Changing academies: exploring international PhD students' perspectives on ‘host’ and ‘home’ universities

Abstract

As students move between universities on different continents, they are expected to adjust rapidly to the academic and cultural practices of their host university. Many of these students are higher educational professionals in their home country and on their return home they are faced with the challenge of how to fit back into – or whether to make changes in – their institution's established academic practices. I explored international PhD students' understanding of, and responses to, the perceived differences between academic cultures of host (UK) and home universities. Whereas some students regarded the changes made in how they conducted and wrote up educational research as temporary and strategic in order to pass the PhD course, others saw themselves as change agents. They were keen to transform academic practices once they returned home and were already actively working out politically and practically how to go about this. By reflecting on how educational research practices are changing and being influenced by the movement of academics between countries, I suggest how UK university departments can respond positively to the differing research practices in which international students engage in their home institutional contexts.

Keywords:

• academic literacies
• academic writing
• cross‐cultural
• doctoral supervision
• educational research
• higher education
• research ethics
• UK

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues at CARE – particularly the individual researchers quoted here – who contributed reflections and comments on this article.

Notes

1. I have chosen to use the term ‘international student’ in this paper, reflecting the current discourse in UK Higher Education. This term seems slightly less problematic than defining this group of students only in relation to ‘us’ as implied by ‘overseas student’ or ‘NESB’ (non‐English speaking background) student.

2. Participants who agreed to anonymity have been given pseudonyms, whereas others preferred that I used their real name.

3. Research findings are taken from the following sources: ethnographic/practitioner research with groups of 10–15 PhD students as part of a weekly research methods seminar programme (from 2001–2007), informal interviews and analysis of theses written by former PhD students in my department. A detailed account is available in Robinson‐Pant (2005). This article also draws partly on individual interviews conducted as part of a teaching fellowship research project (with Boodhoo) from 2005–2006.

4. I have chosen to use Canagarajah's terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ throughout this article, though academics whom I interviewed tended to refer instead to ‘First’/‘Third world’ or ‘developed’/‘developing’ country.

5. Kaplan's early work, which famously contrasted the ‘linear’ argument of English academic prose with the ‘circular’ argument of academic writing by Japanese academics, has however since been criticised for ‘seeming to privilege the writing of native English speakers’ (Connor, 2002, p. 494).

6. Hatim's (1997) research (cited in Connor, 2002, p. 500) gives an insight into why these difficulties might exist. He suggests that whereas Arabic argumentation ‘may be heavy on through‐argumentation (i.e. thesis to be supported, substantiation and conclusion)’, English ‘is characterised by counterarguments (i.e. thesis to be opposed, opposition, substantiation of counter claim, conclusion)’. So an English writer might appear to adopt a more adversarial stance.

7. These differences in writing practices within academic and policy contexts relate to Holliday's (1999) distinction between ‘small’ cultures and ‘big’ cultures. The ‘big’ culture (e.g. Malaysian culture) can also be seen in terms of these intersecting ‘small’ cultures (which may be influenced by class or caste as well as occupational roles).