Making the tacit explicit: rethinking culturally inclusive pedagogy in international student academic adaptation

Abstract

The article proposes an approach, broadly inspired by culturally inclusive pedagogy, to facilitate international student academic adaptation based on rendering tacit aspects of local learning cultures explicit to international full degree students, rather than adapting them. Preliminary findings are presented from a focus group-based exploratory study of international student experiences at different stages of their studies at a Danish business school, one of Denmark’s most international universities. The data show how a major source of confusion for these students has to do with the tacit logics and expectations that shape how the formal steps of the learning cycle are understood and enacted locally, notably how learning and assessment moments are defined and related to one another. Theoretically, the article draws on tacit knowledge and sense-making theories to analyse student narratives of their encounter with the Danish system. A framework is offered to help teachers conceptualise, and excavate, the tacit dimensions of local learning culture of which they may not be aware, and reflects on how and when these might best be communicated to international students.

Keywords:

• international students
• higher education
• academic adaptation
• culturally inclusive pedagogy
• tacit knowledge
• culture

Notes

1. Neave (2003 in Huisman and Van der Wende 2004, 351) notes that in Europe increased mobility resulting from the ERASMUS exchange programme launched in 1987 revealed ‘a very shocking diversity … [which] posed real and practical problems to the builders of a European ‘higher education area’.

2. See e.g. Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley (2009); Brown and Jones (2007); (Vaira 2004); De Vita (2001).

3. That is, involving ‘a prescribed learning framework, an organised learning event or package, the presence of a designated teacher or trainer, the award of a qualification or credit, the external specification of outcomes’ (Eraut 2000, 114).

4. The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ is usually used to denote the sense of distress caused when a person’s deeply held beliefs are discrepant from their actions (see e.g. Cooper 2007).

5. See e.g. the work on cultural learning and acculturation by Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner (1993) and Berry (1974, 1989, 1992), respectively.

6. Similar adjustment phases have also been documented, inter alia, in studies on expatriate managers (Selmer et al. 1998, in Valiente 2008, 83).

7. Though research specifically on mentoring of IS is still scarce (Kim and Egan 2011).