How will your research change the world?

by Debra Jones

This is a question I asked my postgraduate research students in the first session of the REAL (Research English and Academic Language) course last term. I can’t take credit for the idea – it was from a colleague – but I’m glad I tried it. Despite being overwhelmed initially, after a few minutes preparation, the students were all able to introduce their research and the impact it will have.

I started doing a Doctorate in Education about four years ago and, having recently completed the taught modules, I’m now writing a proposal for my thesis. While discussing this with a colleague, she posed the same question to me: so how will your research change the world? This got me thinking about why I started doing an EdD. What was I hoping to achieve? I like studying, but a part-time Doctorate is a big investment of time and money. Why not just do an evening class in French or Art History? There must have been more to it.

I started the EdD in 2017 after 12 years teaching in Japan and China. I had been working in China at a transnational university called XJTLU – a joint venture between the University of Liverpool (UoL) and Xi’an Jiaotong University – where the medium of instruction was English. Students studied their academic subjects for two years following a UoL curriculum, before completing their undergraduate studies in Liverpool, provided they achieved the equivalent of B2 in their assessments. My role as an EAP teacher was to help them develop their academic language and literacy skills. However, feedback from subject lecturers at Liverpool suggested that students were not understanding lectures or core readings and did not know how to write essays, cite sources, take notes in lectures, contribute to seminars; all of which they had been taught and assessed on. It was assumed by teaching staff at XJTLU that students weren’t successfully transferring their learning to the UK context.

Meanwhile, feedback from XJTLU students in Liverpool suggested they were disappointed there were so many other Chinese students on their courses; they weren’t making any non-Chinese friends or having the ‘international experience’ they expected. The assumption amongst myself and my colleagues was that the students weren’t making sufficient effort to make international friends, preferring the familiarity of students from their own country. Again, it was assumed the problem lay with the Chinese students.

When I returned to the UK, I began to challenge these assumptions. I heard a lot of talk about internationalisation, achieved, apparently by recruiting more and more international students. But being an international university requires more than just having international students on campus (Schartner & Cho, 2017). Doesn’t it also mean creating opportunities for intercultural communication between those students? I noticed in my in-sessional classes that international and UK students tended to self-segregate in the classroom and efforts to mix them up for group work led to awkwardness among both groups. In social spaces on campus, I noticed few mixed nationality groups. At some universities, international and home students are in separate accommodation (Jones, 2017). I thought about the XJTLU students not getting the international experience they were expecting at Liverpool. Maybe it’s not just about Chinese students not integrating. Perhaps intercultural awareness training throughout the university was needed.

And doesn’t it also mean an international curriculum relevant to a more diverse student body? I noticed that the reading list on an MATESOL programme with over 90% international students was very similar to the reading list I had on my MA about 20 years ago with a very different cohort. Students in tutorials told me the course was interesting but possibly not relevant to their context. This got me interested in curriculum internationalisation.

And doesn’t it also mean adapting our pedagogy to reflect more internationally diverse cohorts from different ‘cultures of learning’ (Jin & Cortazzi, 2017). Moving from in-sessional to pre-sessional, I was struck by how we weren’t just developing language and academic communication. There was an element of changing behaviour to produce the kind of students we know how to teach. Seminar or discussion skills classes are not just about language but about how ‘we’ expect ‘them’ to behave in a seminar: be active, be critical, ask questions, answer questions. Because that’s what we believe makes a successful student. I’ve heard many teachers, both EAP and subject lecturers, express frustration that international students don’t ask questions during class but wait until the end. But why can’t they do that? Would it involve such a big change on our part? And if it works better, isn’t it worth doing? I thought about the feedback from lecturers at Liverpool about student performance and began to question what adaptations had been made to teaching practice.

I was starting to realise that few changes were being made at UK universities in terms of what is taught and how it is taught. The onus is on international students adapting to the UK system. I became interested in the idea of intercultural pedagogy or cross-cultural pedagogy. This seems less well-researched than curriculum internationalisation and there is no clear idea of what it might look like but, for me, the onus is on us, as teachers, to create a pedagogical environment that enables international students to demonstrate their abilities (Moosavi, 2021). It shouldn’t be about changing the students to conform to the environment we have.

So this is what motivated my decision to do an EdD. Internationalisation has the potential to bring huge benefits to all students, teachers and UK universities but it seemed like these benefits are not being realised. Instead, we have a very one-way internationalisation (Singh, 2009): teaching international students but not learning from them. I wanted a more two-way dialogic approach based on interaction between different educational traditions (Ryan, 2012). So how to achieve that? It’s a big question but that’s what research is about: asking the big questions. And fortunately, it’s not just me asking this particular question.

In the early days of my research, I came across the idea of transculturalism which conceptualises international education as a reciprocal exchange of knowledge and world views to generate new ways of knowing (Singh, 2009) where all students are equal participants. Students are seen as partners rather than passive recipients of knowledge in a global education system where power lies with the Western educational institutions (Song & Cadman, 2012). This sounded like the kind of internationalisation I wanted to see.

Notions of power led me to decolonisation which aims to challenge the dominance of Western or European knowledge, pedagogy and research in UK academia (Wimpenny, 2021) and undo the legacy of colonialism which “prevents universities, academics and students from realising the potential” that diversity can facilitate” (Moosavi, 2021). Again, this resonated with my sense of what internationalisation could be. Decolonisation introduced me to the concept of epistemic suppression (Moosavi, 2020), a lasting legacy of colonialism resulting in the marginalisation of non-European knowledge. Decolonisation should bring about epistemic equality, where knowledge from different (i.e. non-Western) sources is acknowledged as equivalent and actively promoted as equally valid in the classroom (Hayes, 2019). My research aims to find out how we can achieve this or at least take steps towards achieving it. I’ve been reading about Critical EAP which highlights power relations and issues of identity and encourages EAP practitioners and students to question what is expected of them (Benesch, 2001). We encourage our students to be critical and questioning is the first step towards change.

And that’s really why I’m doing a Doctorate. Because I want things to be different. I want to be part of a genuinely inclusive education system, and for me, that means the system adapting to the needs of individuals not the other way around. I want to be part of an educational system that embraces diversity not simply ‘tolerates’ it. This means challenging assumptions about what our students know/should know or how they should learn and valuing the knowledge they bring. As an international university, we have students from all over the world; is it really possible we have nothing to learn from them?

I don’t know if my research will change the world, but I’ve certainly been changed by my research. It’s made me reflect on and acknowledge my privileged position as white and Western and challenge the assumptions I have as a result of my educational and cultural background. It’s made me more reflexive about what I teach and how I teach it, and hopefully that will have some impact on students and colleagues within my world. And maybe I have to be satisfied with that. It’s a small step but as a poet once said, one step at a time is all it takes to get you there.

References

Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for Academic Purposes: Theory, politics and practice. New Jersey: Routledge.

Hayes, A. (2019). “We loved it because we felt we existed in the classroom!”: International students as epistemic equals versus double country oppression. Journal of Studies in International Education, 23(5) 554–571, https://DOI.org/10.1177/1028315319826304

Jin, L. & Cortazzi, M. (2017). Practising cultures of learning in internationalising universities. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(3), pp.237-250.

Jones, E., (2017). Problematising and reimagining the notion of ‘international student experience’. Studies in Higher Education, 42(5), pp. 933-943. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1293880

Moosavi, L. (2020). The decolonial bandwagon and the dangers of intellectual decolonisation. International Review of Sociology, 30:2, 332-354, https://DOI.org/10.1080/03906701.2020.1776919

Moosavi, L. (2021). The myth of academic tolerance: the stigmatisation of East Asian students in Western higher education, Asian Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2021.1882289

Ryan, J. (2012). Internationalisation of doctoral education: Possibilities for new knowledge and understandings. Australian Universities Review, 54(1), pp. 55–62.

Schartner, A. & Cho, Y. (2017). ‘Empty signifiers’ and ‘dreamy ideals’: perceptions of the ‘international university among higher education students and staff at a British University. Higher Education, 74, pp.455-472.

Singh, M. (2009). Using Chinese knowledge in internationalising research education: Jacques Ranciere, an ignorant supervisor and doctoral students from China. Globalisation, Societies and Education 7, pp. 185–201

Song, X. & Cadman, K. (2012). Education with(out) distinction: Beyond graduate attributes for Chinese international students. In: X. Song and K. Cadman, eds. Bridging transcultural divides: Asian languages and cultures in global higher education. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 269–283.

Wimpenny, K., Beelen, J., Hindrix, K., King, V. & Sjoer, E. (2021). Curriculum internationalization and the ‘decolonizing academic’, Higher Education Research & Development, https://DOI.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.2014406