By Cheryl Yu, Director of International, Jimmy Choo Academy
The practice of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has seen various successes at UK universities but much more remains to be explored and renewed in the international education arena.
There are debates on whether and how white academics can teach African studies when they do not share the lived experience and espoused emotions of being a Black African, going through the economic, political, social and racial struggle, historically and contemporarily. How can academics, from all backgrounds integrate EDI in the classroom within their teaching practice in a way that we can start questioning the traditionally elitism-perpetuated understanding of knowledge and learn the truth?
With our classrooms becoming more diverse, complex and heterogeneous than ever, with students coming from different ethnic, social, educational and linguistic backgrounds, nowadays, sometimes the makeup of a classroom can be 90 percent international students in the UK. This greatly shifts the dynamics and needs of education set in a global context. For example, students coming from India who are used to their local educational norms and social values should have equal representation, participation and engagement to be part of the learning experience as students from the UK, Nigeria, or the Caribbean.
Are academics who were educated by white teachers or professors and who are used to teaching a more homogeneous group of students culturally and pedagogically ready to go into the classroom and teach, ignoring the heterogeneity in the classroom, as if all students need the same? Education at a global level requires educators to philosophically re-conceptualize the meaning of a university, what is knowledge, and how we acquire knowledge, with a worldwide perspective.
Only through questioning epistemologically what is knowledge and how we acquire knowledge can we truly transform the learning experience.
Only through responsible education can we educate responsible future citizens.
Only through inclusive education can we influence and create the next generation to be inclusive.
As Simon Pratt, Director of Research Strategy & Excellence at the University of Toronto, states: "A student's socio-demographical status will often correlate to traditional measures of student success, such as graduation rates or employment rates. To embrace EDI is to break through the social and cultural reproduction of our society by promoting the widening access and success of underprivileged and underrepresented individuals and groups. It is a social and educational movement that we all should be part of through commitment to action. The international dimension of a responsible university is to engage meaningfully with international students and partner institutions as one community placing the underpinning praxis of education in teaching and learning, and research.”
"A progressive education for freedom requires us to re-think and deconstruct the old epistemology on how we learn, how we teach and what is truth and knowledge."
Professor Vs Student Power
Coming from a family background with French, British and Chinese in the same household, where English is my second language living in the UK, the beliefs of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1972) and bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994) on the use of progressive pedagogy and the meaning of social justice have become an oasis and a source of inspiration. At the same time, it also makes me feel disheartened by a continuing lack of inclusion and social justice within teaching practice. It is not uncommon to hear that some students put up with feeling invisible, ignored, or inferior in the classroom. They lose interest or motivation, they give up, and they fail in their study where the system is not designed to enable them to succeed. On the other side, some lecturers question whether the students are unqualified, disengaged, indifferent, or incapable. Of course, the fact that sometimes the class size is well over 100 students compounds this problem, as it is harder for lecturers to get to know all their students.
Progressive education dispenses with the teacher or professor as the authority in the classroom. bell hooks argues that academics need to achieve a level of self-actualization: they should challenge their own exercise of power and authority to engage in equal relations with students, including the institutionalized post-colonial sense, as only when one is self-actualised can one truly practice education as freedom. Borrowing the discussion from Paulo Freire (1972), the first step needs to be for the oppressed to unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation. This can be particularly challenging when students come from a high-power distance culture where the professor is automatically seen as the authority and source of knowledge. At this stage, students must recognize that education is about co-creating between tutors and peers, and their personal understanding, beliefs and sometimes experiences matter. They have a voice and representation that is of significance and relevance in the classroom. In the second stage, when the oppression has been transformed, this practice will become a pedagogy for everyone.
A progressive education for freedom requires us to re-think and deconstruct the old epistemology on how we learn, how we teach and what is truth and knowledge. This re-adjustment of authority and tradition is essential for teaching social justice, a practice focusing on providing students with the skills, confidence, belief and determination to create social change.
Student vs Student Power
Paulo Freire's insistence that education could be the practice of freedom encourages critical consciousness in the classroom. According to bell hooks, that means that everyone, professors and students, needs to be active participants. Education can only be liberatory when everyone labours and participates, which was affirmed by Thich Nhat Hanh's philosophy of engaged Buddhism the focus on practice in conjunction with contemplation. This active participation of students from diverse experiences and prior knowledge enables rigorous discussion and collaboration, but also an understanding to generate empathy, the highest form of human knowledge.
Equalising the power in the classroom, among students, creates the possibility of eradicating the normalised power and authority attached to the dominant groups or individuals in the class, challenging the illusion of invulnerability of the power, and the unexamined moral and ethical codes. This can be achieved through the avoidance of peer pressure and groupthink and by moving towards conscious inclusion. Equity requires us to treat students according to their differentiated needs. For instance, the unfamiliarity of a topic or discourse for a group of students in the classroom would disadvantage students academically and socially, causing students to feel estranged and alienated.
On the other hand, the active engagement of some students might be perceived as pretentious by fellow classmates. The process of rigorous inquiry and challenging one another across differences require us to be able to reflect and change the way we learn, as this is the catalyst for growth and new ways of thinking. Dialectic engagement does not make the classroom a site of conflict and tensions but progress.
By giving everyone an equal voice, and creating a safe space in the classroom, progressive pedagogy allows all students to contribute to conversations about institutionalised dominance, inequality, hegemony and oppression. The change in student demographics and diversity should mean that universities recognise and seek to dismantle racism, sexism and ableism throughout the institution. It requires the teaching to be intentionally inclusive and progressive.
Education should always embed historical, progressive and global perspectives. These should be embedded in the learning objectives, pedagogies and curriculum, so that they stay relevant, systematically and institutionally. Social justice pedagogy is a method of teaching dedicated to creating equitable classrooms, discussions and assignments for students of all identities through re-thinking epistemologically the construction and learning process of knowledge and truth. This requires us to challenge the status quo, to question our institutionalised values and habits that help maintain the culture of domination and inequality.
Inclusion and Intercultural Teaching
When it comes to working with international students, the cultural intelligence (CQ) framework developed by David Livermore (The Cultural Intelligence Difference, 2011) could become a good strategy for academics to utilise. He divides CQ into four progressive but cyclical steps, from CQ Drive, CQ Knowledge and CQ Strategy to CQ Action. The knowledge about diverse cultural aspects, similarities and differences between cultures, values and their impact is not sufficient in effective CQ practice.
The ultimate stage is the ability to adapt our behaviour appropriately to different cultures. It involves having a flexible repertoire of responses to suit various situations. A recent research project carried out with 50 academics at a UK university revealed that despite 95 percent of the participating academics having an average (55 percent) or high (40 percent) cultural awareness, only 30 percent displayed high competencies in all four CQ elements and 20 percent of participants were unable to give any examples of adjusting teaching approach with a commonality of monolingual or less confident in multilingual contexts. These participants who showed high cultural competency have worked overseas, or/either are international staff themselves or /either speak a second language or/either have over four years' experience teaching international students.
This research indicates that only through the lived experience of being international or by being immersed themselves in an international context, can they navigate the diversity by developing the required strategies to work effectively with international students, by understanding where they come from, how they behave and why they act in a particular way.
The Politics of Language and Class
For international students, the language potentially represents two levels of challenges, the freedom of communicating effectively and the freedom of communication. On one level, to set a competitive standard, UK universities commonly recruit students with an English level of IELTS 6.0 (CEFR B2) to come and study in the UK. However, many institutions also try their hardest to allow the students to 'meet' the standard. Th
is can mean that students are not fully prepared linguistically to engage meaningfully in the classroom. The frustration experienced by the students and teaching staff sometimes leads to both sides giving up. Once students move on from this challenge of being able to communicate, they can still be faced with self-doubt about their own accents, as they are unaware of the vast range of accents across the UK, and how their accents will be just one of many.
In the language space, Karina Rose Mahan (The comprehending teacher: scaffolding in content and language integrated learning, 2020)’s further developed the scaffolding strategy based on Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural theory to encourage academics to use discourse strategies, academic vocabulary development, metacognitive strategies, drawing on prior knowledge, and providing supportive materials (multimedia & semiotics). This facilitates students to transition from direct support from the professors towards independent problem-solving and networking with peers. Scaffolding is essential if students are to acquire skills that will help them lead their own learning. Providing supportive materials is also to be consciously inclusive.
In our society, we seem to ignore the existence of class with an illusion that we are all equal, and the same in the classroom. The white middle-class value tends to dictate the norms in the classroom, creating a barrier to the possibility of confrontation and rigorous debates. The censoring process of one dominating value in the classroom undermines or silences the ‘others’, the opposite of being inclusive. Collective participation and dialogue allow students to have their voices, thoughts and sometimes personal experiences heard and shared not only with the professor but also with their fellow students. At least, this gives the equal presence of all students and the professor in the classroom.
Institutionally, at UK universities, the measurement of student success, the National Student Survey, focuses on final-year undergraduate students, whereas the majority of international students in the UK study at the master’s degree level, which means their voice is not equally represented. The second issue with this indicator of student success is that it is based on economic values, such as employment rate, and salary earnings, neglecting social justice, equality and inclusion. An evolved global education requires us to re-conceptualise the value of a responsible international university, accompanied by the rethinking of the wider meaning of social justice in our society through progressive education.
disclaimer: this article was originally published by QS Insights Magazine July 2023
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