How Can We Be Inclusive of Diverse Cultural Perspectives in International Higher Education? Exploring Interculturality

Abstract

As the flow of international students to UK higher education continues to grow and becomes ever more diverse, higher education institutions and business schools seek to engage more with students’ cultural differences and prior educational experiences in order to create an inclusive and level playing field for academic achievement. For this to happen, institutions and their employees require a greater understanding of the challenges that international students face, both as academic learners and as sojourners in an often substantially different cultural context. On the one hand, this involves an appreciation of what is entailed in the process of cross-cultural adjustment and what kind of practical support can be provided for students engaged in exploring and thriving in a new way of life that may be different to their own. Likewise, greater awareness of the impact of culturally inflected knowledge assumed by learning outcomes from a particular approach to academic study, together with the need to build interculturality in order to enhance interaction amongst students when carrying out unfamiliar academic tasks, without necessarily assuming a corrective or remedial stance when dealing with alternative prior learning experiences and approaches, is of paramount importance in order to ensure an equitable treatment of different perspectives. This chapter concludes that institutions have a duty of care to provide support for sociocultural and institutional adjustment rather than simply imposing standards of compliance and enacting culturally inflected models of knowledge, if a level playing field is to be the intended and desired outcome of internationalised programmes.

Furthermore, recognition and appreciation of different perspectives on the learning process can feed back into both pedagogical and administrative practice to the benefit of educational policy and strategy, including staff development and growth. Fostering interculturality can enrich the perspective of both the learner and the provider of instruction and governance, as well as deliver an inspiring educational experience that facilitates intercultural development for all students and practitioners.