Sheila Trahar

Experiences and perceptions of internationalisation in higher education in the UK

This article is based on a focus group study of staff and students in UK higher education institutions, where ‘internationalisation’ was the topic for debate. The perspectives of academics and students at five UK universities were examined to determine how they perceived their own culturally mediated approaches to learning. Evidence for internationalisation at home was sought including, in particular, views of student interaction and working in cross-cultural groups. Many staff and students demonstrated mindfulness of how local pedagogical approaches were privileged. Most described problems of lack of intercultural interaction and difficulties with particular classroom pedagogy such as group work. Participants described their difficulties but also gave anecdotal evidence of feeling personally rewarded in terms of building new friendships and developing their intercultural competencies.

It starts with once upon a time

On a cold night in February 2008, I ran a workshop on ‘Narrative Research’ for postgraduate students at the University of Bristol. A great believer in building on existing knowledge, I invited participants to share words or phrases that they associated with the term ‘narrative research’. Somewhat predictably, the word ‘story’ came up followed by a proposition that ‘stories are universal’. Ever the devil’s advocate, I asked these students from many different cultures to describe the structure of a story. One participant, a British student, said, ‘It starts with once upon a time and has a happy ending’ – reflecting the linear approach referred to by Julia Preece in her Presidential Address, the first article in this Special Issue. I was mindful of the words used by Trinh (1989, 141) in her assessment of the ‘man of the West’s’ depiction of a ‘good story’ as having a beginning, a development, a climax and an end. In her critique of this definition, Trinh pointed out that many non-Western stories would be defined as ‘bad’ stories, as they do not ‘leave the mind at rest’ (1989, 142). Consequently, I challenged the group with the question – ‘Is this the way that all stories are constructed?’ Many heads were shaken in gestures of denial and, gradually, examples of narrative variability (Cortazzi and Jin 2006) – different ways of sharing stories in different cultures – emerged. Preece explains that stories in Africa are told by ‘going round and round a point so that its complexity is grounded’. This strategy is ‘used as a tool to motivate readers to go on reading, to discover more and to keep the reader/listener curious to find out what the climax of the story would be’. Similarly, Cortazzi and Jin (2006) consider the ways in which the positioning of the audience in the telling of a story differs from culture to culture. The Athabascan people of North America for instance, wait for their audience to anticipate the conclusion of a story, to give it both an ending and a meaning. Such examples illustrate that, although stories may be a universal way of attributing meaning to our lives, the ways in which we tell and hear those stories differ. Nor are the stories that we tell simple, unproblematic carriers of ‘facts’ – rather they are mediated by social, cultural and historical influences. As ‘both narrative and comparative research focus on gathering stories across cultures and contexts and communicating those stories to other audiences’ (Trahar 2006, 15), such fundamental differences in storytelling need to be taken account of when exploring the potential of narrative methodologies for international and comparative education. In addition, ‘interpretations of events can always be otherwise ... usually expressed as a kind of uncertainty’ (Clandinin and Connolly 2000, 31) and this uncertainty is often held up as another distinguishing feature of narrative research, as will be seen in the articles in this Special Issue. Compare Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2008, 259–266

This Is Malaysia. You Have to Follow the Custom Here: Narratives of the Student and Academic Experience in International Higher Education in Malaysia.

An invitation to be a visiting academic at a Malaysian university provided me with rich opportunities to talk with international students and academics and to explore their experiences of learning and teaching in that context. The university had developed an internationalisation strategy and was positioning itself as an ‘education hub’ for South-East Asia. Having conducted extensive similar research in the UK, a context in which I am perceived to be an insider, investigating people’s experiences in a context in which I felt myself to be an outsider enabled me to reflect on their narratives and to compare and contrast them with my own experiences of the Malaysian university. I conducted narrative interviews with six doctoral researchers and three academics, curious to hear their stories about what had brought them to Malaysia, their reasons for studying or working there, how they experienced the learning and teaching environment, their relationships with local Malaysian students and academics. I was intrigued by what they told me, finding some surprising commonalities with other research that I had conducted and also some significant differences. In this article, I share the findings, reflecting also on my own experiences in Malaysia.

Researching learning across cultures

The aim of this paper is to invite readers to share the uncertain beginnings of my PhD in which I am seeking to hold reflexive conversations about learning with a group of international postgraduates studying in the UK. As a higher education lecturer in counselling I want to be able to understand the learning stories of such students, how their stories are affected by the learning experiences they encounter in the UK and how my own story is changing as a result of my involvement with them. My struggle to develop an appropriate conceptual framework within which to conduct cross-cultural research will be described, paying particular attention to the reflexivity of the research activity and how it relates to the counselling process.

Contemporary Methodological Diversity in European Higher Education Research

Preliminary Comments This special issue focuses on the significance of the use of narrative inquiry, autoethnography and collective biography in higher education research in Europe. These methodological approaches – often positioned under the broad umbrella term of ‘narrative research’ – have been growing in popularity in the social sciences, medicine and the humanities in recent decades, but narrative/biographical texts have been integral to the Europeanisation of research and methodological approaches for some years, dating back to Thomas & Znaniecki’s work on Polish peasants (1918-20). One reason for their current popularity is that researchers who favour them appreciate the universality of storytelling and work with it as a way of understanding people’s collective experiences, while acknowledging the individual differences. Importantly, they acknowledge that the stories that can be told – and the ways in which they are told – are context dependent. In addition, these methodological approaches are remarkably powerful in researching professional identities and in enabling voices that have traditionally been silenced or marginalised to be heard. Seeking to foreground people’s lived experiences, often including those of the researcher(s), these approaches thus strive to gain – and provide – insight into the local contexts in which those experience narratives are constructed. There is a plethora of researchers in higher education employing these methodologies but the topics seldom focus on higher education and its complexities. The purpose of this special issue, therefore, is to highlight the value and richness of these contemporary methodological approaches in investigating different dimensions of European – and European-influenced – higher education. Biesta and Simons (2009) draw attention to the responsibilities of European universities to engender ‘cultural, social and civic development’ (p. 142) and I have written extensively (see, for example, Trahar, 2011) of the potential for twenty-first-century higher education to effect greater understanding between people in our turbulent epoch of globalisation and internationalisation. The university is a space within which the multilayered complexities of a variety of values, cultures and academic traditions can be illuminated and critiqued. Lawn and Grek (2012) refer to ‘crossborder travellers’ who, although ‘expert at crossing boundaries’, rarely have their tales used in order to develop ‘an understanding of the bordered nature of the research case’. Scott and Hobson (2013) speak of the ‘forgotten things’ in pointing to those dimensions of the university that can be reclaimed through telling ‘rare tales – oddly shaped personal narratives, group narratives, narratives with unusual characters’ (p. 17). The methodological approaches in this special issue enable us, albeit in different ways, to hear ‘rare tales’ from European ‘cross-border travellers’ to enable the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the ‘research case’, and, in particular, the research case in a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) shaped by Europeanisation processes.

Using narrative inquiry as a research method: an introduction to using critical event narrative analysis in research on learning and teaching, by Leonard Webster, and Patricie Mertova

The title of this book promises much. In the Preface, the authors assert that they have, ‘come across many important and noteworthy arguments about why narrative is valuable as a research method; however we have not found a single source that would explain comprehensively how researchers should use narrative as a research method’ (p. ix). Such a claim accords with my own frustrations. There is a proliferation of related texts, a journal – Narrative Inquiry – but what is missing is an accessible and comprehensive, explanatory book that explains the different ways of doing narrative research. If, however, the authors are promulgating their book as a ‘how to do’ narrative research text then, for me, it falls short on a number of counts. Early in their book (Chapter 2), the authors clarify that the term narrative is often used synonymously both with ‘story’ and ‘narrative inquiry research method’ and that they will use the term narrative to mean the latter. The meaning that they then appear to attribute to narrative inquiry (p. 7) is ‘analyzing and criticising the stories we tell, hear and read in the course of our work (in education)’. If this is the meaning that they are ascribing to narrative inquiry, then it is somewhat different from the meaning used by Clandinin and Connelly, whose work they cite extensively. Their meaning is that narrative inquiry embraces narrative/‘story’ as both the method and the phenomena of study. Similarly, given that the focus is on narrative inquiry, rather than broader narrative research, I am surprised by the lack of emphasis on the role of the researcher. For example, there is no reference made to the researcher’s autobiographical story often being as important as those of her/ his participants, very little on how the researcher re-presents her/himself and hardly any attention given to the storying of the research process. The substantive focus is on what the authors define as ‘critical events’ by which they mean that the stories we tend to tell are of ‘critical events’ in our lives. The most substantive chapter (Chapter Four) is given over to several examples of these critical events. While the reading of these critical events ‘works’ for me on one level, i.e. each one resonates with different dimensions of my own experience, causing me to reflect more deeply on it, they are presented without any substantive discussion, thus appearing to be the unproblematic representations of data that the authors themselves criticise. Minimal information is provided about the context within which the stories are told and about the authors/narrators of the stories. A narrative inquirer (pays) analytic attention to how the different elements of a story come to be assembled, thus demonstrating to the reader the stories that are emerging and how they can be defined as stories. This strategy necessitates recognition of the possible mediating influences on the stories, for example, the cultural context within which they are being told and the narrator’s audience. Such lack of analysis of these critical events seems somewhat ironic given that the words ‘critical event narrative analysis’ are contained within the sub-title. Indeed, very little guidance is Compare Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2008, 367–368

Globalization and internationalization in higher education: theoretical, strategic and management perspectives

globalization and internationalization in higher education globalization and internationalization in higher education theoretical strategic and management perspectives felix maringe nick foskett on amazon com free shipping on qualifying offers universities all over the world are increasingly recognising the challenges of globalization and the pressures towards internationalization this collection draws together a wealth of international, globalization and internationalization in higher education table of contents list of tables and figures contributors details

Celebration, reflection and challenge: The BAICE 20th anniversary

This Forum feature is one of a series of initiatives designed to recognise and celebrate the 20 Anniversary of the British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE). It is an honour for both of us to represent the association in this anniversary year and we are pleased to help mark this important milestone with this special edition of the Compare Forum. The anniversary initiatives include a well-attended and well-received Anniversary Symposium on the theme of ‘Sustainability, Peace and Education’, convened by the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE) at the University of Bristol (https://cireblog.wordpress.com/blog/) in May 2018, and a panel discussion based upon the present Compare Forum contributions scheduled for the association’s annual conference to be held at the University of York from September 12–14, 2018 (see https://baice.ac.uk). Michael will also build his 2018 Presidential Address around the history, evolution and ‘reconceptualisation’ of BAICE (Crossley 1999), while engaging with the conference theme and his own related research. In planning the shape and content of the Forum, efforts were made to identify a diverse range of contributors who could reflect upon their personal experience of different times, roles and activities. The following sections thus cover the pre-history of BAICE, its foundation and early days, strengthening of the research dimension, increased opportunities for doctoral and early-career researchers, the growth and development of Compare, the official journal of the Association, and contemporary challenges and priorities for future development. Biographical details for the contributors are included at the end to indicate how and when they have each engaged with and supported the society. Contributors were invited to develop the above themes in ways that document the growth of BAICE and demonstrate how much has both changed and been achieved in those first 20 years – years that, as many of our writers have remarked, have passed so quickly! While there is certainly well justified space for celebration, each of our contributors also critically interrogate a number of contemporary challenges that need to be addressed as BAICE explores new priorities for the future. In the light of our own experience, and the papers presented here, that future will be challenging but secure if the collegial, supportive and friendly culture that has long COMPARE 2018, VOL. 48, NO. 5, 801–820 https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1499219

“Learning to See the Person, Not the Culture or the Faith”: Critical Reflections on Internationalizing Higher Education in Israel

Experiences as a Work Package leader on a European Union project on internationalization of higher education in Israel motivated the author to use her research on internationalization and university teaching experiences in various countries to facilitate the Israeli partners to interrogate their pedagogical practices. Supported to engage in a pedagogy of discomfort, they confronted complexities in their higher education environment, redesigning programs to integrate principles of internationalization of the curriculum and a social justice agenda.

‘Just Because I’m from Africa, they Think I’ll want to do Narrative’

Narrative inquiry is undoubtedly a seductive methodological approach for many people, in particular because storytelling is a universal practice; the ways that stories are told and listened to—and those considered to be legitimate—differ, however, from place to place. All narratives are rooted in context and this rootedness has to be taken account of so that stories are interpreted according to the local knowledge of that context. We are troubled that many of our doctoral researchers who have rarely encountered qualitative research previously, let alone narrative, are using it in their research even though it is either totally unknown in their own context or, if it is known, is criticised for not being ‘real research’.