Working with international students: a guide for staff in engineering

This guide is for those who work with international students on mainstream undergraduate and taught postgraduate engineering courses. It will be useful to those who want to: •learn about cultural diversity in approaches to learning; •find out how colleagues address commonly experienced situations; •revisit their own assumptions and teaching practices. The approach this guide takes to internationalisation in Higher Education values the diversity that international students bring and seeks to promote teaching where all students can participate and learn effectively. This guide does not attempt to solve “problem behaviours” or to offer ways to assimilate international students into a UK way of thinking. Both aims would reflect a deficit model which unfairly places the student “at fault” and fails to respect alternative perspectives. At the same time, it does address commonly experienced frustrations and situations where cultural difference can give rise to misunderstandings. In a range of teaching contexts, there are usually small steps that can be taken to promote intercultural understanding and effective learning. In the guide you will find: •a consideration of the relationship between culture and learning; •examples of strategies that academics have found successful in teaching a diverse range of students; •suggestions for further reading. The guide is written in conjunction with the “Teaching International Students Project” (TIS), a joint initiative of the Higher Education Academy and the United Kingdom Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) with funding from the Prime Minister’s Initiative 2 (PMI2). The project focuses on the ways that lecturers and other teaching staff can maintain and improve the quality of teaching and learning for international students.