International Students Negotiating Higher Education

In the current economic climate, more than ever, international students provide an important income to universities. They represent much-needed funds for many institutions, but they also come with their own diverse variety of characteristics and requirements. This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand. To do this, the authors focus specifically on giving voice to the student experience. In particular, the authors show how international student experience can be a ready asset from which to glean valuable information, particularly in relation to teaching and learning, academic support and the formal and informal curriculum. In this way, the issues affecting international students can be seen as part of the larger set of difficulties that face all students at university today. Integrating contributions from a academics and student voices from a range of backgrounds issues raised include: - Academic Writing for International Students - The Internationalisation of the Curriculum - Identities: The use of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes - International Students' Perceptions of Tutors, and - The system in reverse, English speaking learners as 'international students'. This book will be of interest to education management and administrators, higher education professionals, especially those working or training to teach large numbers of international students, to which it offers a unique opportunity to understand better the students' point-of-view. Because of this the book will likely appeal to academics in all English speaking countries that recruit significant numbers of international students, as well as the growing number of European universities which teach in English and those in the Indian sub-continent that send large numbers of international students to the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

Silvia Sovic is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and Guest Researcher at the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, University of the Arts, London. Margo Blythman is the former Director of Teaching and Learning at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London.

1. Introduction Part I Policy 2. Equals or Others? Mobile students in a nationally bordered world 3. Whose initiative? International student policy in the UK 4. An ethical commitment: responsibility, care and cosmopolitanism in the internationalized university 5. An international approach to teaching and learning from a UK university management perspective: implications for international students' experience on campus 6. Inheriting the earth: competencies and competition within the internationalized curriculum? Part II Teaching and Learning 7. Classroom encounters: international students' perceptions of tutors in the creative arts 8. The critical meets the cultural: international students' responses to critical, dialogic postgraduate education in a Western university 9. Transformative learning and international students negotiating higher education 10. Bringing forth the graduate as a global citizen: an exploratory study of masters level business students in Australia 11. Entrepreneurial identities of international students at UK business schools Part III Language 12. Negotiating writing: challenges of the first written assignment at a UK university 13. Ways with writing: international students' perspectives on responding to academic writing requirements in the UK higher education Part IV Home Students Abroad 14. Great expectations: the impact of friendship groups on the intercultural learning of Australian students abroad 15. 'Going the other way': the motivations and experiences of UK learners as 'international students' in higher education