Abstract:

Universities are an avenue for secondary socialisation and where students are exposed to colleagues from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Universities, therefore, experience cultural diversity as students from different parts of the globe choose and attend. Ghana, a pluralistic society, has different ethnic groups with diverse cultures. Consequently, the country’s universities admit students from different parts of the world including foreigners. This situation results in the university students becoming exposed to diversity in multiple ways. A survey of extant literature unveils that a plethora of empirical inquiry has been made about the varied experiences of students undergoing university education in universities in foreign lands, with little research attention paid to the academic, social and cultural experiences of students studying in universities in different ethnic communities with diverse socio-cultural ideals and practices in the same country. Besides, a disproportionate chunk of prior studies on the subject tended to have adopted the qualitative approach thereby denying readers of the broader view of the phenomena studied. To fill the lacuna established, this study seeks to investigate the experiences of non-Akan students pursuing various undergraduate programmes at the University of Education, Winneba, an Akan dominated municipality in southern Ghana. The study takes the positivist paradigm using the quantitative approach while cross-sectional survey design is being employed to enable students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to participate in the study. Second and third year undergraduate students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds will be recruited to participate in the study. Self-developed questionnaire will be employed for the data gathering while both descriptive (frequency counts, mean and standard deviation) and inferential analytical (t-test, ANOVA and regression) techniques will be used to analyse the data that will be generated. The outcomes of the study will be discussed and recommendations proffered.

Keywords:

Multiculture education, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, academic, social and cultural experiences.