Lesley Gourlay

International students in the higher education classroom: initial findings from staff at two post‐92 universities in the UK

A significant body of work has emerged over the last 10 years investigating the experiences of international university students. These studies have covered various challenges faced by some groups of international students relating to culture, language and integration and have been prompted by the increase in international students studying in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. A smaller strand of research has also begun to focus on the experiences, perspectives and reactions of academic staff who have seen the composition of their cohorts change substantially over recent years in terms of numbers of international participants. This article reviews relevant literature in this field, reporting on a questionnaire study based at two UK post‐92 universities. Respondents associated a range of traits with international students and suggested that the increasing number of international students enhanced the environment, but also required a higher level of support. This study also found that staff resorted to informal methods when developing means of adapting their practices to the increasing number of international students, preferring discussion with colleagues and students themselves to formal development programmes or advice from specialist departments such as student support. The article concludes that in order to encourage diversity in a meaningful way, universities need to recognise the challenge of increased numbers of international students and support staff accordingly.

It’s Not All About the Learner: Reframing Students’ Digital Literacy as Sociomaterial Practice

Digital literacies are an important area of contemporary research and practice. However, policy and research on this topic relies almost exclusively on capability or competence models of “digital literacy”. These decontextualised, cognitive accounts ignore the insights of New Literacy Studies (e.g. Lea and Street. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172, 1998), which have shown that focusing on a ‘free floating’ learner, without reference to settings, resources and cultures, fails to explain important aspects of how literacy practices are achieved and enacted. Adopting a sociomaterial account of learning provides an alternative to these narratives about student literacy. From this perspective, ‘literacy’ is an achievement that involves the successful coordination of human and non-human actors—including teachers, other learners, pupils, devices, texts and so on. Drawing on work undertaken as part of a JISC-funded project, we critique mainstream ‘learner-centred’ accounts of digital literacy; outline the theoretical framework on which our work has been based; and present a series of case studies that show how an individual’s ability to act in a digitally literate way depends on much more than an assumed set of stable, internalised qualities. These cases involve data collected by students through multimodal journalling over a period of 9–12 months, and from in-depth interviews that explored what these meant to them. This analysis shows how learners’ practices are shaped by the social and material environments in which they are enacted, and reveals that learners are engaged in an ongoing, improvisatory process of both adapting to the environments in which they work, whilst also adapting these environments.