’ (2016:  1291) should be treated with caution and questioned. While many international academics have been found to work extra hard to achieve (I am no exception to this), not all of them work extra hard for such instrumental reasons and with such single-minded focus. As Pherali (2012) observes, moreover, many of those academics for whom English is not their first language are concerned about making mistakes or potential lapses in communication, hence they are often more diligent, putting extra effort and time into completing and checking their assignments and communications (Pherali, 2012). This has certainly been my experience. Fernando and Cohen (2016) also suggest competitiveness and resilience as further attributes of Indian academics. These can be explained through a sociohistorical lens, drawing on the idea that coming from a society with limited resources encourages a certain degree of competition and willingness to do better than others and persevere in the face of difficulties. Tandogan and Incirlioglu point out that academic migrants are different from labour migrants, as they do not emigrate merely for economic reasons but ‘also with a desire to experience the Other’ (2004: 101). They observe that those ‘intellectuals’ are at ‘home’ in both their host culture and their own. In their perspective, ‘home is not fixed to specific location for people in motion’ (2004:  99), and therefore international academics can maintain multiple ties, interactions and relationships reaching to people across borders. Against the dominant discourse of the migrants’ lack of social and cultural capital (in Bourdieu’s terms, 1986), international academics have been observed to draw on their ‘transnational social capital’ – using their social connections to home cultures and their cultural knowledge to establish valuable international partnerships with academics abroad, hence obtaining ‘highly prized symbolic capital’ (Fernando and Cohen 2016: 1292).

The importance of a dialogue Brown and others (2010) suggest that the support and understanding for the diverse knowledge and experience that international academics have brought to UK institutions is often left untapped. Elsewhere my colleague and I (Gaitán and Jankowska 2016) also argued that international academics have a wealth of experience and knowledge to share, alongside their broad and varied perspectives, but their willingness to articulate and share these is not always matched by a

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receptive audience/environment. In essence, we are often expected to ‘work hard to understand this way of doing things (the British way) and of being academics’ (2016:  24, emphasis original). As explained in the above sections on hybridity and challenges, I felt I was required to change my teaching style to much more informal/‘friendly’, engage in pastoral care and student experience initiatives, and become much more autonomous, independent and critical in an academic environment that favours individual success and progression. Indeed, at times, I felt that I was expected to leave my past knowledge and experience behind the gates of the university – and my continuous efforts to articulate them (e.g. my perceived need for more interdependent, cooperative and collaborative work with my colleagues or the need to engage students with broader, and not only subject specific, knowledge) were met with a lack of receptiveness and, at times, willingness to engage, understand and share. This, at least partly, is linked to the fast-paced, highly competitive and pressurized environment of academia in the UK. There is simply little time and space to engage in a meaningful dialogue and co-construction, especially in an environment which favours individual success over collective achievement. Such a landscape is not particularly conducive to developing and sharing a ‘cosmopolitan stance’ (as per the definition earlier) and bridging boundaries with people who are different to us (Lamont and Aksartova 2002). Yet, there were moments, usually away from the pressure of daily work (for instance, on a writing retreat or an away day), when my British colleagues asked me questions about my background and education system in Poland. These were often linked to their puzzlement with how well Central and Eastern European (CEE) students were doing at our institution, across various departments. Such exchanges prompted me to interrogate the topic further (Jankowska 2011). I  considered how the merging of past, broad, general and sound knowledge acquired in CEE education systems (‘encyclopaedic approach’, Perry 2005), a high motivation orientation, and a certain educational ethos emphasizing the importance of being an educated or ‘cultured’ person (Williams 1997), displayed by these students allowed them to thrive in a much more student-centred and practical model of education at the host university.

Towards the pedagogy of connection – finding common sets I believe that a few initial years of researching pedagogy as well as my doctoral work (Jankowska 2014) helped me to engage in debates in education (specifically

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regarding internationalization, teaching and learning, personal, academic and professional development and employability in HE in the UK) and, if not fully prepared, then it at least eased my entry into teaching. Reading copious amounts of literature increased my understanding of the UK education system and its pedagogic tradition, the issues around internationalization of HE and the position that international students and staff occupy. However, conducting research on the experiences of international staff in my institution (Jankowska et  al. 2014) made me realize that my position was fairly unique. Most of my colleagues came directly from distinctively different pedagogic systems and were unprepared for the culture shock in relation to teaching diverse widening participation student population. Looking back at my Polish educational experiences, I have realized that they were marked by the lack of ‘connection’ and care. The relationships with lecturers were largely hierarchical and ‘distant’, with them ‘standing on a pedestal’ and occupying a position of experts. Hence, I realized that I did not want to follow suit, and that finding ‘connections’ has progressively become important to me. Given my cosmopolitan stance and interest in culture and pedagogy, I  searched the literature for pointers towards culturally relevant/responsive approaches. I became interested in Cadman’s proposition for a ‘pedagogy of connection’, which involves changing classroom practices from ‘hierarchical teacher-learner relationship’ and calls for ‘the formation of a community of international scholars’ (2005:  357), therefore assuming that we all (students and staff ) bring myriad values, beliefs, knowledge and ways of knowing (Haigh 2008). I also connected with Kostogriz’s notion of ‘Third space pedagogy’, which invites us ‘to (re)imagine classrooms as multivoiced collectives’ (Kostogriz 2002:  8). This third space is not about finding a solution to differences or assuming a common ground but about being aware of contradictions and ambivalences, accepting them and helping students find a way of living and learning from this ambivalence. To me, learning becomes more meaningful when difference is recognized, brought to the fore and used as a resource, in Kostogriz’s spirit of ‘thirding’ (2002). I  believe I  am well placed to create such third space as I  had to learn and negotiate many contradictions and ambivalences in my own personal and professional life, as I moved countries and disciplinary contexts. I decided that using cultural referents and drawing on our diverse experiences (rather than asking students to leave them outside the classroom doors) was important if I wanted to work towards empowering them intellectually, socially, emotionally and politically (Ladson-Billings 1992, 1995). In this spirit, I aimed

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at creating meeting places ‘where new and radical happenings can occur’ (hooks 1990:  31). I  started designing projects which drew on students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and engaged them in cultural learning exchanges with communities: for instance the Creative Bilingual Writing Clubs project, in which I provided an opportunity for bilingual students from four different disciplines to work together in multidisciplinary teams in two local schools, supporting bilingual children in dual language story writing (for details, see Jankowska et al. 2016); or the Writing Through Heritage Languages as a Therapeutic Endeavour for Adults in Mental Health Recovery project, in which I  collaborated with a national mental health charity, MIND, and provided further opportunity for bilingual students and service users to work together, drawing on their experiences, cultural backgrounds and languages (publication forthcoming). This, I found, not only meaningful, enjoyable and congruent with my developing pedagogic stance but also rewarding and empowering for my students.

Conclusion Moving to another country and becoming an academic in a different system can seriously disrupt life, but in my experience, a new, more complex and multidimensional academic and personal identity can emerge from all the disturbance and discomfort. As I  look back, I  realize I  have progressively and more purposefully embraced the complexity of reality, pedagogy and my interactions with students. I have become more critical in my stance, daring to challenge my students and yet at the same time working hard to find the points of connections in the ocean of contradictions and differences. There are certain things that would have eased my transition between two different HE contexts. First, having a mentor – ideally another Polish or international member of staff who had gone through the adaptation herself/himself would have helped. Some universities began recognizing the importance of this and introducing a ‘buddy scheme’ (Equality Challenge Unit 2013; Hammond and Willis 2013). I recognize that I  could have sought help and advice at several junctions in my journey, but the fear of losing professional face (also noticed in Pherali’s research 2012) prevented me from it. Although I  received a general induction, this was not enough. It has been recognized that elements of familiarizing international staff with the local pedagogy and organizational culture as well as mutual support can be weaved into a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching, offered by most universities, or other Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

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workshops (Hammond and Willis 2013). However, because I  already held a teaching degree, I did not have to attend such a course, and, at the time of my induction, I doubt there was much of such content in the course offered by my institution. I could have also benefitted from more explicit explanation of the British schooling system and its implications for HE. Finally, as discussed, there are several key psychological dispositions, which can help international academics with the transition to foreign Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). These can at least to some degree be learned. I  recognize the importance of remaining open and willing to learn from culturally diverse colleagues and students. Moreover, being able to accept risks involved in trying new things, putting ourselves into entirely new and unfamiliar contexts, turning disruptions into inflections and remaining alert and agile can be instrumental in our personal and professional success, giving us an edge and enabling us to make contributions in our institutions and disciplines.

References Almeida, S., Fernando, M. and Sheridan, A. (2012), ‘Revealing the screening: Organisational factors influencing the recruitment of immigrant professionals’, International Journal of Human Research Management, 23: 1950–1965. Atlay, M. (2007), ‘Stimulating learning – the background to CRe8’, http://www.beds. ac.uk/learning/curriculum/structures/cre8 (accessed 28 June, 2011). Bateson, R. and Taylor, J. (2004), ‘Student involvement in university life – beyond political activism and university governance: A view from Central and Eastern Europe’, European Journal of Education, 39 (4): 471–484. Bhabha, H. K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1996), ‘Culture’s in-between’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 53–60, London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1986), ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–258, New York: Greenwood. Bourdieu, P. (1988), Homo Academicus, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, A., Dashwood, A., Lawrence, J. and Burton, L. (2010), ‘ “Crossing over”: strategies for supporting the training and development of international teachers’, The International Journal of Learning, 17 (4), 321–333. Brown, S. and Jones, E. (2007), ‘Values, valuing and value in internationalised higher education context’, in E. Jones and S. Brown (eds), Internationalising Higher Education: Enhancing Teaching, Learning and Curriculum, 1–6, London: Routledge. Cadman, K. (2005), ‘Towards a “pedagogy of connection” in research education: A “REAL” story’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4 (4): 353–367.

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Dandridge, N. (2010), ‘Universities rely on international staff and students’, The Guardian [online], 12 October. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ education/2010/oct/12/universities-rely-on-international-staff (accessed 16 July 2016). Ellis, C. (2009), Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Equality Challenge Unit (2013), Improving the Experiences of International Staff in the UK Higher Education: Research Report, London: ECU. Fernando, W. and Cohen, L. (2016), ‘Exploring career advantages of highly skilled migrants: A study of Indian academics in the UK’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27 (12):1277–1298. Frieze, I. H., Hansen, S. B. and Boneva, B. (2006), ‘The migrant personality and college students’ plans for geographic mobility’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 26(2): 170–177. Gaitán, A. and Jankowska, M. (2016), ‘Reflecting on being an immigrant academic’, Lifewide Magazine, 17: 24–6. Green, W. and Myatt, P. (2011), ‘Telling tales: A narrative research study of the experience of new international academic staff at an Australian university’, International Journal for Academic Development, 16 (1), 33–44. Haigh, M. (2008), ‘Internationalisation, planetary citizenship and Higher Education Inc.’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, 38 (4): 427–440. Hammond, A. and Willis, J. (2013), ‘International academics in UK higher education: What do they bring to the classroom?’, paper presented at British Association for Applied Linguistics Conference, Newcastle University, 17 May 2013. Available online: https://baalicsig.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/icsig2013hammondwillis.pdf (accessed 8 January 2017). Hannerz, U. (1990), ‘Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, 237–251, London: Sage. Hoffman, E. (1989), Lost in Translation, London: William Heinemann. Holliday, A., Hyde, M. and Kullman, J. (2004), Inter-cultural Communication – An Advanced Resource Book, London: Routledge. hooks, bell. (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press. Jankowska, M. (2011), ‘A reflection on adaptability; achievement motivation and success of central and eastern European students in one English university’, Compare – a Journal of International and Comparative Education, 41 (6): 801–818. Jankowska, M. (2014), ‘Students’ representations and experiences of Personal Development Planning (PDP) at one British university’, PhD thesis, University of Bedfordshire. Available online: http://uobrep.openrepository.com/uobrep/handle/ 10547/326090 (accessed 10 June 2016). Jankowska, M. (2016), ‘Pathways through life’, Lifewide Magazine, 16: 43–8.

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Jankowska, M. and Gaitán, A. (2016), ‘Guest Editors’ Foreword’, Lifewide Magazine, 17: 6–8. Jankowska, M., Kukhareva, M., Clements, A. and Clarke, S. (2014), ‘An inquiry into the experiences of new international academic staff (IAS). Implications for CPD practice’, paper presented to the 20th Annual European Conference on Educational Research, 1–5 September 2014, Porto (Portugal). Jankowska, M., Coleman, S., Rainford, J., Stoica, I., Pac, A., Christian, A., Syngouna, M. Tsoukala, A., Adewuyi, A. and Barker, D. (2016), ‘Bilingual Creative Writing Clubs: An ecology for cross-cultural learning’, Lifewide Magazine, 17: 86–92. Kegan, R. (1982), The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kostogriz, A. (2002), ‘Teaching literacy in multicultural classrooms: Towards a pedagogy of “Third space” ’, paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane, 1–5 December 2002. Kwiek, M. (2001), ‘The internalization and globalization in Central and East European higher education’, Society for Research in Higher Education International News, 47: 3–5. Ladson-Billings, G. (1992), ‘Liberatory consequences of literacy: A case of culturally relevant instruction for African American students’, The Journal of Negro Education, 61 (3): 378–390. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995), ‘Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy’, American Educational Research Journal, 32 (3): 465–491. Lamont, M. and Aksartova, S. (2002), ‘Ordinary cosmopolitanism: Strategies for bridging racial boundaries among working class men’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19 (4): 1–25. Luxon, T. and Peelo, M. (2009), ‘Academic sojourners, teaching and internationalisation: The experience of non-UK staff in a British university’, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (6): 649–659. Marginson, S. and Mollis, M. (2001), ‘ “The door opens and the tiger leaps”: Theories and reflexivities of comparative education for a global millennium’, Comparative Education Review, 45 (4): 581–615. Montgomery, L. (2012), Trends in International Academic and Research Staff Recruitment: Insights from 2012 European Career Fair Exhibitor Survey, The BrennWhite Group. http://www.brenn-white.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ECFInsights-White-Paper.pdf (accessed 3January 2018). Perry, L. (2005), ‘The seeing and the seen: Contrasting perspectives of postcommunistic Czech schooling’, Compare – a Journal of International and Comparative Education, 35 (3): 265–283. Pherali, T. (2012), ‘Academic mobility, language, and cultural capital’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 16 (4): 313–333. Ravitch, D. (2002), ‘Diversity, Tragedy, and the Schools’, The Brookings Review, 20 (1): 2–3.

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Reeves, D. (2016), ‘Encountering Māori culture as a European immigrant to Aotearoa NZ’, Lifewide Magazine, 17: 100–102. Roberts, K. (2001), ‘The new East European model of education, training and youth employment’, Journal of Education and Work, 14 (3): 315–328. Salaff, J., Greve, A., and Ping, L. X. L. (2002), ‘Paths into the economy: Structural barriers and the job hunt for skilled PRC migrants in Canada’, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 13: 450–464. Sandsted, T. (2011), ‘Some thoughts on hybrid identity’, New Narratives, 24 May. Available online: http://newnarratives.wordpress.com/issue-1-hybrid-identity/somethoughts-on-hybrid-identity/ (accessed 16 July 2016). Simmel, G. (1971), ‘The stranger’, in D. N. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms, 143–149, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Stodd (2014), ‘Agility’, Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog, 26 February. Available online: https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/agility/ (accessed 29 June 2016). Tandogan, Z. and Incirlioglu, E. (2004), ‘Academics in Motion: cultural encapsulation and feeling at home’, City and Society, 16 (1): 99–114. Tobin, W. (2014) Personal Inflection Points Shift the Trajectory Kaufman Fellows Report Vol 5. Available online: http://www.kauffmanfellows.org/journal_posts/ personal-inflection-points-shift-the-trajectory (accessed 29 August 2017). Turchick Hakak, L. T. and Al Ariss, A. (2013), ‘Vulnerable work and international migrants: A relational human resource management perspective’, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24 (22): 4116–4131. Williams, C. (1997), ‘Convergence or divergence? A comparative analysis of youth in Russia and Britain’, Education in Russia, the Independent States and Eastern Europe, 15 (1): 12–20. University of Bedfordshire (2012), Strategic Plan 2012–2017. Available online: http:// www.beds.ac.uk/_media/dl/Strategic2012-lr.pdf (accessed on 18 July 2016). Zikic, J., Bonache, J. and Cerdin, J-L. (2010), ‘Crossing national boundaries: A typology of qualified immigrants’ career orientations’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31(5): 667–686.

11

Continuing the International Academics’ Teaching Journey Sheila Trahar University of Bristol, UK

Introduction Writing this final chapter has afforded me an opportunity to offer an ‘outsider’s’ commentary, not only on the narratives, but also on the broader, geopolitical landscapes that, inevitably, shape the learning and teaching experiences recounted by contributors. I begin with a brief discussion on the use of language and the process of writing the chapter, and then I discuss how the contributions relate to one another by extrapolating what appear to be common themes. Inevitably, I foreground those themes that I want to highlight for their significance within the remit of the book, but I also draw attention to the geopolitical dimensions of today’s higher education (HE) environments that I  feel cannot be avoided for their significant role in shaping and reshaping our academic identities. Moreover, in drawing attention to such issues, I  strive to expand on the individual reflections on teaching and suggest some frameworks within which they might be considered further, given, for example, the gathering momentum to ‘decolonize’ curricula. Clegg proposes ‘one of the peculiarities of research into HE is that we are, to a large extent, researching ourselves’ (2016: 250). I end the chapter, therefore, by commending the reflexivity of these individual pieces of writing, arguing as ever, for its importance in HE practice – and research.

What’s in a name? I recall that, when the book was proposed and I  was invited to write the final chapter, I  asked what the term ‘international academic’ meant. It was

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being used as an identifier of those teaching in a HE environment in which they had not been educated, certainly in their earlier years. I questioned the appropriateness of this term as I  felt  – and feel  – that I  am very much an ‘international academic’ even though I  am British and work, mostly, in the UK which is my local – and ‘international’ – context. In addition, does all of the teaching that I have conducted in Hong Kong over the past fifteen years or so not render me ‘international’? What of the research projects on learning and teaching in HE to which I have contributed in several contexts? Do they not qualify me to attach that label ‘international’ to myself? I will not labour the point further as, somewhat perversely, I have written elsewhere about my resistance to labels, that, once attached, become difficult to loosen (Trahar 2011a). The language that we attribute to concepts is, nonetheless, important, and we need to be able to explain the rationale for choosing it. I  agonized, for example, in my own writing over the terms ‘intercultural’, ‘transcultural’, ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘multicultural’. I settled, eventually, on ‘cultural capability’ because: All of us are shaped by values and systems that have different consequences for some people and societies, often resulting in social division. Being ‘culturally capable’ means understanding what those values and systems are and challenging one’s own thinking and behaviour about them. (Trahar 2011a: viii)

I am not sharing those words to massage my academic ego, but because they seem to encapsulate many of the core elements of the accounts of learning and teaching presented in this book and because they affirm, for me, the importance of transparency over the use of language. Kim, for example, uses the terms ‘transnational academic mobility’ and ‘transnational identity capital’ as ‘intimately related to the social process of academics crossing international borders’ (2017: 2). In this book, we have a series of accounts that are centred mainly on teaching experiences, for that is the theme but, inevitably, they are intimately related to the crossing of many borders – physical borders, intellectual borders and pedagogical borders. The word ‘borders’ can itself be problematic as it suggests something fixed, immutable, whereas, as we see in each of the narratives presented, while some borders may seem immutable, many others are permeable and need to be challenged. I  will use the term ‘international academics’ as the decision to use it had been made, but my questioning of its legitimacy has surfaced some crucial issues for me that will be developed throughout this chapter.

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The writing process and resonance In my reading of the first drafts of the chapters, I found myself being unusually critical. As a narrative inquirer, I believe that it is important that, as researchers and, indeed, as human beings, we listen to and hear the stories that people choose to tell without striving to fit them into some predetermined way of seeing the world. I am not driven slavishly by ‘theory’, but neither am I atheoretical, enjoying the challenge of framing ideas, practices and, indeed, beliefs, according to different theoretical perspectives. I could read the stories recalled here and listen to the voices as wholly convincing and powerful accounts of authors’ experiences. At the same time, I noticed that I wanted the writers to engage in a critique of learning, teaching and assessment practices and to acknowledge them as being culturally mediated and often ethnocentric. As I read each subsequent iteration of the chapters, I  saw significantly more reflective and sensitively theorized accounts emerging and, each time, my framing of this final chapter shifted slightly. I  became aware of how elements of the different narratives resonated with me; how they caused me to reflect on my own experiences in myriad contexts. I admired the writers for their reflexivity and transparency, for the ways in which they raised the profile of autoethnography in HE research, but, at the same time, I  felt sad, frustrated ashamed. I  agreed, I  disagreed, I  was ambivalent. I  wanted to defend particular perspectives, ask questions. Occasionally I felt indignant. I write this because so often it is in these liminal spaces, these in-between spaces of exploring how writing affects us, that much learning about ourselves and about others can occur. Thus, scholarly writing that is engaging resonates with us, causing us to reflect on our own values, beliefs and behaviours – as these pieces, in their different ways, have caused me to reflect once more on mine. I share these resonances throughout the chapter.

Context I always argue for the importance of the clear articulation of context and positioning in research. I accept that this can render me as a thorn in the flesh of those who do not attribute similar importance to such concerns, but I make no apologies for my insistence on them. It seems to me crucial, therefore, that in reflecting on the chapters in this book, they are located not only within the context in which the writer lives and works but also considered within the current, global

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situation of HE and, indeed, given that I am writing this early in 2017, connected to the state of the world. In many parts of the globe, HE is going through a crisis, ‘especially given the rise of nationalist sentiments and the probable implications of “Trumpism” in the USA and “Brexit” in the UK’ (Kim 2017: 4). In the UK, the vote to leave the European Union is causing uncertainty for universities about their position with regard to recruitment of students and academics from mainland Europe. The immigration rhetoric is contributing to a dramatic drop in the numbers of students from other contexts, so called ‘international students’ who want to study in the UK and, possibly, impeding the recruitment of academics from other contexts. In South Africa, the ‘#FeesMustFall’ movement is the tip of a bigger iceberg of restlessness and discontent. Many students and academics are challenging what they define as colonized curricula, demanding that disciplines be more Afrocentric and, in some instances, taught in African languages (for various versions of this debate see, for example, Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Mbembe 2016; Case 2017). In Australia, New Zealand and Canada, contexts that have, until relatively recently, marginalized their indigenous populations, these issues are also coming much more to the fore. Additionally, lest we forget, ‘the boundaries of academic mobility overlap with, and are constructed by, the characteristics of contemporary neoliberal market-framed universities’ (Kim and Brooks 2013: 9). We can glimpse some of these neo-liberal ‘characteristics’ in the accounts of some of those working in the UK, for example, those of Anesa Hosein and Henry Asei Kum, who discuss what they consider to be restrictive practices that purport to be associated with quality assurance. The broader, geopolitical dimensions of HE are, inevitably, mediating their perspectives and practices, but perhaps more significance is ascribed to the impact of the vagaries of the local context because, understandably, it is those with which they have to grapple every day, leaving them with little space to locate these experiences within a global setting. In writing this final chapter, I have an opportunity to draw attention to this wider context and its role in shaping our teaching practices in HE. Khattab and Fenton in writing about ‘overseas academics in the UK academia’ use the term Golden Triangle (GT) to refer to the ‘top of the top’ (2015:14) universities that are members of the prestigious Russell Group in the UK. Russell Group universities include Bristol, Manchester and Sheffield but, according to Khattab and Fenton, the GT, the ‘top of the top’ include Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, King’s College London and University College London. They argue that the GT employs the majority of non-UK academics – about 42 per cent were employed by the GT universities in 2009–2010. Thus, their claim is that the majority of non-UK academics are working in research-intensive institutions, most of which are science focused

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and tend to attract more international academics than those that are less so. I note, however, that the majority of the book’s contributors who work in the UK are from post-92 universities, that is, those institutions that were former polytechnics and colleges of HE, perhaps because of the focus on experiences of teaching, and that they are predominantly social scientists.

Change and adaptation The focus of this book is the contributors’ experiences of teaching in contexts in which they feel and/or are positioned as outsiders, ‘othered’. In each narrative, irrespective of context, I  noticed that it was the academics that expected to change and adapt to their new situations, rather than expect or hope that the contexts would embrace and celebrate the diverse experiences that they bring and thus from which colleagues and students could learn. The accounts of Judith Enriquez-Gibson and Thushari Welikala offer an exception through their laudable refusal to accept the ways in which others position them. Chloe ShuHua Yeh, having also communicated an expectation that she needs to adapt her teaching to be more commensurate with her environment, highlights, at the end of her chapter, the important role that ‘international academics’ have in enabling their institutions to learn more about how learning, teaching and assessment are mediated in different contexts. Provided that the institution develops a culture of listening to these international academics, I believe that more inclusive teaching approaches can be developed and a stronger sense of social justice in HE can, undoubtedly, be fostered – Enriquez-Gibson’s ‘pedagogy of academic mobility’ is an illustration of this. The experiences of Tanya Hathaway in Australia seemed to me to be particularly brutal. Her colleagues did not only not appreciate the different perspectives that she brought to teaching and learning, but also seemed to be actively unhelpful and obstructive towards her in their competitive environment. Hathaway’s vignettes illustrated, to me, a morally reprehensible positioning of students by some of her colleagues. The contrasts that she draws between attitudes encountered in this Australian university and her former UK university with its widening participation policies and activities were illustrative of two very different HE institutions. Similarly, Maja Jankowska writes about her experiences of working in a UK university that takes great pride in its diversity and commitment to widening participation. Coming from a HE system in which those who are less academically able are weeded out or withdraw in their first year of university, Jankowska describes her initial struggles in working with

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students whose knowledge was not at a level that she had assumed. This theme is also evident in both Anesa Hosein’s and Jennifer Chung’s chapters. Much of Hosein’s ‘culture shock’ related to students in her post-92 UK university, one committed to widening access, not having the level of mathematical knowledge that she had experienced in her previous institutions in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Chung, having been educated in an elite liberal arts college in the United States, resisted adamantly the ‘pressure to give extensive guidance to the students’, considering this to ‘contrast heavily’ with her ‘own ethos and philosophy of higher education’. Students, who were ‘so appalled’ by her ‘lack of support’, complained about her. I experienced challenges to my own beliefs and practices in reading of these experiences and the views held by the writers. I  believe, passionately, in the importance of diversity in HE but not only in diversity, in the sense of ‘variety’, but in fostering and celebrating it for its rich potential to enable us to learn about each other and to engender a sense of global responsibility and social justice. I myself have a widening participation background. I  am the daughter of a manual worker, from a lower-income family in which I was the first to attend HE. Such experiences have contributed significantly to the importance that I place on striving to ensure inclusivity in teaching, learning and assessment and to supporting students from different backgrounds and academic traditions to achieve. I have no doubt that the authors of these chapters share similar values, and it may well be that, in questioning the prerequisite levels of knowledge and understanding of some of their students, they are attributing less recognition to the extent that social background may be an influencer in this. It seems apparent that those working in the UK are very clear about the diversity of cultures, ethnicities and faiths that they can expect to encounter in the classroom, but that diversity in levels of knowledge and understanding is – or was – a surprise. Reading these accounts, my initial reaction was one of dismay, yet, on reflection, I realized, once again, that I, too, have been socialized into particular values, beliefs and behaviours. Being alert to that and continuing to interrogate them prior to jumping to judgement is vital in my opinion and, indeed, experience. Similarly, articulating their experiences in their accounts has, undoubtedly, alerted authors to these differences.

Career development and gender The majority of contributors are women, another under-researched group in UK HE research, particularly ‘women of non-UK origin’ (Johansson and Sliwa

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2014: 18). In addition, I note that some of them project ahead, to how they view the development of their academic careers. Those working in the UK should take courage from the work of Fernando and Cohen who, in their study of Indian academics in the UK, challenge what they consider to be ‘the dominant discourse of disadvantage associated with skilled migrants’ careers’ (2016: 1292). They claim that the participants in their research used their ‘ “ethnic capital” to enhance their positions’ (2016:  1291). Their participants worked, however, in ‘a premier research-intensive university in the UK’ (2016: 1285). On the other hand, Sang, Al-Dajani and Ozbilgin’s (2013) study of migrant female professors drew similar conclusions as did Johansson and Sliwa’s study of ‘foreign women academics in UK business schools’ (2014: 18). There is cause for optimism!

Neoliberal practices? Several authors discussed practices that they found restrictive. Hosein, for example, writes of feeling somewhat constrained by the procedures for making changes to a module, which she viewed as affecting her academic authority. In other words, she felt that adhering to these protocols meant that her professional judgement was not trusted. Kum also recalls that, in his early experiences of teaching in the UK, he felt that his professional authority was questioned, that he was constantly being evaluated. These are practical indications of the neoliberal, performative culture which we in the UK and in many other contexts now have to negotiate. It is, of course, important to be accountable for one’s decisions but, on the other hand, as others have lamented (e.g. Brown and Carasso 2013) the administrative procedures that are all too often demanded of quality assurance protocols can be cumbersome, unhelpful and associated negatively with the increased marketization of HE. Providing a student with detailed and constructive feedback that s/he can make use of in her/his future learning is an intrinsic dimension of the role of the academic, but we need to recognize, appropriately, the time that this takes.

A parallel process? Perhaps of most significant interest to me were the parallels between academics’ accounts of their experiences and the research into the experiences of international students. When I  began to be interested in the experiences of ‘international

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students’ in the UK, it was not very long before I  realized that I  was curious about not only their learning and teaching experiences but also the interactions between these so-called international students, so-called home students, and academics. Very quickly, it became important that my own beliefs and values about learning and teaching, and, indeed, about myself, were interrogated. At that time, some seventeen years ago, that level of reflexivity in academics was rare. Many people called for greater reflexivity, and those such as Sanderson referred to the importance of the ‘internationalization of the academic Self ’ (2007: 276), but the literature was not replete with examples. It seems now that the situation is similar with regard to non-local academic staff in the contexts within which contributors work. In fact, Walker claims that ‘the lived experiences of the academics themselves barely attract even cursory coverage’ (2015: 64) and the ‘voice of the international academic is not foregrounded’ (2015: 71). If that is the case – and it seems to me that it may well be – then this book is timely and important in addressing that gap in the discourse. Walker claims that if one is teaching in a context that is not one’s own, then one is faced with ‘unfamiliar pedagogical, epistemological and philosophical paradigms as they teach and research in an educational system of which they have no experiential knowledge’ (2015: 65). I agree completely, yet, at the same time, I have had such experiences in teaching in the UK in complex multicultural, multilayered environments. Erik Blair, for example, in reflecting vividly on his experiences of moving from the UK to teach in a university in Trinidad and Tobago, comments that he had ‘never realised that I had been socialized by the system’ and that, in the UK, his approach to teaching and beliefs about learning may well have excluded students who had not been educated in the UK. I  note that he ‘needed to feel that he fitted in’ and that his experiences in the new context led him to ‘adopt a more scholarly approach to my teaching’. His experiences mirror many of mine in working with people from and in several contexts, experiences that prompted me also to interrogate why I  taught in the way that I  did and to make some significant changes in order to ensure a more ethnorelative approach, as Blair himself describes. Some of the contributors comment on the attention that is paid to their physical appearance and that they are not first language English speakers. Judith Enriquez-Gibson, in particular, focuses on how she feels that people always try to position her, to determine where she is from, ‘the mono-racial tendency to impose identity and status based on my place of origin and identity’. Yeh and Kum, who both speak English as a second language, reflect movingly on how they feel judged by students because of the ways in which they speak English, and

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how this is often conflated with their knowledge of a subject and their intellectual abilities. In my research with postgraduates who were not first language English speakers, such sentiments were also expressed (see, for example, Trahar 2011a). Kum writes about doubting himself, yet, for me, doubt, rather than being a negative emotion, is crucial in the complex international classroom. Kuipers considers that doubt is the ‘central academic virtue. It should take center stage in university teaching, academic writing and in academic forays into the public and transnational spheres’ (2014: 75). I expressed similar sentiments when I wrote: Doubt has always been a faithful, if uncomfortable, companion to me. In particular, over the past fifteen years or so, doubting the certainty of the ways in which I see and experience the world has challenged me to grapple with the discomfort I can experience in the international environments in which I am an educator. (Trahar 2015: 103)

Such disquiet, in my opinion, is crucial and reflects the concept of a pedagogy of discomfort implicit in many of contributors’ accounts. The term ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ was coined by Megan Boler (1999), extended by Boler and Zembylas (2003) and now, importantly, pays explicit attention, to the ‘discomfort’ of the academic/educator in addition to that of the student: A pedagogy of discomfort . . . is grounded upon the idea that discomforting feelings are valuable in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities and thus create openings for individual and social transformation. A major requirement, then, of pedagogy of discomfort is that students and teachers are invited to embrace their vulnerability and ambiguity of self and therefore their dependability on others. (Zembylas 2015: 170)

A project on internationalizing HE in Israel with which I  was involved, for example, had some success in encouraging academic participants to begin to question the ethnocentricity of their learning and teaching approaches. My experiences in Israel, although often uncomfortable and personally challenging, mirrored my lived experience of a pedagogy of discomfort, illustrating how it can play a significant part in moving towards greater social justice and understanding in conflicted areas of the world. In some of the accounts recalled in this book, authors mention creating spaces in their classrooms for students to engage with each other, in order to begin to understand more clearly their similarities and differences. Some contributors are more conversant with pedagogic theories than others, but all bring to the attention of readers the importance of how reflecting on personal experience can inform a more critical perspective on

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practice. Framing these experiences theoretically within concepts such as a pedagogy of discomfort may well be a valuable next step for contributors as undoubtedly, they believe that ‘teaching is vitally important, learning to teach is vitally important, and theorising learning to teach is, indeed, extremely valuable and important’ (Leibowitz, Bozalek and Kahn 2017: xxi)

Cultural mediation of learning and teaching and decoloniality All contributors discuss the importance of recognizing that there are different cultural and contextual influences on learning, teaching and assessment, but issues that seem to me to be touched on only very lightly in the chapters are those of decoloniality, decolonization of the curriculum or internationalization of the curriculum. Colonialism is referred to by Hosein, Blair and Kum, is implicit in the writing of Welikala and more explicit in Enriquez-Gibson’s chapter, but, aside perhaps from the latter, I observed that the majority of authors did not appear to challenge the notion of ‘British education’, in particular those who are from or are working in former British colonies where it is described as still being considered to be the ‘gold standard’. This may be because contributors are concentrating on the teaching of their discipline but, as indicated earlier, ‘colonial’ perspectives on learning, teaching and assessment are being more vociferously challenged in many contexts, including in the UK (see, for example, the ‘Why is my curriculum white’ movement, http://www.nusconnect.org. uk/ articles/ why- is- my- curriculum- white- decolonising- the- academy). Such challenges are not especially new  – Freire’s critical pedagogy appeared more than forty years ago – but, for me, surfacing these issues that are now very much to the fore in some parts of the world, in particular in South Africa but also in Australia and New Zealand and Latin America, is indicative of the extent to which HE can be a site to engender a sense of social justice for all of those who work in it, in whatever the context. Engaging with this literature may be something that authors care to do in the future as they continue to develop their practice, and thus to challenge the continuing dominance of Anglo/Eurocentric principles in HE. Authors may want to consider concepts such as pedagogy of discomfort, pedagogical reciprocity, pedagogical presence  – or exploring the notion of pedagogic frailty (Kinchin and Wiley 2017). There are glimpses of such concepts in the accounts, but, aside from Enriquez-Gibson’s articulation of a ‘pedagogy of academic mobility’ that constitutes ‘other thinking’ based on

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non-white histories, cultures, experiences and identities, they are not made explicit. This may be because writers are less familiar with the scholarship of learning and teaching literature, which they may be interested to consult further in the future. Yeh gives a detailed exposition of how learning and teaching are mediated in Confucian heritage cultures, but could perhaps have extended this to suggest how many of the concepts and practices can be integrated into her teaching in the UK. Some time ago, I  conducted research into how academics in three different UK universities experienced ‘diversity’ in their classrooms (Trahar 2011b). I was deliberate in my use of the word ‘diversity’ as I wanted the academic participants to attribute their own meaning to that term. Without exception, all participants focused on cultural diversity and, usually, on ‘international students’ – although one person, who worked in an institution whose UK student constituency was significantly ethnically diverse, mentioned British Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students in passing. One academic, who was from Austria, told me that her colleagues seemed not at all to be interested in her experiences of learning and teaching in Austria, telling her that ‘This is the UK. We do things differently here.’ These words have stayed with me as an embarrassing example of how the British can be somewhat parochial in their attitudes to the ‘other’. This is often borne out in research into relationships between ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ students but appears less often in research with academics. In some of the interactions described in the chapters, this parochialism can be detected, irrespective of the context, so perhaps it is not only symptomatic of the UK. I recall, from my experiences of being a visiting academic in Malaysia, that when I invited academics to share the complexities of teaching in their increasingly international context, almost immediately they began to ‘other’ the international students, using ‘they’ pejoratively. In conducting some research while I was in Malaysia with both international students and academics, sadly, they told very similar stories, that bore out, from their perspective, the attitudes of many of the local academics that I had encountered (Trahar 2014).

Continuing the journey… In writing this chapter, I have striven to articulate the commonalities within these accounts in addition to proposing ways in which authors might extend their critical reflections on their own perspectives on learning and teaching

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and their experiences of being international academics in a range of contexts. I  have also suggested ways to frame them within different theoretical perspectives and also for contributors to consider their experiences within broader geopolitics of HE. I  have drawn attention to issues of widening participation and for the need to conceptualize and understand ‘diversity’ in its widest sense. I  have located participants’ critique of what they consider to be restrictive academic practices within neoliberalism. Several authors propose ways in which universities could take steps to better support new international academics and could strive to shift their cultures to embrace academic traditions that differ from those of the local context. These proposals are very worthy of consideration, especially in light of the recent theorizing of academic and professional development in HE within frameworks that focus not so much on developing the individual teacher but on recognizing the individual as being part of a learning community (see, for example, Leibowitz, Bozalek and Kahn 2017). In so far as I am aware, this book is one of very few to give voice to academics’ critical reflections on their experiences of teaching in HE contexts within which they have not been educated. The hearing of those voices is poignant and salutary and is a rather sad indictment of how in HE many people continue to ‘other’ those that are considered to be differently positioned from themselves. On the other hand, and more optimistically, taking on roles as academic developers has been productive for Tanya Hathaway in her rural Australian university and for Anesa Hosein and Thushari Welikala in their UK institutions. Does this suggest, then, that in such positions international academics feel more confident in being able to influence the scholarship of teaching and learning and to initiate conversations that acknowledge what they bring to the context? I  hope so. Finally, for me, the narratives contained in this book are yet further evidence of the importance of critical reflexivity. The words of Carl Leggo are always ringing in my ears: ‘I am the person I am because of the experiences and people and places that comprise my life and living’ (2008: 91). The contributors to this book have shared with us, as readers, their experiences as international academics. They have painted vivid pictures of the people and places that comprise their professional lives and the living of them, giving us insight into their emotions, rendering themselves vulnerable in their transparent articulations. They have affirmed the strength of autoethnography in scholarly writing and are to be commended for their courage. Let us read these accounts and allow them to accompany us on the continuing journey, a journey that has ‘global ramifications that extend far beyond higher education’ (Kahn and Agnew

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2015:  54), and, if travelled openly, and, perhaps, doubtfully and humbly, can enable us to reach a greater understanding of each other.

References Boler, M. (1999), Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, New York: Routledge. Boler, M. and Zembylas, M. (2003), ‘Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding differences’, in P. Trofonas (ed.), Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Justice, 110–136, New York: Routledge. Brown, R. with Carasso, H. (2013), Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Case, J. M. (2017), Public Higher Education in Peril? A View from Down South, Centre for Global Higher Education Working Paper no.15 Clegg, S. (2016), ‘More than the sum of its parts: Higher education research explored’, in J. M. Case and J. Huisman (eds), Researching Higher Education: International Perspectives on Theory, Policy and Practice, 249–260, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Fernando, W. D. A. and Cohen, L. (2016), ‘Exploring career advantages of highly skilled migrants: A study of Indian academics in the UK’, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27 (12): 1277–1298. Johansson, M. and Sliwa, M. (2014), ‘Gender, foreignness and academia: An international analysis of the experiences of foreign women academics in UK Business Schools’, Gender, Work and Organization, 21 (1): 18–36. Kahn, H. E and Agnew, M. (2015), ‘Global learning through difference: Considerations for teaching, learning, and the internationalization of higher education’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 21 (1): 52–64. Khattab, N. and Fenton, S. (2015), ‘Globalisation of researcher mobility within the UK Higher Education: explaining the presence of overseas academics in the UK academia’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 14767724.2015.1067763 (accessed 28 February 2017). Kim, T. (2017), ‘Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism’, Higher Education DOI 10.1007/s10734017-00118-0 (accessed 28 February 2017). Kim, T. and Brooks, R. (2013), Internationalisation, Mobile Academics, and Knowledge Creation in Universities: A Comparative Analysis. Society for Research into Higher Education Research Report. Kinchin, I. M. and Wiley, C. (2017), ‘Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education DOI: 10.1177/1474022217698082 (accessed 28 February 2017). Kuipers, G. (2014), ‘In praise of doubt: academic virtues, transnational encounters and the problem of the public’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17 (1): 75–89.

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Leggo, C. (2008), ‘The ecology of personal and professional experience: A poet’s view’, in M.Cahnmann-Taylor and R.Siegesmund (eds), Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice, 89–97, New York: Routledge. Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V. and Kahn, P., eds, (2017), Theorising Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Mbembe, A.J. (2016), ‘Decolonizing the university: New directions’, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 15 (1): 29–45. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2013), ‘Why decoloniality in the 21st century?’, The Thinker, 48: 10–15. Sanderson, G. (2007), ‘A foundation for the internationalization of the academic Self ’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 12 (3): 276–307. Sang, K., Al-Dajani, H. and Ozbilgin, M. (2013), ‘Frayed careers of migrant female professors in British academia: an intersectional perspective’, Gender, Work & Organization, 20 (2): 158–171. Trahar, S. (2011a), Developing Cultural Capability in International Higher Education: A Narrative Inquiry, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Trahar, S. (2011b), ‘Changing landscapes, shifting identities in higher education: Some narratives of academics in the UK’, Research in Education, 86 (1): 46–60. Trahar, S. (2014), ‘ “This is Malaysia: You have to follow the custom here”: narratives of the student and academic experience in international higher education in Malaysia’, Journal of Education for Teaching [Special Issue: Transnational and Transcultural Positionality in Globalised Higher Education], 40 (3): 217–231. Trahar, S. (2015), ‘Learning and teaching on transnational higher education programmes in Hong Kong’, Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences (LATISS) [Special Issue Learning and Teaching in Transnational Education], 8 (1): 95–112. Walker, P. (2015), ‘The globalisation of higher education and the sojourner academic: Insights into challenges experienced by newly appointed international academic staff in a UK university’, Journal of Research in International Education, 14 (1): 61–74. Zembylas, M. (2015), ‘ “Pedagogy of discomfort” and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education’, Ethics and Education, 10 (2): 163–174.

Index academic mobility viii, xii, xiii, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 28, 89, 125–9, 133–9, 162, 164, 165, 170 academic tribe 21 acculturation xv, 6, 9, 18, 67, 71, 76, 77, 104 adaptation xi, 6, 10, 19, 84–7, 96, 143, 145, 148, 150–1, 155, 165–6 see also resistance pedagogy 20, 21, 22, 23, 30–1, 40, 82, 122, 131, 139, 153 administration 5, 16, 26, 35, 39, 68, 72, 83, 84, 88, 121, 130, 144, 145, 149, 167 Africa xv, 8, 15, 26, 28, 29, 37, 164, 170 see also Cameroon; South Africa agency 40, 86, 88, 94, 95, 103 alien 1, 40, 64, 77, 84–9, 127, 141 alienation 88, 147, 149 see also isolation anxiety 10, 38, 39, 67, 82, 149 assessment and feedback 6, 19, 32–3, 39, 47, 51, 53–4, 57–8, 80, 84, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 113–14, 118, 129, 130, 136, 163, 165–6, 167, 170 assimilation 26, 37, 72, 115, 118 see also integration assumptions 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 39, 87, 98, 118, 126, 132, 141, 145, 148 Australia viii, xi, xiii, 4, 5, 68, 93, 95–6, 99, 101–5, 164, 165, 170, 172 Austria 171 authenticity 97 autoethnography 7, 61, 62–3, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 88, 89, 109, 110, 141, 163, 172 see also methodology; narrative autonomy v, vii, 9, 14, 28, 83, 84, 109, 110, 113–15, 118–22, 149, 150, 153 belonging 10, 37, 63, 65, 69, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94, 135, 141, 146, 147 Bologna system 145 borders 3, 9, 64, 66, 69, 71, 141, 152, 162

Bourdieu 16, 141, 151, 152 brain drain 26, 96 Cameroon v, viii, xiv, 5, 25, 26–40 Canada xiii, 164 Central Eastern European system of education 153 Chinese academics and educational system 75, 77–84, 86–9 cognition xv, 33, 70, 85–9 collectivism ix, 5, 27, 75, 81, 85–6, 153, 154 colonialism 9, 15–16, 18, 26, 49, 64, 109, 112, 115, 125, 129–31, 132–4, 136–9, 142, 164, 170 decoloniality 125, 127, 129, 136–9, 170 communication xiii, 18–20, 22, 30, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 129, 144, 152, 165 see also culture communities of practice 10, 28, 37, 40, 89, 95, 102, 131, 154, 172 community 33, 48, 65, 81, 85, 135, 144, 151, 155 competition ix, 4, 49, 51, 53, 67, 80, 96, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 165 Confucianism ix, 75, 78, 85, 86, 88, 171 constructive alignment theory 114–16 context 17, 18, 20, 21–2, 23, 27, 67, 69, 76, 87, 100, 113–14, 137, 141, 142, 150, 163, 168–9, 172 see also disciplines; UK; USA academic 95, 96, 98, 102 cultural and social 7, 9, 15, 16, 21, 25, 26, 66, 84–5, 94, 164 educational 21, 25, 28 global and international 5, 10, 40, 61, 62, 65, 89, 161, 162, 164, 172 host university 65, 129 Oxbridge 47, 50 pedagogy 17, 19, 30–1, 32, 36, 70, 81, 138, 148, 165, 168, 170

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universities/higher education 15, 69, 94, 118, 143, 155, 164 continuing professional development 27, 28, 30, 33–4, 38–9, 72, 155 see also professional development cooperation 153 cosmopolitanism ix, 72, 142, 145, 151, 153–4 critical theory 127 cultural-professional interfaces 62, 72 culture 27, 37, 46, 64–6, 67, 75, 76, 77, 85, 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 103, 109, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 151–6, 162, 171–2 see also context; neoliberalism; otherness; UK; USA academic 5, 8, 10, 57, 72, 77–8, 100, 122, 126, 142 cultural capability 162 cultural capital 39, 40, 72, 143, 151, 152, 167 cultural shock v, 8, 13, 16, 27–8, 38, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51–7, 67, 148, 154, 166 departmental 97, 98 geocultural 5 host culture 71, 125, 127, 131, 133, 134, 137, 145, 152, 167 institutional 141, 155, 165 intercultural communication 89 interculturality 10, 38, 75 pedagogy 65, 70, 78, 85, 86, 118, 120, 121, 131, 154, 163, 169, 170 curriculum xv, 2, 6, 14, 16, 19, 31, 45, 47, 49, 51–4, 57, 64–5, 66, 76, 105, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 120, 129, 134, 136, 161, 164, 170 Dearing Report 114 deliberation 17, 20–1 disciplines 8, 46, 54, 69, 70, 71, 111, 141, 143, 147, 151, 154, 155, 164–5 disconnection 142, 147 discourse 35, 37, 63, 64, 67–9, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100–4, 125, 127, 129, 139, 148, 152, 167–8 disempowerment 67 see also empowerment dislocation 61, 103, 127, 135, 139 diversity ix, 5, 10, 39, 49, 72, 116, 138, 144, 145, 146, 151, 154, 165, 166, 168, 172

learners xiii, 40, 118, 143, 144, 150, 154, 171 double consciousness 147 early career academics 6, 76 East and West 9, 65, 75, 77, 86–7, 88, 89, 131–2, 137, 149 economy 46, 49, 139 market forces 54, 80, 93, 95, 145 Education Act The 48, 53, 57 employability 154 of learners 31, 46, 50–1, 80, 83, 149 empowerment 40, 66, 69, 70, 86, 104, 154, 155 see also disempowerment enlightenment The 15 epistemology viii, xiii, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 62, 65, 70, 129, 137, 139, 168 European Union xv, 5, 9, 79, 141–3, 145, 151, 164 exclusion 81, 148 experiences, transitional 7, 8, 93, 94, 104, 127, 129, 135, 137, 138, 139, 145, 152, 155, 162–3, 165–168, 169, 171–2 fear 1, 14, 38, 46, 48, 81, 88, 100–2, 155 Finland xii, 141, 143, 151 flexibility 115, 119, 120, 145 Further and Higher Education Act, The 46, 80 gender 6, 68, 116, 128, 133, 134, 136, 143, 144, 166–7 see also women Global Educational Reform Movement 53–4, 55, 57 global universities 4, 65, 71, 72 see also higher education globalization viii, 28, 125, 133, 172 boundaries and borders 9, 125 Golden Triangle 164 group membership 94–5, 98, 100 Guyana 109, 111, 112, 114–16, 118, 122, 166 hierarchy 18, 78, 94, 96, 97, 100, 137, 154 higher education 47, 49, 57, 71, 110–11, 112, 122, 133, 161, 163–4, 172 see also context; culture Higher Education Academy 133 home academics 8, 9, 10, 71, 72, 141, 142, 145, 171

Index Hong Kong xiii, xv, 162 human capital 15 hybridity 37, 141, 147, 153 identity 2, 4, 17, 37, 38, 61, 69, 84, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 103, 125–9, 131, 134–9, 141, 146, 147, 162, 168, 171 see also race cultural 37, 78, 129, 133 see also culture geopolitics of 9, 139 professional 8, 17–18, 21, 23, 25, 29, 33, 36, 67, 75, 77, 81–4, 87, 88, 89, 93, 94–5, 100, 120, 139, 155, 161 shifts 40, 80 social identity theory 93 socially constructed 9, 67, 94, 95, 97, 102, 128, 141, 147, 166 individualism ix, 75, 78, 79, 85–6, 93, 95, 96, 137, 149, 172 induction and training programmes (HE) 14, 34, 38–9, 72, 88, 155–6 see also continuing professional development insecurity 65, 67, 70 integrated threat theory 38 integration 37, 39, 85, 87, 89, 103, 147 see also assimilation international academics 1–6, 10, 29, 32, 36, 39, 40, 61, 62–3, 67, 70, 71–2, 75, 76, 77, 81, 82–3, 84, 87, 88, 89, 93, 94–5, 97, 102–5, 125–7, 129, 132–5, 138, 142–3, 145–8, 151–2, 154, 155, 156, 161–2, 164–5, 167–8, 171–2 see also Chinese academics and educational system; women international students xii, 4, 10, 39, 66, 83, 129, 142, 154, 164, 167–8, 171 internationalization xiv, xv, 2, 4, 10, 66, 69, 75–7, 89, 96, 105, 126, 148, 154, 168, 169, 170 see also geopolitical isolation 10, 56, 84, 103 see also alienation Israel xv, 169 language 5, 20, 26, 29, 30, 32, 45, 77, 82–3, 86–8, 95, 116, 129, 135, 142, 149, 151, 152, 155, 161, 162, 164, 168–9 Latin America 170 leadership 69, 97, 105

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league tables viii, ix, 36, 49, 54, 55, 57, 69 legitimacy 17–18, 131, 133, 162 liberal arts v, 5, 8, 45–58, 166 Malaysia xiii, 171 managerialism 81, 83, 84, 101, 129 marginalization 69, 81, 84, 95, 133, 134, 135, 137, 164 mentor 10, 14, 28, 38–40, 82, 104–5, 118, 122, 148, 155 methodology 7–8, 25, 77, 109–10 see also autoethnography; narrative motivation xv, 110, 121, 151, 153 narrative 6, 7, 8, 10, 25, 62, 75, 93, 95, 70, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110, 125, 127, 129, 135, 162–3 National Student Survey 35–8, 39, 101, 126, 134 neo-liberalism 4, 6, 35, 54, 68, 76, 83, 94, 95, 125, 129, 133, 136, 145, 149, 164, 167, 172 see also economy networks 4, 104, 149–51 New Zealand 164, 170 norms 16, 19, 22, 32, 52, 67, 68, 78, 97, 98, 113, 116, 120, 136 ontology 13, 22, 39, 61, 65, 70–1 otherness 10, 21, 23, 29, 37, 68, 125–32, 134–9, 142, 145–6, 152, 165, 170, 171, 172 Palmer, P. J. 1 pastoral support 28, 56, 80, 144, 147, 149–50, 153 pedagogy 8–9, 18, 64, 66, 70–1, 75, 76, 99, 103, 109, 110, 112, 114–17, 120, 125, 127–8, 131–2, 134, 138, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 162–3, 166, 168–70, 172 see also autonomy; communities of practice; context; culture; disciplines; identity; teaching blended learning 118–19 competence 113, 122, 148, 167 critical pedagogy 96, 125, 128–30, 133–6, 138, 169, 170 disconnectedness 117, 122 external evaluation 54–7

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Index

institutional 105, 120 international perspective 2 of connection 142, 153, 154 of discomfort 169–70 pedagogic frailty 6, 170 pedagogical dissonance 6, 9, 19, 25, 102, 110, 133, 139 qualifications 27, 28, 29, 31, 112, 115, 116, 118, 135, 138, 155 relatedness 112, 113, 115–16, 118–20, 122 self-evaluation of 29 student-centeredness 6, 15, 16, 18, 27, 30, 35, 78, 80, 81–2, 88, 117–18, 122, 143, 144, 148–50, 166 systematic model of learning 54 teaching philosophy 28, 31 technology 26, 29–30, 36, 98, 110, 118– 20, 122, 144, 149 peer observation 30–1, 37, 68, 82 personal development xiv, 72 Philippines xiii, 5, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132 Poland viii, 5, 9, 141, 143–5, 147, 151, 153, 154, 155 post-1992 university v, 45–7, 49, 50–1, 53, 56–8, 103, 144, 165, 166 power relationships 56, 64, 93, 94–5, 97, 101, 103, 130, 136, 139, 143, 148–9 professional development xv, 22, 27, 70, 72, 75, 77, 88–9, 133–4, 154–5, 166–7, 172 see also continuous professional development quality assurance xiv, 55, 102, 114, 116, 121, 164, 167 Quality Assurance Agency 34, 114 race and ethnicity xiv, 6, 65, 68, 126–7, 128–9, 132, 133–134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 163, 168, 171 see also whiteness rankings see league tables reflection 22, 23, 25, 38, 40, 57, 62, 67, 69, 70, 71, 76, 102, 105, 109, 111, 113, 119, 132, 148, 151, 161, 163, 168 reflective conversation 16–17, 18–20 see also Schön reflexivity 62–3, 66, 77, 88, 93, 96, 163, 168, 171, 172 rehearsal 17, 18, 149

research 35, 75, 83, 84, 96, 102, 103, 121, 143, 148, 149, 163, 164, 165 international research groups 3 see also networks ‘publish or perish’ 50, 55, 57, 96, 121 see also Research Excellence Framework teaching-research nexus 2, 6, 55–6, 77, 84, 87, 88, 95, 98, 100–1, 103, 105, 121, 144, 152 Research Excellence Framework 33–5, 39, 55–7 resilience 6, 67, 79, 93, 151, 152 resistance 4, 16, 54, 69, 72, 76, 84, 95, 100, 132, 146, 162, 166 scholarship of teaching and learning 2, 8, 22, 93, 96, 168, 171–2 Schön 2, 13, 15, 16–17 self-actualisation 127 self-determination theory 9, 109, 110 self-doubt 28, 30, 32 social capital 8, 39, 152 social interactions 77, 84, 85, 94, 103, 150 social justice 165, 166, 169, 170 South Africa xv, 164, 170 Sri Lanka viii, ix, xv, 5, 61–4, 67 stereotyping 8, 38, 97, 99, 146 stress see anxiety student consumers 84, 126, 145 see also neo-liberalism; tuition fees student development ix, 34, 45, 47, 51–2, 99 student satisfaction 35, 80, 84, 101, 144, 147, 153 see also National Student Survey; student consumers subjectivity 126–7 support 22, 26, 31, 34, 35, 38, 45, 54, 69, 72, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 97, 103, 104–5, 110–11, 117, 118, 144, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 166, 172 systems approach 109, 110–110, 120–1 Taiwan viii, ix, x, 5, 75, 76, 78, 81, 83–5 teacher-student relationship 6, 64, 77–80, 88, 101, 147, 149, 154, 165 teaching 6, 9, 33–5, 98, 99, 102, 103, 109, 111–13, 118, 121, 142, 149, 154, 155 see also pedagogy temporary academics 102–3

Index territoriality 8, 40 tertiary education see higher education third space 135, 142, 154 threat theories 25 threshold liminality viii, 8, 25, 31, 33 transnational capital 72, 152 Trinidad and Tobago xii, 5, 13–23, 109, 112, 114–16, 122, 166, 168 tuition fees 35, 46, 78, 80, 142, 144, 164 see also student consumers UK 5, 96, 99, 109, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 141, 142, 149, 162, 164, 168 higher education institutions 8, 15, 34, 45, 76, 97, 100, 116, 121, 122, 135, 145, 148, 152, 165, 171 higher education system 9, 19, 23, 27, 28–9, 46, 48, 53, 54–5, 56, 63, 64, 65, 67, 70, 76, 78, 80, 81–3, 98, 101, 103, 114, 115, 121, 122, 126, 130, 131, 132, 135, 142–3, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 156, 164, 166–7, 170

179

USA 5, 45, 49, 96, 114, 164 higher education system 8, 48, 56, 166 values ix, 25, 27–8, 46, 49, 54, 64–5, 72, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102, 109, 127, 142, 149, 154, 162, 163, 166, 168 academic 6, 55, 57, 58, 69, 71, 93, 94, 102, 109, 113, 121, 132, 133, 138 vignette 93, 95, 98, 100, 102, 129, 165 vocationalism versus practicality 50–1 well-being 149 whiteness 64, 67, 68, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133–135, 137–9, 142, 146, 170–1 see also race widening participation 100, 117, 131, 143, 144, 145, 154, 165–6, 172 women 9, 61, 63–4, 67, 68, 69 see also gender work-life balance 120–1, 122