How postgraduate university students construct their identity as learners in a multicultural classroom

ABSTRACT

This article considers the ways in which a group of postgraduate students position themselves in a multicultural classroom at one university in the UK. Research indicates that postgraduate students actively negotiate and renegotiate their learner identities and belonging in the context of higher education environments and develop new subject positions. The study examines students’ constructions of their own identities as learners and considers their changing identities from the perspective of agency. Our data collected from focus groups and one-to-one interviews with students prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, comprise a large proportion of non-UK/EU students, amongst whom Chinese students are the single largest constituency. Findings show that students’ experience of learning is constitutive of the identification work they do during lectures and group-work to position themselves as participants of HE, and in the process, practice othering of students belonging to non-traditional participants in UK higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Student identity
• higher education
• student agency
• critical thinking
• multicultural education

Introduction

Student populations in higher education (HE) institutions across the globe are becoming increasingly multicultural in character (Popov et al. 2012), a term that we understand as a space where ‘students of various cultural backgrounds are presumed to interact with one another’ (Halualani 2008, 1). The postgraduate taught (PGT) student population within the UK HE classroom comprises a majority (approximately 60%) of full-time PGT students in England who are registered as international (non-European Union), with a further 12% registered as European Union students (Coneyworth et al. 2020). The internationalisation of the UK’s universities in recent decades has seen an unprecedented acceleration of international enrolments, where the highest representation, 22%, are Chinese students (OECD 2016). According to the most recent figures, 104,240 Chinese students are studying in UK higher education (HESA 2021). This suggests that the massification of HE and increasing internationalisation of student bodies make it important to study the challenges those international students face including ‘how students themselves understand their identity’ and how ‘they are constructed by other social actors’ (Brooks and O’Shea 2021, 2). Recent research into HE student experiences focuses on the effects of a neoliberal and highly marketised education system (Robertson 2011) where students are constructed as consumers (Molesworth, Nixon, and Scullion 2009; Tomlinson 2018). Although we acknowledge that these macro considerations are useful in understanding the student experience, our focus in this paper is on the relatively under-researched micro-processes of university education: the teaching and learning interactions in the classroom, and their effects on student experience.

As faculty members at a university in England, our paper arises from a study of the postgraduate students whom we teach. The study was carried out prior to the Covid-19 pandemic before much of HE teaching and learning moved online. Our study had a dual purpose: (1) to explore students’ experiences of teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and (2) to use the findings to help reflect on our teaching practice in response to students’ needs and requirements. We attempt to systematically understand students’ learning experiences in this context and explore the ways in which students construct their postgraduate learning identities. In studying student identity in higher education, we carry forward the insight that universities are potentially spaces where identities are expressed in contested ways, contestations that can have a bearing on students’ sense of belonging and their achievement (Trowler 2019). Previous research has explored the ways in which postgraduate students negotiate an academic identity taking into account university practices (Tobbell, O’Donnell, and Zammit 2010), students’ cultural identities (Koehne 2006) and their learning experiences (Daniels and Brooker 2014). In this paper, we examine these identities through the perspective of agency which, we argue, allows us to gain a richer understanding of how different students construct their learning identities in multicultural contexts. We also consider the concept of critical thinking to highlight the ways in which students construct their learning identities.

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. We begin by taking identity (Daniels and Brooker 2014) and agency (Krause 2013, 2015) as our theoretical frame and set out our understanding of these concepts in the context of our study. We then detail our research design and present our findings from two key themes constructed from our data. We conclude the paper with a discussion and consider by the implications of our findings on our own practice.

Identity and agency – a theoretical framework

Identity

Identity is conceptualised as being dynamic and shifting (Bauman 2013), fluid and flexible (Tomlinson 2010) and constructed and reconstructed by a number of factors including through the influence of prior educational experiences (Johnston and Merrill 2009) as well as discourse and agency, such as personal biographies and narratives (Giddens 1991). As Baumeister and Muraven (1996) suggest, an individual’s identity is always in the process of becoming as they negotiate and adapt to different contexts and sociocultural environments. Students’ learning identities are influenced by their interaction with others in the HE space, including peers and tutors and, crucially, are also influenced by academic performance (Daniels and Brooker 2014). The importance of the social group in student identity construction has also been explored by taking a ‘social identity approach’ (Mavor, Platow, and Bizumic 2017). This approach can be useful in understanding postgraduate learner identity construction where a student’s individual sense of self is shaped by their social context and their identification with particular cohesive groups in higher education (Cruwys, Gaffney, and Skipper 2017). According to Daniels and Brooker (2014, 69) a university student’s identity can be renegotiated as they journey through ‘new spaces of learning and sharing knowledge, critiquing and reflecting on new and unfamiliar ideas’. In writing about identity in understanding how individuals participate and learn in different contexts or ‘communities of practice’, Wenger (1989, 215) argues:

Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience of identity, it is not just an accumulation of skills and information, but a process of becoming – to become a certain person or, conversely to avoid becoming a certain person.

The process of ‘becoming’ speaks to the postgraduate student experience, where individuals find that their identity ‘work’ involves ‘a complex negotiation between their existing, expected and desired identities’ (O’Shea 2014, 138). Similarly, Koehne’s (2006, 241) study with 25 international students at an Australian university takes a discursive approach to explore the ways in which dominant academic discourses ‘speak subjects into being’ with her work exploring the process of ‘becoming’ rather than of ‘being’. International students arriving from different cultural and educational contexts can encounter tensions between their existing learner identities and the identity positions available in their new social and educational contexts.

Agency

We examine identity through the perspective of agency, given the ‘agential character’ of the practices in higher education wherein ‘the student is typically understood as a strong agent piloting the course of her/his life’ (Marginson 2014, 20). The concept of agency has been defined through multiple disciplinary perspectives but can be broadly understood as a person’s capacity to act independently and make their own free choices (Jääskelä et al. 2017). Being an agent is to intentionally work towards completing an action – the sort of agency that enables people to fulfil their potential. Studentship then, even though ‘liminal and developmental’ is agentic, agency that arguably enables ‘students to influence their future lives’ (Klemenčič 2015, 9). Exploring this perspective, we argue, would provide valuable orientation towards understanding student experiences at university.

Choosing to be a university student, it is assumed, is to practice being a sovereign agent – an individual who exercises intentional choice and control over oneself to fulfil academic expectations (Krause 2015). Krause (2015, 3) argues:

… we want to believe that we can rise above the power of our circumstances, that our actions can be self-generated and hence subject to our control because their origin is inside us.

However, the construct of sovereign agency does not completely eschew the idea that external conditions shape an individual’s life. Krause’s (2015, 4) conceptualisation goes further to suggest that agency properly conceived needs to consider that an agent’s impact on their social world is highly dependent on ‘the social uptake provided by other people’. Applying this idea, a student’s agency and efficacy as a student are dependent on how others (teachers and fellow students) interpret and respond to their participation in discussions.

For instance, the prevailing ‘discourse and norm’ that some international students experience is not common in the educational contexts they are used to (Chapman and Pyvis 2006; Zhang 2017). This makes their learning experience different from that of students who are more familiar with certain discourses, such as around thinking, talking and writing ‘critically’. ‘Critical thinking’ occupies a position of high premium in university learning. We know that teachers of higher education in the UK are expected to teach with an explicit mandate of building critical thinking amongst students, with an emphasis on classroom discussions that nurture such thinking (Danvers 2018; Song 2016; Davies 2015). That teaching critical thinking is important is articulated in government policy, university mission statements, module guides and assessment criteria. However, as Danvers (2018, 549) highlights, the subject of critical thinking as invoked in policy documents is understood as an ‘unspecified body’, thereby underscoring critical beings as ‘neutral, undifferentiated bodies’. Significantly, an attempt to empirically understand the intellectual value of critical thinking in universities that are not monocultural, requires us to examine the ‘negotiated processes’ through which agency is exercised or curtailed.¹

We suggest that all students are in the process of ‘becoming’ critical thinkers and that critical thinking is universal, yet it has been interpreted in ‘culturally relativist terms’ (Moosavi 2022, 7) with reference to the belief that some cultures are oriented towards conformity rather than individualism. Our intention is not to explore such characterisations of our students but we suggest that students who are more well versed than others in the practices of critical thinking are ‘privileged’ in the context of our study, because their ways of being are recognised within the university’s norms. In this case agency then is ‘a matter of position or location within or in relation to particular discourses’ (Davis 1990, 346 as cited in Kettle 2005). We can consider Krause’s (2015) theory of ‘non-sovereign’ agency in this respect. Put simply non-sovereign agency is when an individual’s actions are not completely autonomous, this means that in a social context a successful action depends on others to carry it through and how others respond to an individual’s actions shapes the quality of their agency (Fossen 2017). Action is therefore ‘deeply intersubjective’ (Fossen 2017, 2). Crucially, Krause’s (2015) non-sovereign account of agency highlights the effects of inequality. As Krause (2021, 4) says about relations of inequality:

If agency’s socially distributed character is often invisible to those who are privileged, this aspect of agency is keenly felt by the marginalized. Indeed, agency’s dependence on social uptake may be clearest in cases where uptake is missing or distorted by bias, which makes these cases especially informative.

More importantly though, agency is an assertion of students’ subjectivity and of the identity they bring to bear in learning experiences. Identity accounts represented in statements, ‘we Chinese people’ or ‘we who thought that higher education is about critical thinking’ are affirmed (or not) through actions in learning spaces, and they shape the role of students’ agency in relating to their learning, sense of belonging, norms for engaging in the classroom – and overall, their progress on their master’s programme. For a more complete conception of agency then, we must recognise the power relations which shape social dynamics within a multicultural classroom, which are in turn shaped by discursive representations available to students. Likewise, the discursive elements emerge from the politics of a particular period in time and can become ‘normalised’, and as Kettle (2005) notes, do the ideological work of producing and reproducing inequitable power relations.

In this paper, we explore the understated and often non-deliberate social dynamic that can undermine the agency of students in the context of teaching and learning. The practical possibilities of participation, critical engagement and reflexivity in an educational setting where there are students from culturally diverse backgrounds, are only possible if we grapple with these social dynamics with a view to understanding the relationship between the material conditions in the university setting and students’ identity and agency. The criticality afforded by the apparent intercultural space, as alluded to in the literature the university publishes on its website and student handbooks, is not always represented in actual student experiences, indicating a social dynamic that needs reflection.

Research design

This research has arisen from the authors’ experiences in teaching postgraduate students in a large department in one university. The data for this study are based on focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with 40 students enrolled on a postgraduate programme, over a period of two years between 2018 and 2020. The students who participated in this study were enrolled on programmes that had ethnically mixed student bodies with proportionally higher numbers of international students. Four focus group sessions were held with groups comprising between 4 and 8 students and the authors followed up with 9 in-depth semi-structured interviews.

After gatekeeper permission was obtained, students were informed of the research study via a message posted on the postgraduate online learning platform accessed by students across different education-focused MA programmes. Interested students were advised to contact the researchers directly to participate. The four focus group discussions centred around academic reading, writing and participation in classroom discussions during their studies. These were followed up with nine interviews, which were designed to provide a richer, more in-depth understanding of students’ views on teaching and learning, and in particular a focused conversation on peer learning during seminars.

Table 1 provides the details of the participants who have been quoted in this study and Table 2 notes the participants from the focus groups. The research was conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the British Education Research Association and ethical clearance was obtained from our university’s ethics committee.

Table 1. Participants in one-to-one, semi-structured interviews.

Pseudonym	Full-Time (FT) Part-Time (PT) Home International (Int)	Ethnicity (where known)
Ye	FT/Int	Chinese
Li	FT/Int	Chinese
Sarah	FT/Int	Chinese
Jamini	FT/Int	Indian
Rose	FT/Home	White British
Zhao	FT/Int	Chinese
Kaya	FT/Int	Georgian
Stella	FT/Int	Ukrainian
Jeff	FT/Int	Hungarian

Table 2. Participants in ocus group interviews.

Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4
8 students	5 students	5 students	4 students
2 Indian	2 White British	4 Chinese	2 Ukrainian
1 European	1 Russian	1 European	1 Black British
2 American	2 Chinese		1 European
3 Chinese

Data analysis was an iterative process, which began with the discussions with focus group participants followed by the interviews. Throughout, in talking about their experiences in the classroom (group-work), writing assignments (grappling with academic writing in general and the emphasis on thinking critically in particular) and participating in wider university activities, our students encouraged us to pay attention to their own stories and those of their peers by underscoring ‘who they are’, ‘who they are not’, and ‘who and how they would like to/should be’ (Yuval-Davis 2010, 266). These narratives of their self and its boundaries (ibid) relate to their agency as students studying with peers from multicultural backgrounds.

The four focus groups and nine interviews were transcribed and analysed. Coding was carried out using a two-stage process (Saldana 2011): in the first stage, labels were attached to repeated characteristic noted in the interview transcripts. To increase the reliability of our coding, we first coded all transcripts independently, then shared and revised code definitions before recoding and analysing the transcripts (Saldana 2011). Our analysis centred on how participants position themselves in the postgraduate learning space and how they speak about themselves and each other. In order to understand our students experiences critically, we attempted to interpret the text beyond what was said by the students, to understand the ‘structures and relations of meaning’ (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009, 207) in what was said with the help of literature on student identity and agency.

Researcher positionality

Before turning to the data, it is worthwhile to note that our position as researchers cannot be separated from our roles as tutors in the department. Our researcher positionality is defined by our identities ‘in relation to [our] participants and data’ (Lapan, Quartaroli, and Riemer 2011, 380). In our case, our emic (insider – researcher) perspectives need to be acknowledged. Although we are not in a position to report on the ways in which the students themselves perceived us, we can say that we are both female early career researchers, one of us is of Indian heritage and the other is white European and we completed our own studies relatively recently before joining the department as staff members. We believed that our students did not feel intimidated by us or our questions and trusted us with their views. We endeavoured to practice what Mason (2002, 7) refers to as ‘active reflexivity’ throughout every aspect and stage of the research process with the aim of ensuring that as researchers we could be as honest as possible in the given circumstances.

We organise our findings around the two key themes: becoming and belonging, and constructing learner identities. First, we present students’ descriptions of their experiences of becoming a postgraduate student and belonging to a postgraduate learning community. We have adopted the phrase, ‘becoming and belonging’ from Koehne’s work (2006) in order to understand the ways in which our student participants construct their learning identities. We understand this as being a process of ‘becoming’ while endeavouring to find ways to belong to their new learning environment. We locate this theme in the students’ discussions about how they made sense of themselves in their surroundings, how they contributed to their own learning, and their relationship with the concept of critical thinking, which Zhang (2017, 858) considers as the ‘standard achievements and attributes of postgraduates’. Second, we explore the students’ constructs of their learner identities, the ways in which they position themselves in relation to their peers, and their views of others.

In what follows, we present participant quotes from the one-to-one interviews and focus group discussions. Interview participants are referred to by their pseudonyms, while focus group participants are referred to by their student status and nationality.

Findings

Becoming and belonging

Much of the discussion in both the focus groups and one-to-one interviews centred on the ways in which the students made sense of their own identities to themselves and to others in the context of postgraduate study. We listened to the students’ experiences of negotiating, what we understood to be, their ‘existing, expected and desired identities’ (O’Shea 2014, 138). Many of the students’ descriptions of arriving and settling into postgraduate study exemplified their process of ‘becoming’ a post-graduate student in the department. We start by presenting their reports of their initial feelings of arriving on their MA course and making sense of themselves in their new context at the beginning and over time. We then turn to explore how they navigated their learning journeys in their lectures, seminars and through their self-directed learning.

Settling in

Although there were some differences between the 40 students about how they felt on arriving in the university, they all communicated a sense of excitement, high expectations and some anxiety, to a lesser or greater extent. Two home students, born and raised in England but from different ethnic backgrounds had similar initial experiences.

As soon as I started lectures, I just felt really at home and kind of that people had similar views to me and it was really great to have that time to research and learn more and even thinking about the bigger issues like political things and I’ve just kind of been able to maybe express the thoughts that I had in a better way (Rose, home student, British, interview)

Living my life as Black British in the UK is just you live your life in an interdisciplinary way … I think that’s maybe why I came into education, to make sense to how I live my life and experiences that I’ve had in my life and to be able to communicate that on a level that is understood beyond the person … I’m enjoying it. (Home student, British, focus group)

Others, mainly the international students on the course, had more mixed initial experiences, like Jamini who said in her interview, ‘it was a huge, huge transition. I would say that I struggled initially a lot’. Moving away from family, friends and most significantly, from familiar educational and cultural environments (Koehne 2006) meant that it took a while for Jamini to understand how the system worked before she could begin to adjust to her new surroundings. Although the heterogeneity among international students must be acknowledged, many of the international students in our interviews and focus groups expressed a mixture of enthusiasm and appreciation of their new environment but also revealed a sense of isolation in their new learning environments. These students had all been successful in their undergraduate degrees and were accustomed to being socially integrated into the university setting, however many of them revealed that they encountered obstacles in their learning and socialising, that they had not anticipated, that at times seemed to limit their progress and achievements.

As Li, an international student from China, explained in her interview, many Chinese students ‘found the academic environment totally different’ to what they were accustomed to. Zhao explained the steep learning curve he experienced on arrival.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and things are quite different from China. In China you don’t have to read anything before you go to the lectures. You just listen to the teacher in class. But here you have to read something, then you think about it, with the questions, then you attend the lecture. (Zhao, international student, Chinese, interview)

Some of our participants highlighted the positive differences they encountered in their new environments:

I think in Chinese university, I think we have less [contact with teachers], 50 or 60 people sit in the classroom and listen to teachers, so that’s a very common … here we can share our ideas to teachers and teacher also had a good … read something about our opinions and they accept us, they respect us. (International student, Chinese, focus group)

Generally, it’s kind of challenging and wonderful because I like this international spirit too. I like that kind of openness that the university has and it kind of encourages you to be better than yourself and that’s good (International Student, Russian, focus group).

However, as Wu (2002) has argued, each country has different academic cultures and contexts, but the same is true for different universities within the same country as highlighted in the following Black British student’s experience:

I’m finding my feet here, because my last university had a very different identity … coming here was like jumping on a speeding train … so focused, so driven. (Home student, British, focus group)

Getting to grips with language and communication

A recurring topic we encountered in the interviews and focus groups, particularly for students from countries outside of the UK and Europe and who spoke English as an additional language was the struggles they reported in understanding, being understood and having their views valued and acknowledged. This theme spoke to the ways in which the students, and international students in particular, sought to construct an acceptable and valued learning identity. In terms of language, for students with English as an additional language, the constant effort of translating, striving to understand the nuances of English could be frustrating and exhausting. As Koehne (2006, 251) said of her international student participants, ‘translating, negotiating meaning, compromising to create meaning … place a tremendous extra load on international students’.

I would be worrying about whether I’m good enough, do I have enough academic vocabulary to express [myself]? (Sarah, International Student, Chinese, interview)

I do feel the language barrier on the one hand, because for some international students English is their second language, so it is possible for them to feel difficult or have trouble expressing themselves in English, but on the other hand I think it also depends on your ability to express clearly because what you said in words, sometimes what you said in words … could be different with your mind. (Li, International student, Chinese, interview)

Just as the international student body is heterogeneous, so are students’ proficiencies and experiences of the English language. Jamini highlights this point:

I have done all my education in English, but it was very different to have an everyday conversation for everything in English, because back home I don’t talk to my parents in English, but then I got used to it (Jamini, International student, Indian, interview)

Possible difficulty in communication that can be faced by international students who speak English as a second language is a topic still often overlooked in HE studies (Park et al. 2017). The extracts above speak to the struggles many international postgraduate students may face in this respect and their efforts to try and ‘fit in’ and feel a greater sense of belonging in the learning community.

Many of the (mainly international) students we spoke to were also concerned about expressing their views, worried that their ideas would not be properly understood or well received, as highlighted in the following: ‘[Sometimes] we just don’t feel comfortable to put forward some opinions that are different from others, so in this situation we just keep silent’ (International student, Chinese, focus group). Indeed, the notion of the ‘silent’ student, is often described in relation to Chinese students (Ping 2010; Zhu and O'Sullivan 2022) where it has been argued that staying silent is perceived as being appropriate classroom behaviour in their own educational contexts (Ping 2010). It has also been argued that being silent is a strategy used by students to avoid any awkwardness resulting in disagreement (Jackson 2002). This was echoed in our data. This tension can affect students’ sense of belonging as they seek to formulate their learning identities, as Li expressed in her interview:

If there is someone who shares the same feeling with me, I might feel ‘oh I’ve been recognised’ or ‘I’ve been valued’. But I think cultural difference sometimes do place like a barrier between different students (Li, International student, Chinese, interview)

Critical thinking and writing skills

Critical thinking and writing skills are one of the main achievements and attributes expected of MA students in the UK (QAA 2020) and a key assessment criterion for MA programmes. This is a skill needed to achieve well in an MA degree and one that many students find challenging to develop. In situations where students are encouraged to develop their critical thinking skills, there are tensions and struggles in developing and showcasing this skill. This was especially the case with the international students from China in our study. This topic was mentioned frequently across the focus groups and individual interviews. There were mixed views about how successful students felt in developing their critical thinking skills and how well teaching in the department prepared them for this and factors that may hinder their critical thinking development.

I think it may be because [of] the culture, they maybe have some critical thinking and they maybe have some different opinions, but […] Chinese people focus on the polite, they think if I disagree with someone’s ideas it’s maybe not polite. They have some idea of critical thinking in their mind but they can’t show it, they can’t express it (International Student, Chinese, focus group)

In one focus group, a student from the EU asked the students from China what they felt was the most appropriate way of expressing their views. The students responded that this was best done ‘in private’. Others, such as Jamini an international student from India, drew on her wider experiences to develop and practice her critical thinking skills:

You know that there is nothing wrong and right, we are all open to interpretation of the articles of the literature that is provided to us, but even then, like, it is something that the writer’s trying to tell you and then you come across it in a different perspective maybe because you have different experiences (Jamini, International student, India, interview)

Constructing learner identities

Our second key theme analyses the ways in which our student participants construct their learning identities in relation to their peers.

Fitting into a diverse student body

Many of our student participants in the interviews and in the focus groups expressed an appreciation for the diverse student body enrolled on their MA programmes. There are many examples in the data which illustrate that participants in all cases valued the experience of mixing with people from different backgrounds and other cultural groups:

I think it’s an amazing exposure, to be honest, I think it is because we are diverse … we’re able to have so many different opinions and we’re able to learn so much, whether it’s about the culture, whether it’s about the experience of people or the academic knowledge, everyone’s doing different things, so you just see them and you think OK, you think more globally (Jamini, international student, India, interview)

I think there’s nothing more valuable than learning about a topic and then hearing someone else’s experience or anecdotes from a different country (Rose, Home student, British, interview)

This was echoed in the focus groups:

It’s [good to have] different people who are from different cultures, they have different opinions … so we can share the ideas of each other, yeah, we can learn a lot … (International student, Chinese, focus group)

Some of our participants’ comments suggested that they sought ways to fit in and experience a greater sense of belonging to their learning community. As Li, a Chinese international student explained in her interview:

I pushed myself to [become a student representative] because for me I am sometimes very shy to go out and talk to others, so I think being a student rep can help me make more friends and also help to improve my English speaking and my organisational abilities and I do want to contribute in certain ways for my study here.

It might appear from the excerpts above that not only do the postgraduate students appreciate learning within a diverse international student body, but that this ‘fits’ with their imagined identities as postgraduate students in an elite UK University. The desire to ‘fit in’ and ‘belong’ to this group can also be seen in our data and this sense of belonging to the learning community is ‘fundamental to [their] identification’ (Udah and Singh 2019, 5). However, as the authors argue, ‘identity narratives can shift and change, be contested and multiple’ (6) and we see this exemplified in the excerpts that speak of the ‘other’ and ‘othering’ in the following section. The phenomena of ‘othering’ international students in UK universities is also discussed elsewhere (Udah and Singh 2019; Hayes 2017).

Group discussions – positioning themselves and others

While some of the participants welcomed the fact that students enrolled on MA courses in the department represented diverse cultural, academic and social experiences, there were also those who remarked that the majority of students came from China and was therefore a much less diverse cohort than they had anticipated. These students commented on what they perceived as the limitations of some students who did not contribute to the learning of the wider group. In the group discussions, these participants tended to talk around the subject, perhaps unsure about how their views would be received:

I’m not stereotyping, but there are some people who come right from their undergrad, so they are not having any kind of experience that they could share with you and this was kind of disappointing to me (Home student, British, focus group)

It gradually became clearer that the participants who reported these sorts of views were referring to other students from China:

I came in thinking at this level there’s going to be a lot of discussion and purely because there will be a lot of different viewpoints in the room from different countries … and it really took me aback that there wasn’t more of a mixed demographic in the classroom. (Home student, British, focus group)

These sorts of views became more frequently articulated in the focus group sessions when reflecting on discussions that had taken place in the classroom. There seemed to be a general perception that certain students, those from China, did not engage wholly in the seminar experience.

I think dominant voices always happen within a classroom, but I think it’s amplified in the dynamics of the class that I’m in a group of 30+ and 20 are probably Chinese – I’m going to just say it –so there are two guys, there’s always a couple of guys that are in a minority, and they will speak, but I think it’s amplified because the wider group are quiet. (International Student, Ukranian, focus group)

The phrase ‘I’m going to just say it’ was one that we encountered a few times in our focus groups where students felt the need to express their frustrations about sharing a learning space with a large group of mainly ‘silent’ students. We surmised that this phrase ‘I’m just going to say it’ which we heard several times could have been because the students had already had discussions around this topic between themselves but felt they could not broach the subject with their tutors in case we would be disapproving. However, the students reported that they needed to assume a more ‘dominant’ student identity or role in the classroom context, because no-one else in their discussion groups was speaking. Taking a ‘dominant’ role, the students told us, did not come ‘naturally’ to them.

I feel like maybe I’m talking too much and maybe I should stop and, you know, it’s like a little struggle and I’m really disappointed in that, that there is no, like, peer learning from peers. (International student, Ukranian, focus group)

The students from China were perceived in a particular way by some of the other student participants:

Just like sunflowers all turning around that I’m going to do the talking, the writing, the thinking and I feel quite torn inside because I just feel I’m having a bit of a reaction but I’m having it internally and it has to seep out because I’m not being me … (Home student, British, focus group)

What was evident is that students made sense of their learning experiences by upholding the primacy of talk in the classroom and pointed out that many other students remained silent in group-discussion activities. As with the observations made by Bao about the dynamics of silence and talk in intercultural contexts of learning, the participants contributed to maintaining and signifying the hierarchy of silence and talk. In a similar vein, the students in our sample believe that talk makes learning possible, and they idealise talk as part of being active and critical at the master’s level. In a HE context that upholds being expressive as a norm, silence is peripheral and could be taken to indicate an ‘other’ and ‘them’. As Bao (2) argues:

The divide between silence and talk in intercultural encounters also marks the separation between ‘we’ and ‘the other’ in which a group of people could be ‘we’ or not depending on the context they come from.

This is borne out in a number of the comments such as the following:

I’m not sure how it would work on a master’s level, that kind of critical analysis, because for that I think it’s not enough that we just read on our own, for that I think dialogue is extremely important and, like, active dialogue where people can actually talk through certain arguments and then deconstruct arguments that I have not yet had the chance to really do … (EU student, Germany, focus group)

Consequently, what is striking is the contrast between what the postgraduate students from China told us about their experiences of being ‘quiet’ and the perceptions of ‘others’ regarding their quietness. This difference in the cultural ways of being a student in a classroom, where one important criterion of being a ‘good student’ is participation through talk, makes the Chinese students feel lacking in their learning context.

Discussion

The goal of this paper was to explore how postgraduate students constructed their learning identities in a multicultural classroom with a view to informing our own pedagogy and practice. By approaching the students’ identity formation through the perspective of agency, we could explore the ways in which students from different cultural backgrounds realise agency in different ways. Krause’s (2015) approach to the concept of distributed agency is one where the impact an individual has on the world is dependent on social uptake provided by others.

In this paper, we have used the example of critical thinking to examine these concepts of identity and agency. While we would suggest that all our postgraduate students are in the process of ‘becoming’ critical thinkers, some are already more practiced than others in performing critical thinking. This might involve acts like asking evaluative questions regarding the topic under discussion or sharing their own reflections on new knowledge and applying it to their lived experiences. We argue that these students are ‘privileged’ in the context of our study because their ways of being are recognised within the university’s norms. These norms relate to dominant cultural conventions and practices of a host country (such as the UK). Much of this may also be due to dominant assumptions about monolingualism and dominant cultural conventions and practices of a host country (Song 2016). As a result, ‘privileged’ students are perhaps better positioned to exercise their agency as a student. Conversely, those who are relative newcomers to the practice of critical thinking do not share this privilege. Indeed, as our data shows, these students may be perceived as disrupting the critical thinking ethos of the postgraduate learning space, by being silent and not contributing to discussion, for example, on the set readings for the session. These students are seen as passive and dependent (Heng 2018).² A powerful discourse that enables the ‘othering’ of students who do not immediately belong to this space makes it possible to alter relations in the classroom while the existing stereotypes make it possible to enforce the othering. As we explore in this paper, the understated and often non-deliberate social dynamic can undermine agency in the context of teaching and learning.

A dominant outlook in the form of a social discourse on critical thinking can conceal the force it generates as well as subvert or undermine the possibility of interpellation. In terms of agency, we have employed Krause’s (2015) notion of the non-sovereign aspect of agency which becomes apparent in a socially distributed way. As we have shown in the case of critical thinking, this form of agency is taken for granted by a ‘privileged’ person, and a facet sensed by those who are marginalised.

We have shown that identity work in learning spaces that accept and value multiple identities, brings forth tensions associated with representation and recognition of cultural aspects of identity. When translated into practice, such experiences are fraught with tensions for educators as well as students. It is possible to think of critical thinking ‘skills’ as arbitrarily categorising students in which those students who are yet to practice these skills are being subjected to standards that do not account for multicultural approach to education. Equally, this is a complex job for a teacher to address. Indeed, the stereotyping resorted to by some participants in the study show the difficulties in adopting a multicultural approach to teaching given limited time and resources. Without the time and resources put in place for students to understand each other’s identity processes, it is perhaps no surprise that some of our student participants came to conclusions about their peers’ learning habits, in particular about Chinese students’ attitudes to education and their perceived lack of agency in learning. Our study has shown that this has led to a deep segregation in student identities.

It should be noted that soon after this study was completed, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically altered university life as campuses closed and educators rapidly adapted in-person activities for synchronous and asynchronous online learning (Ma et al. 2022). Therefore, any discussion of student learning must consider the effects of the pandemic on the teaching and learning experiences of future postgraduate students in multicultural classrooms.

Conclusion

All students need to feel a sense of belonging to be engaged in their learning (Bowden, Tickle, and Naumann 2021). The ‘group discussion’ remains a key component to the postgraduate seminar and, as our study has shown, these need to be planned and organised to ensure the right balance of peer-to-peer interaction and, crucially, ongoing interaction between teachers and students (Leach 2016). One beneficial practice that has come out of the requirement to provide online learning for students during the pandemic, is the availability of pre-recorded lectures that can be accessed prior to attending seminars. Maintaining this mode of teaching, allows for more focused discussion opportunities between students and teachers. One way to support peer-to-peer and student–teacher discussion opportunities is to have dedicated seminar time for small groups of students to practice and develop critical thinking through carefully planned pedagogical activities. These activities can include different forms of questioning (clarificatory, reasoning and analytical questions); activity tasks that provide students the opportunity to analyse their own thoughts and experiences; structured discussion segments within seminars where students can discuss and receive feedback on their ideas from their peers and teachers; and possibly for students themselves to consider the concept of critical thinking and the way in which this is enacted by different groups of students. As Daniels and Brooker (2014) suggest a student’s identity can be renegotiated through the reflection and critiquing of ideas in the seminar space. We argue that postgraduate students must have the opportunity to actively participate in their learner identity development throughout their postgraduate studies. By engaging in these processes, we may see fewer incidences of stereotyping and ‘othering’. In this way, the postgraduate learning space could become an epistemically inclusive and much richer space for dialogues, exchange of ideas and mutual understanding.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students who have participated in the study and offered their insights on how to make our teaching inclusive. We also offer thanks to our colleagues from the writing group at the School of Education Communication and Society who offered their reflections on our paper. Our special thanks to Prof Meg Maguire for her critical comments on our paper and her encouragement for the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a full account of the different contestations in conceptualising critical thinking, we are using critical thinking as an example around which students’ identity and agency are realised. The intellectual value of being a critical thinker has different interpretations, meanings, and usage of the term (Lloyd and Bahr 2010; Walker and Finney 1999; Davies 2015). It is possible to attribute different ways of thinking about critical thinking such as finding faults within analytical methods, ethical attitudes or a disposition towards academic work or general skills in reasoning (Davies 2015). Likewise acknowledging the international mobility of students Song (2016, 1) argues for a transcultural approach to think critically about the practice of ‘critical thinking’.

2 It should be noted that this aspect of the classroom dynamic has intensified since the pandemic moved higher education teaching and learning online, such as students keeping their cameras turned off during classes (Castelli and Sarvary 2021).