A second theme which was prominent in the interviews was relationships, particularly with teachers and other students. I summarised the students‟ views about their teachers using the notions of teacher roles and contextual factors. Whilst using roles as categories in this way ran the risk of over-simplifying my participants‟ accounts, they provided useful heuristic devices for articulating the differing expectations which these students held of their teachers. In most cases, students thought that their teachers in China had conformed to the role of transmitter of knowledge, but there was also a strong element of teacher as parent figure.
Where students found teachers in unfamiliar roles on their business modules, they seemed to interpret them as conforming to the norms of teaching in the UK. In this way a number of students commented positively on the relatively relaxed relationships between students and teachers here. This is not to say that they felt that all UK teachers were like friends, but there seemed to be more cases of this than the students would have expected to see in China. Concerning the teacher as facilitator role which is characteristic of Active Learning pedagogies, most students appreciated the fact that this was different from the role in more traditional, teacher-centred, settings since it gave students greater opportunities for interaction.
However, the comments which I categorised as referring to contextual factors show that students‟ perceptions of teacher roles are also affected by their understanding, the extent of teacher intervention and the quality of the experiences. So where communication was a greater problem, the relationship between teacher and student was seen as a distant one, and students‟ silence in class was explained as their desire to show respect (teacher as parent). Similarly, although the role of teacher as facilitator was greatly appreciated, a number of comments confirmed that at times more teacher intervention would have been appreciated, especially where certain students felt left out of group work processes. Finally, where students had negative experiences on their modules, they were more likely to be critical of the teacher.
Relationships with other students were an important theme in all of the interviews. There were some accounts of good relationships where students had made friends with home or other international students and sometimes received a lot of help with their academic work, especially working through language problems. Other comments confirmed a deep social divide between most of the Chinese students and other students, both home and international, who were nearly always referred to as “foreign”. Some students also inferred the presence of perceived hostility, which resulted in a number of Chinese students either being unwilling to work with non-Chinese students, or feeling ostracised or ignored by their non-Chinese group members.
The social alienation felt by some of my interviewees prompted them to recommend teachers to be more interventionist in Active Learning modules and to pay more attention to the group working processes than they sometimes appeared to. These students concluded that the outcomes focus of certain teachers led them to assume that group work was progressing successfully, even in cases where some students in certain groups were being ignored by their fellow group members. In some cases, Chinese students deferred to the “group leader” to take decisions regarding allocation and integration of individual work tasks. This sometimes, but not always, had positive results in terms of the assignment completion. However, in most cases the Chinese students felt that they had little control over the process aspects of the assignment.
Although relationships are not commonly investigated in research on Chinese learners in international contexts, close analysis of the interviews I carried out for this thesis confirms that, for these students, relationships were a crucial factor in their interpretations of their experiences on these courses. The constructivist underpinnings of Active Learning pedagogies strongly support paying attention to this area since the quality of the relationships among group members must inevitably impinge on group work processes. For this reason, I attempt here to discuss the topic of relationships with reference to the concept of “social structure”, which originated in social psychology and was famously developed in Berger and Luckmann‟s (1967) work: “The Social Construction of Reality”.
In the section on “social interaction in everyday life”, Berger and Luckmann explain how social interaction in everyday life takes place typically in face-to face situations. This interaction is modified by a process they call “typification”, by which we locate others within our “social structure”. Typificatory schemes depend on the directness or indirectness, both spatially and temporally, of our encounters with others. The more direct and frequent our encounters, the richer and more vivid our typification, whereas more anonymous or indirect encounters lead to less concrete and sparser typifications. I reproduce some of Berger and Luckmann‟s text here for clarification and then show how the notion of social structure, particularly the aspects they refer to as “typification” and “anonymity” might be used to explain some of the experiences of isolation and disconnectedness expressed by some of my Chinese interviewees.
“An important aspect of the experiences of others in everyday life is thus the directness or indirectness of such experience. At any given time it is possible to distinguish between consociates with whom I interact in face- to-face situations and others who are mere contemporaries of whom I have only more or less detailed recollections, or of whom I know merely by hearsay. In face-to-face situations I have direct evidence of my fellowman [sic], of his actions, his attributes, and so on. Not so in the case of contemporaries – of them I have more or less reliable knowledge. Furthermore, I must take account of my fellowmen in face-to-face situations, while I may, but need not, turn my thoughts to mere contemporaries. Anonymity increases as I go from the former to the latter, because the anonymity of the typifications by means of which I apprehend fellowmen in face-to-face situations is constantly “filled in” by
the multiplicity of vivid symptoms referring to a concrete human being”. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 46)
Many interviewees talked about their classmates in terms which seem to express the anonymity some of them felt towards the non-Chinese students. This must have been a frustrating outcome since experiencing a different culture and learning about different ways of thinking are frequently mentioned as motives underlying the decision to come and study in the UK, or sometimes expressed as important opportunities offered by the same. Clearly these things can only happen through being exposed to having to work with students of other cultures. Indeed a number of students described how they were challenged by different ways of thinking or different customs during their UK sojourn.
However, a frequent experience of some of these students was the lack of face- to-face communication with non-Chinese students, which led some to say that studying here was like studying in China since they only got to work with other Chinese students. This was powerfully reflected in their exclusive use of the term “foreign” to mean non-Chinese. It was almost as if these students felt that they were still in a Chinese learning and social context so the same terms applied. Non-Chinese students then were “foreign” and Chinese students, by implication, the norm. One reason for the imperviousness to change of this perspective must have been the paucity of face-to-face encounters with local students. As face-to-face encounters are described by Berger and Luckmann as “prototypical encounters with others”, we could say that the most frequent access these students had to non-Chinese students remained indirect, and therefore their typification of them remained relatively anonymous.
To use two other terms of Berger and Luckmann‟s, for many of my interviewees, local students remained contemporaries rather than consociates, which is to say that their relationship remained of an indirect and anonymous nature. Berger and Luckmann summarise this notion as follows:
“At one pole of the continuum are those others with whom I frequently and intensively interact in face-to-face situations, my “inner circle”, as it were. At the other pole are highly anonymous abstractions, which by their very nature can never be available in face-to-face interaction. Social structure is the sum total of these typifications and of the recurrent
pattern of interaction established by means of them. As such, social structure is an essential element of the reality of everyday life.” (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 48)
Using this notion of “social structure” to describe the variegated pattern of interactive communication among individuals, it is possible to conceive of the social structures experienced by many Chinese students, particularly those with limited linguistic capability, as being quite different from those of home or other non-Chinese students, who do not suffer from the same linguistic limitations. Given that the effectiveness of Active Learning pedagogies is predicated on constructivist principles, particularly the notion of knowledge as co-constructed in interactive encounters with others, it might be concluded that the relatively sparse fruits of encounters between students of different nationalities are evidence that these pedagogies are not as efficient for these students as more traditional styles would be.
Nevertheless, if social structure is an important element in the ability of students to benefit from constructivist pedagogies, and there is strong evidence here that it is, then it seems reasonable to expect course design and classroom practice to reflect this. This could be attempted through the use of an institutionally agreed framework such as the “Interaction for Learning Framework” promoted by Arkoudis et al. (2013), although a planned approach to spontaneous interaction might strike some as contradictory. Alternatively, at a local level, tutors could pay more attention to the relational dynamics between group members and be prepared to intervene where these threaten the process (not just the outcome) of task completion. The evidence in this research of inconsistency among tutors seems to support Clark, Baker and Li‟s (2007) recommendation for HEIs to develop a “consistent philosophy for collaborative learning assignments that is understood by all lecturers” (Clark, Baker and Li, 2007: 9). This might well involve a more deliberate approach to developing the academic and socio-cultural skills required of students, as recommended by Strauss and U (2007) without trying to force interaction through the imposition of a planned framework. I develop this recommendation in the following section.