The doctorate: international stories of the UK experience

This is a collection of stories written by non-UK students about their experience of studying for their doctorate in a number of different UK institutions. The stories are personal ones, in which they outline the barriers they have overcome and the feelings they encountered on the way

Facing our whiteness in doing Ubuntu research:Finding spatial justice for the researcher

In this article, the two authors, academics from different contexts and both aware of their whiteness, focus on their own vulnerable selves. The aim is to reflect on their specific agency in this project and to create awareness for subjectivity in research. What are the challenges of two white academics – the one from a first world country with a baggage of colonialism, and the other from South Africa with the apartheid baggage? On the one hand, they are not ‘vulnerable’ selves but indeed very privileged selves. On the other hand, there is an awareness of the fact that this very privilege puts researchers in a vulnerable situation, especially in doing research on Ubuntu in an African context

A changing world : the internationalisation experiences of staff and students, home and international, in UK higher education

This is a selection of internationalisation resources produced by ESCalate to support the project A Changing World: the internationalisation experiences of staff and students (home and international) in UK Higher Education. Fifteen focus groups were run with staff and with students, both home and international, to listen to their views on what internationalisation meant to them, how it had influenced teaching and learning, and what challenges and successes they had experienced. Participants came from a range of disciplines and from across the UK. Staff in particular showed great awareness of the issues surrounding internationalisation with an appreciation of some of the complexities. Topics raised by participants included recruitment strategies, entry requirements for non-native speakers, PMI, fees, the British degree, higher education institutions (HEIs) competition for students in the global marketplace, and internationalising the curriculum. Staff and students described various techniques and strategies for creating inclusive learning environments. Many said how students and staff from across the world had enriched their lives, both personally and professionally. Staff discussed the difficulties of meeting the needs of culturally diverse groups, and both students and staff talked about how far we still have to go in encouraging some students to break out of their familiar cultural groups to socialise cross-culturally. Home students were the hardest group to recruit for this project. Given that they have so much to gain from learning in a culturally diverse environment it is suggested that more work needs to be done in the research area of Internationalisation at Home (Teekens, 2006, Joris, van den Berg & van Ryssen, 2003), and within institutions, to engage not only staff but also home students so that all students and staff can gain maximum benefit from the changing higher education landscape. A Changing World: the internationalisation experiences of staff and students (home and international) in UK Higher Education is a report produced by ESCalate and LLAS, that is made available as a PDF file of some 40 page

The Call of Stories: Using Narrative Inquiry in Cross-Cultural Research in Higher Education

La investigación narrativa está ganando popularidad en el marco de los estudios educativos y multiculturales. En este artículo, cuento la historia de cómo descubrí la investigación narrativa y de qué forma la asumí como el enfoque metodológico más apropiado para mi investigación sobre las experiencias de enseñanza y aprendizaje en el contexto de la enseñanza superior multicultural. El artículo relata la investigación narrativa, su idoneidad para la investigación multicultural y de la entrevista narrativa como método de investigación. Se ofrece un breve extracto de una conversación de investigación como ilustración de la entrevista narrativa y del uso del análisis dialógico/interpretativo para “narrar” los datos.Narrative inquiry is gaining in popularity in educational and cross-cultural research. In this article, I tell the story of how I came to encounter narrative inquiry and to settle on it as the most appropriate methodological approach for my research into experiences of learning and teaching in a multicultural higher education context. The article discusses narrative inquiry, its suitability for cross-cultural research and the narrative interview as a research method. A short extract from a research conversation is offered as illustration of a narrative interview and of using dialogic/performance analysis to ‘story’ data.Grupo de Investigación FORCE (Formación Centrada en la Escuela) Universidad de Granad

Facing our whiteness in doing Ubuntu research. Finding spatial justice for the researcher

In this article, the two authors, academics from different contexts and both aware of their whiteness, focus on their own vulnerable selves. The aim is to reflect on their specific agency in this project1 and to create awareness for subjectivity in research. What are the challenges of two white academics – the one from a first world country with a baggage of colonialism, and the other from South Africa with the apartheid baggage? On the one hand, they are not ‘vulnerable’ selves but indeed very privileged selves. On the other hand, there is an awareness of the fact that this very privilege puts researchers in a vulnerable situation, especially in doing research on Ubuntu in an African context.This article is part of the Special Collection titled ‘Spatial Justice and Reconciliation’, sub-edited by Stephan de Beer, of the Department of Practical Theology and the Centre for Contextual Ministry, University of Pretoria.The Templeton World Charity Foundationhttp://www.hts.org.zaam2017Practical Theolog

Women in powerful conversation: collaborative autoethnography and academia

Working as women in academia may still be regarded as “complex and fraught with myths, gross generalisations and mixed emotions” (Barakat, 2014:1). In this paper we articulate the collaborative autoethnographic process in which we have been engaged over some time and through which we have challenged generalisations, explored emotions and illuminated further our complex identities as women in academia. Sharing and making visible our collaborative autoethnographic conversations and writing to other readers is risky and exposes us to possible censure. We realise that we are susceptible to being disparaged for being self-indulgent – a common criticism of autoethnography – yet we contend that our conversations and writing are both self and socially luminous as we connect our ‘selves’ with the UK higher education context. The paper’s main focus is the collaborative autoethnographic process in which we have been engaged. Examples from our conversations and writing are included in order to demonstrate the power of this process and its potential and wider relevance for research