Abstract:

"Nowadays it is beyond doubt that there is a high need of professionals with intercultural competence",[Catteeuw 2013].The aim of the Cross Cultural Management module was that through the process of self-reflection, students would enhance their cross cultural competencies, vital for success in employment as organisations become increasingly multicultural.

Reflective approaches to Learning, Teaching and Assessment have increasingly been adopted within UK Higher Education, especially in the context of employability agendas. Agreeing with Quinton and Smallbone [2010] "that engaging in reflection is a vital part of learning for university students and its practice should be embedded in course design", we used a 3000 word reflective report on the development of students' knowledge, skills and competencies relevant to a career in cross cultural management as the assessment.

With our experience of students "writing apprehension" [Daly& Miller 1975] and being mindful that much reflective writing is superficial, [Clegg 2004 & Orland-Barak 2005], we brought speech into the service of writing to develop students' writing "as one of their owned voices" [Elbow 1995]. Given that 82% of new students at UK universities own a smartphone [UCAS, 2013]; we wanted to use their technology as a pedagogical tool. As Cheng and Chau [2009], discuss there is evidence [Sherin & Han 2004; & Stockero 2008] that indicates that as an alternative to text-mediated reflective practice, digital video, can help foster student self-reflection. Agreeing with Sethi [2013] that “implementation of technology in enhancing higher business management education is not an option but a requirement” we pedagogically integrated weekly user-generated reflective audio recordings using mobile devices into the module in order to reinforce the idea of reflection as being a personal construction and one that makes connections beyond and impacts on learning outside of the specific module [Siemens 2003].

Scaffolding, as advocated by Bain [2002] and Grossman [2009], was provided by our weekly reflective discussion, on the VLE, in relation to an article, global event or experience relevant to the topic.

Our aim from this paper is not to produce generalizable findings, but to add to the literature on pedagogical approaches to supporting students in self-reflection with a specific focus on mobile technology.

Keywords:

Audio-Reflection, Pedagogy, Cross-cultural management, Mobile-technology, technology enhanced learning.