Developing the global graduate: how first year university students’ narrate their experiences of culture

ABSTRACT

Developing global graduates or global citizens is a goal often expressed in university mission statements. This study draws on Amadasi and Holliday's (2017) distinction of block narratives and thread narratives of culture and applies these to interviews with first year students. It shows that some ability to draw on thread narratives and therefore non-essentialist views of culture is in evidence from the start of students’ university careers. Universities need to implement policy and practice to foster the emergence of these abilities and thus enable students to acquire the attributes of a ‘global graduate’. This will also ensure that ‘internationalisation at home’ is not a value-free concept.

In ihren Leitbildern setzen sich viele Universtitäten das Ziel, sogenannte ‘global graduates’ oder ‘global citizens’ auszubilden. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht Interviews mit Studienanfängern auf der Basis von Amadasi & Holliday's (2017) Unterscheidung von Sperr- und Strangnarrativen. Sie stellt fest, dass die Fähigkeit, Strangnarrative zu verwenden, schon zu Beginn der Universitätskarriere dieser Studenten erkennbar ist. Universitäten sollten durch Leitlinien und praktische Maßnahmen die Herausbildung dieser Fertigkeiten fördern, um es Studenten zu ermöglichen, die Eigenschaften eines ‘global graduates’ auszuprägen. So kann sichergestellt werden, dass ‘internationalisation at home’ kein wertfreies Konzept bleibt.

KEYWORDS:

• Global citizenship
• global graduate
• higher education
• block narratives
• thread narratives
• internationalisation at home

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Marion Heron and two anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Doris Dippold is Lecturer in Communication and German and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research is focused on internationalisation at home, with particular focus on university policy, student and staff support and linguistic and cultural diversity. She is active in making her research accessible to wider audiences, for example through an online course on ‘Communicating with Diverse Audiences’ which was launched in 2018. Her monograph on ‘Classroom Interaction: the Internationalised Anglophone University’ (Palgrave, 2015) was the first to provide a comprehensive summary of research on internationalisation at home in linguistics, education and psychology.

Dr. Stephanie Bridges is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham. She is a registered pharmacist, member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She teaches across a range of undergraduate modules about professional, legal and clinical pharmacy practice. Her research interests focus on teaching and learning in higher education. Her research is into aspects of professional and intercultural education, and particularly the potential for higher education to act as a space for students to explore and develop more cosmopolitan-aware selves. She is particularly interested in the Capability Approach as a means of conceptualising, evaluating and informing thinking about pedagogical environments within higher educational environment which promote intercultural capability development.

Dr. Sue Eccles is acting Deputy Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning at Bournemouth University and has worked in HE since 1995. Her research is focused around the experiences of students as they transition into, through and out of Higher Education, the Widening Participation policy agenda and how this impacts on/influences practice. She is also conducting research into the experiences of HE academics particularly in relation to effective leadership practice. She has experience of strategic management and leadership, as well as in-depth knowledge and understanding of education practice within HE.

Dr. Emma Mullen is a Lecturer in Organisation & Human Resource Management at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. She is Programme Leader for the faculty's CIPD accredited BA (Hons) Human Resource Management degree, and teaches across a range of UG and PG programmes. She holds CIPD Academic Associate membership and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Previously, Emma has worked within various HR, recruitment and employability roles in public sector organisations and social enterprises.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bournemouth University: Research Development Funding, University of Surrey: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Pump-Priming Grant and University of Nottingham: School of Pharmacy Research Fund.