Cadman's analysis of transculturalism in higher education

¶ … growing smaller all the time. Goods flow across international boundaries as easily as carbon dioxide. The idea that we are all global citizens is not simply a metaphor any longer: It is the simple truth. This erasing of traditional boundaries and borders extends to the world of higher education. This might seem to be one of the most natural arenas in which there can be porous borders since education is a realm in which people learn new perspectives. Or at least it is supposed to be. But as Cadman (2000) makes clear, there are as many potential culture clashes within the field of higher education as in any other. This paper examines Cadman's analysis of ways in which higher educational can be truly transcultural and so serve to benefit students from any cultural background.

Cadman's major task in this paper is to problematize the concept of internationalization of education by examining the preconceptions that the students and especially the faculty at the University of Adelaide have about the process of education itself and to what extent these preconceptions are rooted in culturally specific ideas. She notes that Australian faculty, trained in the traditions of the Western university, have key beliefs about teaching that tend 1) to focus on the transfer of knowledge and 2) assume that only certain kinds of critical thinking (and therefore only certain types of approaches to research) qualify as valid.

Cadman argues that the university should make the shift from "internalization," which is the sincere desire to welcome to the university students from other cultures, to a position of transculturalism, in which both Australians and students from other nations learn from each other and each begin to shift their concept of the ideal education.

Synopsis of the Study

Cadman begins her analysis of how well international students have been integrated into the University of Adelaide with a brief historical overview of the ways in which the international student population had changed in the previous years. Australian universities have welcomed international students, she notes, both out of a sense that these students will help broaden the experience and therefore the education of the Australian students and -- and there is of course nothing wrong with this -- because international students bring money into the university. But while both of these goals on the part of university administrators are perfectly acceptable, Cadman suggests that Australian universities were perhaps a bit naive in assuming that there would be a better fit between their expectations (and those of their students) and the expectations and needs of the international students.

All interactions between people from different cultures hold the potential to be highly complicated and are peculiarly subject to miscommunication when those on both sides do not make an intentional effort to view relationships and interactions from the perspective of the other side. Or, when the cultures are so different from each other that it is impossible to have a good understanding of what someone from a different culture is experiencing, at least those on both sides must be aware that there is a constant potential for misunderstandings. While all parties to cross-cultural relationships must be aware of this, however, it is especially important for those who have the greater power to be more aware and more sensitive to the ways in which culture can disrupt what might seem to be even the most transparent of communicative acts.

The University of Adelaide "actively promotes itself as welcoming international postgraduates," Cadman writes, but while the initial impetus for the welcome mat's being spread out was to help share "liberal values" (such as the goodness of education for all and the importance that all students have access to as much education as possible) the lure for the university has shifted to seeing international students as a "very necessary source of income." One of the strengths of this paper is that Cadman is not apologetic about the fact that the university has to think about funding. If she had framed this research in terms that did not include the financial, it would have seemed naive and would not have been nearly as useful in terms of prompting university staff into rethinking their policies and strategies towards international students.

This shift -- from a Platonic form of education to one that includes a weather eye on the bottom line -- might be seen as problematic for a number of reasons (a point that Cadman only touches upon). However, it is immediately and most certainly problematic in that if international students provide necessary funds to the university and they are not happy with the education that they are getting, then they will leave and take their money with them. To the extent that the university needs the funding brought in by international students, the staff must convince the students that they are getting an education that is worth what they are paying. But while Cadman is very straightforward about the financial aspect of the problem, she is also clearly concerned (even passionately so) that the students are receiving an education that will serve them well over the long-term. She clearly believes that Western universities can meet a need that international students may not find at home.

Cadman argues that both students and university faculty and administrators have in certain key ways proven to be less than hospitable to international students, seeing them as simply having bought a seat at the table but not coming equipped with the necessary intellectual background or rigor to perform as well as the Australian students. At least implicit in her critique of the University of Adelaide -- at least before it began to address the issue -- is the idea of cultural imperialism. International students had been made to feel, she suggests, that they should consider themselves at least a little honored that they had even been allowed to buy the seat at the table.

Woods & Woods (1995) elaborate this point, arguing that Australian universities have essentially been selling their prestige as Western universities, a prestige based on the fact that Western academic conventions are inherently better than those practiced in the other parts of the world. While not denying that this has sometimes been the case, she believes that it neither should be nor need be the case. For it is not just people from 'somewhere else' who are global citizens, but all of us. And if international students come to Australia to learn both about an academic subject and about a new culture, then the Australian students sitting next to them in class should be encouraged to acquire a broader perspective on the world as well.

Selling Western academic prestige is not illegitimate; however, it is short-sighted, she writes. A university might be able to bring in international students for a few years by (essentially) simply selling degrees without trying to make any real, lasting intellectual bridges between the cultures involves. However, such a policy is unlikely to keep bringing international students to a university since international students can legitimately ask for both a degree and an education. Moreover, by simply requiring that international students change themselves so that they fit in as neatly as possible is to surrender a great deal of potential for education (Carr & Kemmis, 1986).

"The educational and ethical issues of internationalising postgraduate education are rarely considered," she writes, by which she means (in part) that Australian students and faculty can in fact learn a great deal from their international students. And what the Australians can learn is not simply the relatively trivial (if fascinating) kind of information that tourists exchange with each other, but a much more fundamental sharing and even blending of epistemologies.

Different cultures produce different world views, which are both reflected in the educational process and in turn shape that process. Investigating the underlying ideas of culture is something that can occur in any classroom in which students from different cultures gather, but only if there is both eagerness and humility on both sides. Cadman describes a situation in which these have not been present, a situation that has repeatedly compromised the experiences of international student.

Much of the focus of Cadman's article is on the possibility that a new "bridging" program will provide a sort of epistemological space that will help international students learn the culture of the Australian university. For the universities must -- if they are to act ethically -- must educate their students not only in the subject matter at hand but must also give them the tools to think in ways that will allow them to succeed. And (as Woods & Woods, 1995; and Lulat & Altbach, 1985 explore). But even as the university faculty help their international students learn to think in Western ways, the faculty and staff must be sensitive not to valorize such a way of thinking as if it were the only possible approach to research and learning.

While it is certainly acceptable for University of Adelaide faculty to ask that their international students seek to learn to fit in with the pedagogical traditions of the Western university, there must be empathy on the part of the faculty how difficult this task may be. For not only are students faced with learning a new culture outside of the classroom (in addition to having in many cases to gain fluency in a foreign language) and having to handle the pragmatics of living in a foreign country, they are faced with the daunting task of learning new ways to learn.

Trice summarizes these problems, although she is describing the experiences of international students in the United States rather than in Australia.

Looking first at the role that language barriers play for international students, weak English language skills are related to a number of negative outcomes. The results of several studies showed that the poorer their English, the less adapted international students were to the host culture (Surdam & Collins, 1984), the less satisfied they were with their social and community relations (Perrucci & Hu, 1995), and the more difficulty they had making friends (Heikenheimo & Shute, 1986). Not only do students with weak English language skills have more difficulty communicating with Americans, but they also do not gain important cultural insights that come about through extensive knowledge of the language.

These cultural insights include cultural concepts of what is means to be a student.

Cadman's research design is essentially ethnographic: She focuses on information gained through interviews with international students, blending this with insight from her own experience with students. She is essentially in the position of being an anthropologist reporting back on her own culture: She is speaking as an authority on her own culture while also sampling the views of the "natives from beyond Oz" who have wandered into her village. She serves as a skilled anthropologist in interpreting the meaning of what the students tell her, allowing them to speak critically without judging them. For example, from one student she elicits:

I hope the [new transcultural program] will give more attention to help the students understand the expectations of their departments and their supervisors, because the educational system, teaching methods and styles are very different. My [home county] [deletion in original] supervisor always told me what to do and how to do it, and it was impolite to disobey him, but the situation is different here. So, it is very difficult for me to get used to it.

It should be immediately clear how such a shift in academic culture could be fundamentally disorienting to students. It should also be clear how students coming from a culture in which they were required not to question their academic supervisors might appear to be insufficiently thoughtful or critical. What was to the students required obedience and respect when they had gone to university at home could seem to the Australian students and faculty like a lack of initiative or even intelligence.

Disagreements about the potential for international students to be sufficiently critical in their thinking was a central issue for both students and faculty, Cadman writes in one of her key findings. Even more important, she notes, is that students who participated in the bridge program were able to learn to think critically in ways that allowed them to do better in their classes, feel more comfortable, and feel that they were acquiring the skills that they had come to the university to find. The bridge program also had an important function in helping the staff to reassess their evaluations of their international students: The program allowed both sides to see each other more clearly.

Cadman is mildly -- but effectively -- critical of staff members who fell back on stereotypes of foreign students' skills, noting that the "staff associated the developing expertise of international students with their participation in those departmental activities which require critical interaction." She follows this up with the insight that the staff tended to see the students' "poor" performances as arising from poor training in their countries of origin:

In some cases, staff focussed on what they believed the students needed, as in 'There may be some connection to country of origin in learning how to think critically. Therefore critical evaluation of papers is important' & #8230; or in 'Student attitude toward learning and scientific inquiry is the most important factor."

Rather than understanding that foreign students may think in different but equally valid ways -- or may be thinking with great insight but may simply stay quiet because they have been taught that this is respectful, the Australian staff often saw the quietness or difference of their students as being a "deficit." One staff member says with clear frustration -- and maybe even disdain:

Students desperately need to ask questions during seminars and other oral presentations, this forces students to listen, synthesise, identify areas they don't understand and then formulate questions in English. Many of our overseas students sit quietly in class and say nothing.

Cadman is arguing -- for her findings are couched within her arguments about the ways in which she wants the university to change -- that the staff need to be more flexible in what they see as "acceptable" student decorum while at the same time helping students to learn to express themselves in the ways that Western students do since such modes of critical expression are -- at least in the West -- highly valuable.

International students come to Australian universities for a range of motivations, including (and perhaps even primarily) because they wish to earn a degree that will increase their earning potential. But they also, Cadman suggests, may well come to Australia because they are interested in learning about the kinds of critical thinking skills that they are daily exposed to. They will be best served, her research suggests, if they are exposed to the critical learning and thinking traditions of the West without whatever research skills and perspectives that they have been taught in their own nation being disparaged.

A final note on Cadman's methodology. If one believes that only quantitative methodologies that include large sample sizes that can be manipulated with statistical software packages are valid, then her study will seem highly problematic and unconvincing, for her sample size is small and her research is highly qualitative, even hermeneutic. She is more interested in asking questions and encouraging her readers to come to their own answers. Within the realm of social scientific research, this is a highly unusual strategy. However, it is also for this particular research question with this particular research population, an effective one.

Hara (1995) summarizes the key reasons why Cadman's choice of research methodology is such a good fit:

Qualitative research in education, thus, maintains that the researcher's subjectivity is central. In consequence, the researcher's viewpoint and value judgments are deeply connected to the research. In this view, the relationship of researcher and what is being researched is impossible to separate. In other words, what a researcher chooses to study is related to his/her value judgment. There is a belief that research facts and researcher's value judgments or interpretations of the research cannot exist separately. Rather, facts and the researcher's viewpoint are inextricably intertwined with each other. That is to say, a researcher is considered to be "an insider to the research" (Carr and Kemmis, 1986). Philosophically, this view is based on a "subject-subject relationship" (Smith, 1983, p.8) in which human reality is subjective. There is a belief that the researcher acts on the basis of his/her own value.

Had Cadman not served as both researcher and subject and acted on the basis of her own values, this research would have been impossible to perform.

Part Four: Critical Assessment

The primary criticism that can be offered about this research is the converse of what I believe to be its strength: Its qualitative research design. Small sample sizes and open-ended interview questions provide research results that are deep and -- as anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed it -- thick. But they do not provide for results that are generalizable. Hara (1995) describes the commonly noted limitations of the type of research design that Cadman uses:

In contrast to [a quantitative] approach, the qualitative research approach has opposite weaknesses. One weakness of this approach is the issue of generalizability because the researchers unique viewpoint is central in the research, it is hard to generalize to other research settings. Firestone (1987) shares this sense stating that the weakness of the qualitative research approach in education is that theoretical model developed for one project is difficult to generalize to other research projects. Eisner and Peshkin (1990, eds.) ask the questions: Is it possible to present research values with the unique situation of the qualitative research approach? When there are not generalizations on the research, how can research knowledge be accumulated?

If one considers each nexus of human activity to be sufficient in itself, this does not bother one. Cadman's research clearly illuminates some of the important dynamics at the University of Adelaide, and if what one wishes to understand is this particular university and its staff and students, then the study is perfectly sufficient (Clark, 1990, p. 337).

If one if interested in how the conditions at other Australian universities -- or universities in the United States, or New Zealand, or Europe -- then Cadman's research may be helpful. However, because her study is limited to a single university we have no way to determine how generalizable her work might be. There is no objective way to determine whether this is a good way to do research or a bad way: The choice of whether one chooses to pursue a qualitative as opposed to a qualitative approach to research is to some extent almost a matter of faith (Best & Kahn, 1989, p. 219). There are different ways of answering the same question, and Cadman has thrown in her lot with those who pursue humanistic models of inquiry.

Part Five: Conclusions and Future Research

The final paragraph of the previous section provides a neat transition to this section, for one of the most obvious next steps to be taken in terms of research that would mesh nicely with Cadman's is to broaden the scope of the research. Similar studies could be done at other Australian universities or at universities in other countries that also have significant international student presences. These studies could either be quantitative (which would allow for more students and more universities to be included) or they could parallel the qualitative research design used in this study. Which research design would be preferably would depend on the specific goals of the researchers. (Of course, it is also possible to combine qualitative and quantitative methodologies in a single study or to collate separate studies with different methodologies, although this latter can be messy methodologically.) (Borg, 1981, p. 137).

Future research might also consider -- or consider more closely -- factors that Cadman either did not touch upon at all or looked at only very briefly. Trice (2004) examined some of the differences that country of origin made for international students. Again, her research concerns American universities but the questions that she raises are valid for Australian universities as well:

Concerning home region, those who share few cultural similarities with Americans (Hofstede, 2001) have the most difficulty establishing relationships with them. Sodowsky and Plake (1992) found that Asian, African, and South American students encountered more difficulties in adjusting to campus life and establishing relationships with host nationals than did students from Europe. Schram and Lauver (1988) also found that European students were less likely to feel alienated than students from other world regions, particularly those from Asia and Africa. Finally, Abe, Talbot, and Geelhoed (1998) found that "Students from Asian countries particularly struggle with adjustment to U.S. college life" (p. 545). These studies indicate that Asian and African students, who differ culturally from Americans in many ways, can find it quite difficult to establish a social network with American peers. Discrimination that is targeted more to these students than to Western Europeans may also help to explain these differences (Pruitt, 1978).

Another possible direction for future research would be to do a longitudinal (or at least a quasi-longitudinal) study to see what has changed over the past decade at the University of Adelaide. This would not be a true longitudinal study because the students who participated in this study are (one assumes) all gone. Many of the staff may still be there, however, and there are likely to be students with similar backgrounds and similar reasons for coming to the university as was true of the students in this study.

In a broader sense, setting aside the particulars of the experiences of international postgraduate students at Australian universities, this study has important implications for research within the educational field in general (Donmoyer, 1990, p. 200). Too often the cultural dimensions of teaching in terms of the deep structures of knowledge transfer are left unexamined. University staff can forget the fact that all knowledge is indeed constructed, and that both the tools and the rules for construction are specific to the culture at hand. Educational researchers should -- no matter what their specific subject might be -- always remember this.