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Special issue on university internationalisation – towards transformative change in higher education. Internationalising doctoral research: developing theoretical perspectives on practice a

Anna Magyar & Anna Robinson-Pant

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School of Education and Lifelong Learning , University of East Anglia , Norwich, UK Published online: 26 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Anna Magyar & Anna Robinson-Pant (2011) Special issue on university internationalisation – towards transformative change in higher education. Internationalising doctoral research: developing theoretical perspectives on practice, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 17:6, 663-676, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2011.625189 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2011.625189

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Teachers and Teaching: theory and practiceAquatic Insects Vol. 17, No. 6, December 2011, 663–676

Special issue on university internationalisation – towards transformative change in higher education Internationalising doctoral research: developing theoretical perspectives on practice Anna Magyar and Anna Robinson-Pant*

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School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (Received 19 April 2011; final version received 3 May 2011) The current internationalisation agenda in UK higher education (HE) is still seen as most relevant to those university departments involved in international student recruitment and support. This approach has been influenced by the dominant ‘deficit’ discourses from earlier decades, which emphasise the need for international students to ‘catch up on’ English language and academic skills. By contrast, we argue that a more critical and holistic approach towards internationalisation can have implications for all staff and students in the university, and in all areas of activity, including curriculum development, assessment and research.

Through examples from recent research conducted with doctoral students, we draw on conceptual approaches from the fields of academic literacies and intercultural communication to develop a lens for exploring educational research and teaching practices from an internationalisation perspective. We discuss some of the issues that arose in relation to the unfamiliar academic literacy and communicative practices that international students encountered in the UK institution.

These included: negotiating different procedures and approaches when conducting research as a UK university-based researcher as compared to their ‘home’ institution; developing understanding of the supervisory relationship and feedback, and the challenges of reading and writing across cultures. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these research findings for developing a ‘transformative’ approach to internationalisation of HE.

1. Introduction Many UK higher educational institutions are currently developing internationalisation policy and strategies. This varies greatly from a focus on increasing recruitment of international students, to attempts to ‘mainstream’ an internationalised approach within the institution as a whole, thereby addressing the implications for all students and staff in terms of curriculum, values, attitudes, and academic practices. Recent research has identified ways in which the internationalisation agenda benefits home students, for example, through gaining first-hand experience in intercultural communication and understanding (see Hyland, Trahar, Anderson, & Dickens 2008; Montgomery, 2008). Even in terms of recruitment, there is increasing recognition that the quality of students’ experience in UK higher education (HE) will strongly influence future trends.

*Corresponding author. Email: a.robinson-pant@uea.ac.uk ISSN 1354-0602 print/ISSN 1470-1278 online Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2011.625189 http://www.tandfonline.com

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Aside from the narrowly instrumental economic rationale for enhancing the learning and teaching of international students, there is a growing understanding of the complexity and diversity of their experiences in UK HE (see Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010). This has presented a challenge to the dominant discourse, which has tended to position international students in ‘deficit’ terms, for example, as lacking adequate language skills and critical understanding when compared to home students (Carroll & Ryan, 2005). This ‘deficit’ approach tends to translate into a focus on ‘integration’ and ‘induction’ and how to fit international students into existing university cultures (see Turner and Robson’s (2008) historical overview). At the same time, local initiatives and research projects show that international students are far less homogeneous and their experience and knowledge more nuanced than the image often implied by these university policy approaches. Many international doctoral students in particular may find themselves moving between differing identities and learning to mediate between the sometimes conflicting priorities and values of their UK supervisors and their ‘home’ employers and sponsors (Robinson-Pant, 2005, 2009). As Rizvi (2010) has identified, such students can be seen to be operating within ‘transnational spaces’ – and in this respect their learning and the knowledge that they construct during their time in the UK has relevance to all researchers and educators working in our increasingly globalised world.

We take these tensions and opportunities within the HE internationalisation agenda as our starting point for this article. Despite the growing field of research undertaken in this area (some of which is cited above), we suggest that the concept of internationalisation in HE has been under-theorised, and has tended to be seen by those working in HE institutions as a policy directive without exploring the implications for teaching, learning and governance practices. De Vita and Case (2003) noted the potential for ‘transformative change’ through internationalisation: ‘Despite paying lip service to various aspects of internationalisation, institutions are failing to make the most of the opportunity to engage in a radical reassessment of HE purposes, priorities and processes that student diversity and multicultural interaction provide’ (ibid., p. 384). The question of how to move beyond such ‘lip service’ is perhaps even more pressing today as we face a future of shrinking resources and less likelihood of the ‘investment-focused’ approach that Turner and Robson (2008, p. 28) associated with ‘transformative’ internationalisation (as opposed to ‘symbolic’ internationalisation, Bartell, 2003). Turner and Robson emphasise that transformative internationalisation involves challenging and transforming dominant values, at both an institutional and individual level: ‘Transformative internationalisation is as much about values of international reciprocity within the institutional ethical and belief system as it is about skilful teaching and learning practices, requiring individuals to move from an ethnocentric to an ethnorelative position’ (ibid., p. 126). As practitioners wishing to engage in transformation, we have found that the question of how to make this change in attitudes, values and practices is more problematic than establishing the need for it.

In this article, we look at a participatory change-oriented research project, which in its conception and realisation explored what a move towards an ethnorelative position might mean in practice at an individual and institutional level. By taking doctoral programmes as a potentially rich site of intercultural encounters (between supervisors, home and international students, and research participants/colleagues/ sponsors in their home countries), we explore two theoretical approaches – intercultural communication and academic literacies – using them to analyse the

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experiences and perspectives of international doctoral students. We argue that these are complementary approaches for discussing and analysing international students’ experiences of doctoral study – particularly in relation to the communicative and institutional practices associated with the supervision process – and could enable both supervisors and students to challenge their usual perspectives. We conclude by exploring how these two theoretical frames could be combined to provide a new lens – not only for critical reflection on interaction and academic literacy practices at an individual level – but also for interrogation of institutional academic (including research) practices within HE and the assumptions that inform these.

2. Rationale and methodology The rationale for the research project, which forms the basis for this article, was the need to improve academic provision for the increasingly significant cohort of international postgraduate research (PGR) students attending our university. Recognising the pivotal role supervisors play in a doctoral student’s research process, our practical aim was to create resources which might help students and their supervisors build effective supervisory relationships. We were aware of a great diversity of doctoral supervision practice, even within one department, and that, as Goode (2010, p. 39) notes, ‘doctoral supervision has remained a ‘black box’, a privatised space’, with little empirical research on the kinds of practices involved. As Thomson and Walker (2010, p. 4) suggest, the doctorate can be understood as ‘a relational and pedagogical project of student/supervisor development and identity formation’ – a process which becomes even more complex when differing cultural practices and multiple identities are involved. Informed by theoretical debates within intercultural communication and academic literacies, we therefore hoped to provide an opportunity for new international research students to engage in dialogue around their teaching and learning experiences, and to generate understanding and insights for all those involved in doctoral programmes, including ourselves.

The methodological approach adopted was ethnographic in its focus. We pursued enquiry at two levels: firstly participants’ perspectives on texts and practices and secondly, the institutional and departmental practices surrounding the carrying out of research and the production of the Ph.D. thesis. The project consisted of two inter-linked research activities. A group of 10 first-year international research students met regularly over the year to share their experiences and approaches to their Ph.D. study. Alongside the discussion group, the project researchers conducted 20 initial individual interviews with international research students from across each year of the Ph.D. and representing a range of cultural contexts, languages and disciplines. This was followed up later by a further 14 individual interviews, as part of making a DVD training resource (Magyar & Robinson-Pant, 2010). In total, 37 international students participated in the overall project.1 These semi-structured interviews explored the students’ experiences in the UK and home context and included detailed discussion of their current research and previous academic literacy practices.

We initially set out to investigate the trajectory doctoral students made during their first year as they encountered the academic practices of UK institutions, specifically, unfamiliar academic literacy practices. The first-year doctoral students we met with over a period of 9 months, however, had slightly different concerns and perspectives. What was important for them was not so much the reading and writ-

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ing practices but their immediate encounters with practices on the ‘periphery’ of research but nonetheless vital: preoccupations such as accommodation, immigration and setting up home.

Being in the early stages of the research process, students were still establishing ways of working with their supervisors and familiarising themselves with their departments, their supervisory policies and procedures. It was often students in their second and third years who were able to look back and identify key challenges and milestones in their journey. In our interviews, we explored student perspectives and experiences of doing research the ‘UK way’, the process of writing the thesis, their perception and understanding of the conventions and assessment criteria, and the interplay between their writing and supervision, including their expectations of the supervisor and what they thought supervisors expected of them.

Ideas from academic literacies and intercultural communication informed all stages of the research process, most explicitly, the way in which we analysed the interviews and discussions. The process of analysis included a reflection on how the theoretical frameworks we brought to the research might facilitate the shift in values and perspectives implicit in the ‘transformative’ approach as described by Turner and Robson (2008). In the next two sections, using each framework in turn, we look at what the students’ perspectives can reveal to us about the practices surrounding the process of research and the production of the thesis, and how they might be transformed to the benefit of students, supervisors and the wider academic community.

3. Intercultural communication In this section, we outline the specific concepts and approaches from the field of intercultural communication that shaped our research approach and analysis and explore the implications for teaching, learning and research within an ‘internationalised’ university.

From ‘cross cultural’ to ‘intercultural’ learning Holliday’s notion of ‘small culture’ as ‘a different paradigm through which to look at social groups’ puts the emphasis on ‘culture’ as an analytical (and therefore potentially transformative) tool: ‘A “small culture” approach attempts to liberate “culture” from notions of ethnicity and nation’ (Holliday, 1999, p. 237). We found that the ‘small culture’ approach offered a way of looking at differing values and practices which was less oppositional or polarised than dominant notions of ‘crosscultural’ within the university, and could help to make sense of apparently conflicting ideas and aims expressed by an individual or within one situation. This idea of ‘culture as a verb’ (Street (1993) challenges an essentialist view of culture (as a noun, ibid.) and can enable us ‘to understand how and when culture plays an active role in shaping and influencing our meaning making endeavours’ (Sarangi, 1995, p. 26). Within our university context of researching with international students, this more complex notion of ‘culture’ helped us to take account of the multiple academic and policy cultures between which many doctoral students mediated, as well as responding to the idea of changing cultures (in all our contexts). In some ways, the doctoral students in our project could be seen to adopt the position of an ethnographer – Todorov’s (1988) notion of shifting constantly between ‘proximity and

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distance’ – as they learned to adapt to the new HE context in the light of their previous experiences. This transition involved a similar process of reflexivity as students analysed relationships between themselves and their peers or supervisors, including misunderstandings and different interpretations of texts (oral and written) and situations. The ideas of ‘culture’ discussed above imply that ethnography has the potential to contribute to the field of internationalisation, as both a research methodology and as integral to a pedagogical approach (see Roberts, Byram, Barro, Jordan, & Street 2000).

Risager’s (2007) idea of a ‘transnational’ rather than ‘national’ pedagogy within the field of language education can help to explain the implications of taking a ‘small culture approach’ for teaching and learning in other contexts too. She identifies the movement from learning a pure national language to an emphasis on language learning in multilingual situations, code switching and developing intercultural competence. By problematising the concept of ‘national’, Risager gives an insight into the implications for pedagogy: We are dealing with individuals and their experiences and encounters and therefore it is more difficult to interpret the cultural encounter as solely one between national cultures. The pedagogical task is rather to treat the encounter as a personal one, wherein many different identities can be made relevant and play a role – including possibly, the national. (ibid., p. 213)

The focus on the ‘cultural encounter’ between individuals links closely with Sarangi’s (1995) distinction between ‘cross cultural’ and ‘intercultural’: ‘whilst cross cultural attends to abstract entities across cultural borders, intercultural deals with the analysis of actual encounter between two participants who represent different linguistic and cultural backgrounds’.

As a cultural encounter between individuals, the doctoral supervision meeting provides clear potential for intercultural learning – but equally, can become a site for reinforcing and fixing cultural stereotypes. Under the three themes of identity, otherisation and representation, Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman (2004) introduce approaches to deconstructing such stereotypes of the Other, which could be used to develop intercultural pedagogy within the supervision context. We turn here to use these concepts and approaches to ‘intercultural communication’ to explore the data from our research project with international doctoral students.

Using an intercultural communication lens: what is added?

During our focus group discussions and interviews, students talked eloquently about their experiences of moving between cultures and gave an insight into what was involved in going beyond the surface or visible differences between their home and the UK context. The apparent informality of relationships and forms of address between students and their supervisors was a theme to which several of the students returned – particularly as an aspect that struck them most on arrival. Savitree, a doctoral student in health, explained about the differences she had found: Because I have been here for six months, I still adapt myself to the culture or the way of speaking . . . Because in Thailand . . . I think it’s quite more, you know, the culture of respect . . . but here it seems like the equal . . . it not mean that you don’t respect the elders, but it seem like [here] you can just share and say anything friendly . . .

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Because the supervisor in Thailand at my town, she is very older, you know about 50 or 60. So we quite respect them. It’s about culture anyway . . . but when we work together for a long long time, it is quite open and we can easily to give them what about in our opinion and our expression.

At one level, Savitree’s ideas of ‘the culture of respect’ could be seen as a familiar account of the differences commonly identified in relation to ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures, revolving around stronger hierarchical relationships and notions of ‘politeness’ (see Hofstede, 1991). However, Savitree also brings a complexity to such polarised models of culture through hinting that age comes into it, and that ‘the way of speaking’ may not reveal the depth or ‘openness’ of the relationship.

Savitree reflects here on what we might mean by ‘respect’ in these two different contexts and goes beneath the surface to explore and compare the meanings of the apparently contrasting teacher/student relationships in her Thai and UK university contexts. Her conclusion is that ‘here it seems like the equal’ and that it is similarly ‘open’ in Thailand but takes longer to reach that stage. Applying the ideas from intercultural communication introduced above, we suggest that Savitree is challenging polarised or fixed notions of ‘culture’ or ‘respect’ through taking a reflexive approach to her own experiences and that she is trying to retain the complexity associated with ‘small cultures’ through moving back and forth through apparently contradictory ideas about ‘respect’.

Another student working in the health field, Mohammed, drew on similar ideas of hierarchical relationships and respect to discuss his transition to the UK university: We believe we should pay respect to our teachers, that is what we are taught traditionally. But as time goes by, we know how things work here. We value how to argue . . . so we are getting onto it. We can discuss in an openly manner. There’s different idea about politeness. For example, we are taught that our teachers, our supervisors, they are equivalent to our parents. So we don’t argue with them, whatever they say, we obey. We will do it. We will make sure it happens at whatever cost. But in here there is lots of freedom. You can discuss . . . it’s a friend relationship.

Like Savitree, Mohammed appears to polarise ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Malaysia and UK) and implies a homogeneous culture through using the word ‘we’. Though suggesting that his relationship with the UK teacher is more informal, ‘friend relationship’, he is also looking more critically at what ‘politeness’ means in these contrasting contexts. In Mohammed’s account, there is a strong sense of learning and of change – ‘we value how to argue’. Although both his and Savitree’s account could be seen to essentialise and polarise Malaysian, Thai and UK cultures, what comes across clearly in both is the process of constructing and making sense of cultures, and the role of reflexivity in this process.

Though both Savitree and Mohammed described the process of intercultural learning in these interviews, neither of them appeared to have shared these insights with their supervisors at any time. By contrast, George, who worked on international development, described a process of two-way adaptation where he shared his different expectations and practices with his supervisors: To do a PhD in UK is quite an expensive thing. So when I came here, I told my supervisors and said in a very calm way I told them, I want to be told on the right thing. I want to be pushed to do the right thing.

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George had been frustrated by the indirect way in which his supervisors gave him feedback and described how he was trying to interpret their comments in the light of his previous educational experiences:

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I wasn’t very very comfortable first to look at the supervisor, but when I looked at the supervisor, I began to work with them. It wasn’t easy to understand what they were doing or what they were saying . . . I wasn’t getting what they were saying – like I didn’t know when I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing. But they were just giving you an advice, saying ‘consider this’ or ‘do it this way’. They were not very very firm in telling me this is wrong or this is right . . . I was waiting for them to say ‘this is not good, remove it.’ Because that is how we behave in my culture.

George gives a vivid account of the frustrations of trying to ‘read’ understanding in an unfamiliar context, illustrating Kramsch’s (1998, p. 27) picture of the intercultural speaker ‘manoeuvring his/her way through the troubled waters of cross cultural misunderstandings’. Unlike Mohammed, George does not see this as his own individual challenge of having to adapt to the UK way of learning – but views it as a learning experience for the supervisors too. Through sharing his ‘misunderstanding’ of their feedback practices, George is challenging and suggesting ways in which the supervisory relationship could be transformed. What was unusual in George’s case was that he was confident enough to take the initiative to raise these issues with his supervisors at the outset and suggest that the supervisory relationship could be a compromise between their differing expectations, within the frame work of the institutional expectations regarding PGR supervision. At one level, George’s comments could be read as a challenge to the notion of autonomous learning regarded by UK universities as an essential element of doctoral education. However, from another perspective, his approach could be analysed in terms of his critical reflexivity on the unfamiliar situation in which he found himself. As Thomson and Walker (2010, p.

22) in discussing doctoral education in relation to lifelong learning suggest: ‘having the kind of reflectivity that enables both self and social questioning develops our agency to shape contexts and conditions’. This kind of learning could be associated with changing constructs about what now constitutes a doctorate in the UK – the shift from focusing on ‘one outcome, the thesis’ . . . to foregrounding ‘the actual process of producing the thesis’ (Gilbert (2004) cited in ibid., p. 17).

As researchers, theoretical perspectives from the field of intercultural communication enabled us to analyse the ways in which these students were actively engaged in a process of intercultural learning. They simultaneously drew on, but also challenged and deconstructed dominant cultural stereotypes (such as the notions of respect, hierarchical relationships between teacher and student). Although they presented a picture of a homogeneous culture ‘back home’ (George – ‘that is how we behave in my culture’), they were also recognising and valuing a space to change cultural practices and were aware of their own learning in this respect as an important element of adapting to UK HE. Although we were drawing on intercultural communication theory in the context of research activities with the students (rather than in teaching situations) and were quite constrained in terms of follow-up (not least because we were not the students’ supervisors nor based in their schools of study), we became increasingly aware of the possibilities for building and developing pedagogical approaches based on our research process. The examples above give an insight into the ways in which the students were engaging in a process of intercultural learning. However, we were unable to introduce them (and their supervisors) to more in-depth ideas and approaches from

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intercultural communication, which might have enabled them to share and deepen their understanding of intercultural learning processes. We see this as a possible first step towards ‘transformative internationalisation’ (challenging and changing values of individual staff and students), though such approaches would need to be integrated into institutional aims and structures to be sustainable.

4. From academic skills and socialisation to academic literacies Academic Literacies researchers share with Intercultural Communication researchers a ‘situated’ or social practice approach. The notion of identity is also central, but the focus is on literacy practices and texts, giving ‘particular attention to the relationships of power, authority, meaning making, [and identity] that are implicit in the use of literacy practices within specific institutional settings’ (Lea, 2004, p. 6). This ‘ideological’ model of literacy (Street, 1984) has a strong epistemological dimension, foregrounding ‘the institutional nature of what “counts” as knowledge in any particular academic context’ (Lea, 2004, p. 3). Academic literacies emerged in response to deficit discourses in HE as a result of the increase in widening participation in the UK/US (Lea & Street, 1998, 2007; Lillis & Scott, 2007), which includes international students. As such, the field has much to contribute to discussions about what internationalisation might mean in the context of doctoral programmes.

Critical of decontextualised and ethnocentric notions of ‘academic skills’ and ‘cultural integration’ dominant in many HE institutions, academic literacies research has challenged the assumption of literacy as the acquisition of decontextualised and neutral skills for decoding and coding graphic symbols (Ivanic, 1998; Lea & Street, 2007; Lea & Stierer, 2000; Scalone & Street, 2007; Jones, Turner & Street, 1999).

Academic literacies can be seen to build on an academic socialisation model which draws attention to the particularity of disciplinary discourses and genres, the ‘peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding and arguing that define the discourse of the community’ (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 4). However, where academic socialisation/induction relies on the notion of disciplinary discourses as stable and discreet (which could be seen as similar to the ‘essentialist’ views of culture), academic literacies presents a ‘more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated’ (Lea, 2006, p. 4) frame. Thus, rather than inducting students into existing discourses and practices, it seeks to make explicit ‘the communication norms by which academics transmit and evaluate ideas’ (Curry & Lillis, 2003) and has a commitment to transforming institutional discourse and practices (Lillis & Scott 2007).

Academic Literacies and Intercultural Communication researchers have both been criticised as ‘relativist’ in documenting and analysing difference whilst refusing to label student texts as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ or to prescribe ways of teaching specific cultural groups (in contrast to, for instance, the growing literature on teaching ‘ the Chinese Learner’, see Grimshaw, 2007; D. Smith, 1999).

Our research with doctoral students sought to focus not so much on difference in textual practices but on the multiple and diverse cultures within which students and supervisors were reading and writing texts. The emphasis has been on analysing the process of writing and conducting research in relation to academic institutional procedures and practices. In the following section we turn to academic literacies as an analytic frame. We focus on two key aspects of research and research writing – ethical procedures and attribution practices – and through an academic literacies lens explore how institutions shape knowledge production and

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knowledge communication through procedures and practices informed by culturally situated values and belief systems.

On ethics and attribution: an academic literacies perspective International PGR students doing and writing research as novice scholars are subject to institutional practices and procedures which constrain and shape their research and the writing of their thesis in various ways. Students wishing to conduct empirical research in UK university science and social science departments, for example, have to satisfy ethical procedures in order to have their research proposals approved.

Scholastica, a PGR student who had worked for many years as a social worker, described her experience of returning to the community in Tanzania where she worked in order to carry out research. Scholastica pointed out that the unfamiliar literacy practice of signing a consent form set up barriers – rather than facilitating trust and communication – in the rural community where she was conducting research.

Nora also struggled to comply with the requirements set down by the ethical committee: And the difference between the UK and where I’m coming from – for rural people you give them a paper to sign, it’s like something . . . taxation or land matters. And then sometimes it depends, if they know how to read and write they will read and still they’ll have a question mark, ‘Why do I need to sign this while I’m giving you my information freely, you don’t trust me?’ That’s a dilemma that we have, and in my study I’m going to see how that will come up and how I’m going to resolve that. Am I going to get consent through like recording the conversation of the people or use paper? Because I might use paper and then destroy my whole relationship with my participants. I don’t know, it’s the difference we have between South and North. Here it’s more important for paper but back home it’s better to have the trust.

Thus doctoral students are expected to adopt research procedures and practices, even when conducting field research in their ‘home’ contexts which when imported to a different context lose meaning and appropriacy (see Mokake’s (2005) discussion piece on research ethics). Interviewing Nora and Scholastica prompted us to think about the role of the research ethics committee in approving doctoral proposals and fieldwork, the values and assumptions which underpin its procedures, in which the notion of consent has been tied down to a particular form – the written consent form. These procedures, assumed to be culturally ‘neutral’ are rooted in certain conceptions of contractual obligations and individual (as opposed to collective) responsibility (see T. Smith, 1999), and in turn construct a particular relationship between the researcher and the researched. In terms of internationalisation, we questioned whether ethical procedures could be more flexible so as to take into account different contexts of research.

Other constraints discussed by participants related to conventions around attribution, which determined the kind of research literature they were encouraged to draw on: I think it’s difficult to find in English journals about Thai study. So most of them are written in Thai language and the supervisor was not happy with Thai references.

Because one time he told me that he cannot check that it’s OK because he cannot read the Thai language . . . I’m OK because I understand – I think it’s necessary about references, it should be good references.

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Bella may simply be reluctant to draw on sources which are in a language not shared with her supervisor – namely non English sources. However, Bella’s use of the word ‘good’ seems to imply a value judgement and suggests that perhaps English language sources are perceived as intrinsically better than local Thai research.

The notion of a hierarchy of sources and by implication, of knowledge, ties in with the geopolitics of academic writing (Canagarajah, 2002) which critiques knowledge construction in the West, and the hegemony of English, particularly in relation to academic publishing. Canagarajah argues that what is considered relevant and publishable research often depends on the geo-cultural/linguistic location of the scholars involved. Whilst the value judgement may have come from Bella rather than her supervisor, other students interviewed had been discouraged from drawing on research published in their own context and in their own language.2 It is likely that institutions will be affected by and collude in the geopolitics of academic writing described by Canagarajah. International reciprocity as advocated by Turner and Robson might require actively encouraging ‘non-Western’ perspectives into the university and in the context of doctoral programmes, into the supervisory relationship.

Academic literacies research has also explored the interplay between oral and written practices. The privilege of the written word over the oral within academic communication in the West raised epistemological issues in our discussions with students. Scholastica drew attention to the difficulties of writing for an audience unfamiliar with her research context, where certain ideas which she considered ‘common knowledge’ had to be attributed and supported by evidence from other researchers: Then another thing is . . . what I want to write. I have been born from Tanzania and I have lived there all my life so there are some things I know as I was growing up. But when I put it in the thesis my supervisor will ask, ‘who says this? You need a reference’. I say, ‘I don’t have any reference, this is how it is. No one has written about it.

So if I don’t put it, no one will know, no one will talk about it. There are no books, no research has been done but that is what it is.

Scholastica’s comment highlights the extent to which knowledge gains legitimacy through the written word. Published knowledge (written and usually individually constructed) carries more authority than local and experiential knowledge (often not written and collective). Students sometimes felt constrained not only by the dominant attribution practices but by university plagiarism policy. Harry for example discussed attribution in terms of having to attribute what he knew to someone else who happened to have published it: I’m more comfortable with the attribution now than before but it’s still a challenge in the sense that probably I’m comfortable because I can see this is what I think about it and this other person agrees with that as well. But how sure am I that I’m not plagiarising, you know, the way I found a way round it was to kind of give specific examples to put my point across and to use another person who has authored a journal or book, to kind of support that. But yes, I’m also still uncomfortable . . . how much of what you [know from your own experience] should you attribute to somebody – that’s the issue, how much of it.

Based on individual ownership of knowledge, plagiarism policies are predicated on the notion that an idea and even words are ‘owned’ once they are fixed in the public domain. This is rooted, it has been argued, in an economic model of capitalism (Neville, 2007) and text ownership (Pennycook, 1996) which may run counter to

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the values and perceptions around knowledge, communication and knowledgein-action which international research students bring with them.

Picking up on Risager’s personal encounters between lecturer and student, it is necessary to be mindful of the invisible authority as enshrined in academic practices which the supervisor mediates in some way, and which determine what questions can be asked, what can be said and how it must be said in order to be accepted.

This is particularly pertinent to doctoral students who – contrary to undergraduate and masters students – work largely on their own over an extended period of time with the main pedagogical interactions being with their supervisor.

The implications of viewing literacy as a social practice, shaped by political, cultural and economic hierarchies within HE are to direct attention not so much to the academic skills that students must acquire, but also to the academic practices and conventions in use both at departmental level and university level which control participation in academic life. These practices underpin what academics tacitly expect from students; how academics and students communicate in seminars; the kinds of writing students are required to produce; the ways in which texts are read and how texts are attributed, how students are assessed and other institutional requirements (for example plagiarism) enshrined in university policy and departmental codes of conduct.

Academic literacies: a transformative lens?

Academic literacies has been argued to be ‘highly generative as a critical research frame’ (Lillis, 2006, p. 33) but underdeveloped as a frame which informs ‘the theory and practice of student writing pedagogy’ (ibid.). In conducting ethnographic research with international PGR students, we found that an academic literacies framework has provided a valuable lens with which to explore the students’ experiences and perspectives. However, although academic literacies alerts us to the ‘complex relationships between the institution, discourse, power relations, identities and agency in shaping these practices’ (Clark and Ivanic (1997) cited in Lillis, 2006) the lecturer (and in the case of doctoral students, the supervisor) remains in a position of authority as the academic and cultural ‘insider’, the ‘knower’, the one who is familiar with the implicit rules, who can identify the problem and explain it to the student. As discussed in our earlier section, we found that an intercultural communication approach implied a different relationship between supervisor and student. In several cases, the student described themselves in the role of the ‘knower’, being more sensitive to and aware of differing cultural practices (particularly with regard to communication) than their supervisor.

5. Conclusion The aim of this article has been to explore how the theoretical frames of Intercultural Communication and Academic Literacies could be combined to help doctoral students and supervisors to develop a ‘transformative’ approach to internationalisation within their university. From a research perspective, both these fields share much in common – particularly a more dynamic notion of ‘culture’, an emphasis on ‘reflexivity’ and offering a critical perspective on communicative practices. By contributing valuable insights into how cultures and identities are constructed through our interactions and practices in higher educational contexts, both approaches imply a move-

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ment from the identification of ‘differences’ to a focus on how students and teachers negotiate such differences in teaching and learning situations. Rather than identifying which ‘norms’ need to be learned in an unfamiliar institution or culture, both academic literacies and intercultural communication explore the processes involved in learning and negotiating different cultural and institutional practices.

Our analysis has however also revealed the significant ways in which the approaches differ. Whilst intercultural communication research has focused more on spoken interaction, offering valuable approaches for analysing cross cultural ‘misunderstanding’ (for instance, around feedback from teachers) in classroom situations, academic literacies can provide a lens for examining textual practices, institutional discourses and power hierarchies (particularly between teacher and student), In analysing our data through these lenses, we were aware of their different starting points or locus of attention – the social group or individuals (intercultural communication) as compared to the institution (academic literacies).

Viewed from a university policy perspective, these two different frames of analysis carry different implications for who initiates or facilitates ‘transformation’ with regard to internationalisation. As we discussed above, the academic literacies approach – with an implicit acknowledgement of the supervisor as the ‘knower’ (being the insider of the institution) would imply that the responsibility for change – as well as for ‘induction’ – lies primarily with the teaching staff. However, the analysis of the data through the intercultural communication lens revealed a contrasting picture – as individual students described their individual experiences of mediating and shifting between cultures, which often remained invisible to their supervisors.

Although within our research activities, we recognised and valued the students’ complex understanding of ‘culture’, we were aware that most of the students did not consider that their role as ‘knower’ would be appropriate within the supervision/ pedagogical context.

By combining both these approaches within a policy/practice context, we suggest that there is the potential to deepen understanding of intercultural learning and communication processes at a micro level (for instance between supervisor and student), and also to initiate critique and possibly transformation of institutional structures and procedures that may be constraining research. Although there is now more recognition of the inappropriateness of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to teaching, learning and curriculum, our research revealed that surprisingly little attention was paid to the effects of imposing ‘standard’ ethics procedures and academic writing conventions on research that is to be conducted and read in a different cultural context. By suggesting that academic literacies and intercultural communication approaches could be combined in order to critically explore and transform dominant academic practices, we are moving away from the idea of integration (of, for instance, international students as ‘outsiders’) to look at internationalisation within HE as a two-way process of learning and adaptation. By introducing these ‘tools’ of analysis from intercultural communication and academic literacies to staff and students, the aim would be to create a new dialogical space to examine established power hierarchies, ‘given’ academic practices and the ‘big’ cultures which have often prevented a transformative approach to internationalisation from taking root.

Acknowledgement We would like to thank all the doctoral students who contributed directly and indirectly to this article through the research project, which was funded by a UEA Teaching Fellowship.

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Notes

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1. The country background of those in the focus groups and individual interviews included: Brazil, China (2), Egypt (2), Ghana (2), Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan (2), Korea, Malaysia (3), Mexico (3) Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania (2), Thailand (7) and Vietnam. Students were from the following disciplines/schools of study: biology, literature, international development, education, allied health professions, environmental science, computer science, nursing, medicine, pharmacy, political science, business studies, language and translation studies, mathematics, film studies and chemistry.

2. For ethical reasons we were unable to ‘triangulate’ these perceptions with those of the supervisors concerned. A parallel research study which explores some of these issues with supervisors is, however, currently being undertaken.

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