Abstract:

Of the 633,910 international students studying in UK HEIS (Higher Education Institutions) in 2022, over half were postgraduates (Project Atlas, 2023), and their experiences have therefore received growing academic attention. Most studies of the international taught postgraduate experience in the UK examine psychological, sociocultural and/or academic experience, with the most common focus being experience of distinctive academic skills, practices and learning strategies (Bird, 2017; McMahon, 2017; Quan, He and Sloan, 2016; Wang and Byram 2011; Brown 2008). However, emphasis is often placed on general academic skills, with few published studies of the student experience of specific disciplinary skill sets, particularly small group work. Despite recognition of the expansion and enrichment of UK teaching and learning that international students can bring, most studies also continue to adhere to a ‘deficit’ model (Zhao and Schartner, 2023; Dailey-Strand, Collins and Callaghan, 2021; Bird 2017; Quan, He and Sloan, 2016; Wang and Byram, 2011), in which international students’ voices, skills and knowledge are not valued since they must adapt to fit institutional norms, an expectation still underpinned by the “‘post-imperial’ assumptions within underlying UK pedagogical frameworks” (Turner, 2002, p. 28).

International students’ expectations of teaching and learning largely result from previous experience (Brown, 2008), and studies of this influence were dominated in the late twentieth century by Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory (1980) as well as monolithic models of national higher education systems. Although such frameworks have undergone thorough-going critique, even critical, twenty-first century studies rarely challenge the assumption of the superiority of western learning and teaching (Lu and Tian, 2018; Wang and Byram, 2011; Kingston and Forland, 2008; Brown, 2008), and in exploring the previous learning experiences of taught postgraduates, little attention is paid to experiences in the professional and social spheres.

This paper addresses the aforementioned gaps in scholarship by discussing the findings of quantitative and qualitative research into the experience of small group work by master’s marketing students (98% international) at a UK university. Given the “crucial importance” of the initial international student experience (Dailey-Strand, Collins and Callaghan, 2021, p. 74), emphasis is placed on students’ early experiences of this disciplinary skill set, with a survey and focus groups supplemented by term 1 action learning set notes. However, the focus is the students’ perception of the influence of their pre-MSc experience (in a variety of settings) on their early participation, performance and feelings about small group work.

The paper will also move beyond discussion of the research project to outline how its findings have shaped the design of induction activities facilitating the ethnographic exploration of previous (skills) experiences by a new cohort of MSc marketing students (2023/2024), the results of which will be shared with all module leaders and tutors. It is hoped that increased faculty awareness will pave the way for the intercultural approaches Zhou et al. (2008) termed “cultural synergy” (p. 72). These approaches are still more talked about than acted on in UK HEIS and must result from student-faculty negotiation, a dialogue that an embedded academic skills adviser may be well placed to facilitate.

Keywords:

International postgraduate experience, disciplinary academic skills, small group work, ethnographic approaches.