From the threshing floor

The hope that signs of spring will increase is being grudgingly met by certain signs of spring here, which has renewed, a little, good will among my colleagues.  It’s an easier time of year, too, for the students observing Ramadan than in previous years, when the difference between the Muslim and Augustan calendars has seen the season fall after daylight saving and in the middle of exams.  Some years ago a slim and lively Malaysian student of mine was transformed into the local equivalent of a fading Victorian heroine by her seasonal piety.  Don’t worry, she murmured, leaning on a desk for support with only a slight touch of drama: the hunger focuses my mind.  For a narrative outside the bounds of flippancy, stargazer addresses this rather further in her post on the season.

My workplace is currently in the midst of a boom of student enrolments from one of the major Islamic states of the Middle East.  Many aspects of the students’ presence are comparable to the Chinese student boom of the turn of the century, and relate to the difficulty of teaching international students in a multicultural context when the classes are dominated by any one cultural group.  In this case, the students’ religion is just one part of their cultural mix and in many ways the least complex: my students’ comments in class suggest they think of the Abrahamic religions and the cultures associated with them as being part of one family, and are happy to hold forth on this for the education of their Confucian-heritage classmates, who are interested.   These students of mine are also keen to show their lack of anti-semitism (where semitic, in the colloquial usage, means Jewish people), as keen, perhaps, as any liberal humanist from Central Europe.

Where challenges exist is in the usual location: expectations over teaching and learning.  My experience has been that each international cohort I have dealt with in my work, including those from western countries, brings with it a different set of unvoiced expectations, different from the teaching and learning culture we have here.  Often these things only become apparent in practice.  Uncovering them is exhausting.  For the students currently in my care, there seems to be an expectation that effort put into an assignment will be rewarded with a high mark, even if the overall quality of the work does not meet the criteria.  The fact of our setting–the fact that we are a bridging programme–is superseded by the fact of the individual student’s effort.  This has led to unexpected confrontation, of a kind I haven’t had for some years.  Further causal factors are not dissimilar to those for some students during the Chinese boom: funding tied to academic performance, high parental expectations and borderline English levels at admission.

“English levels” is in itself a misleading term, since it’s not just the student’s vocabulary upon entry that contributes to future success but a whole matrix of factors: ability to listen in an English-language environment without getting quickly fatigued, ability to retain information or to record it in ways that lead to retention, ability to understand the changed classroom expectations from their home learning environment, ability to turn their thinking into writing, ability to express what they want to express with the language that they have, rather than translating their ideas from their first language into their second or third.  Different difficulties confound different groups of learners: verb tenses are hard for Chinese students for example, who are coming from a language with none into a language where these things compound as if in three dimensions (”By Tuesday I will have been working on this for a week”, anyone?), whereas for my new cohort amidst the boom, it seems to be spelling, in particular the way in which it’s often impossible to spell new words in English from your existing knowledge of spelling and sounds.  Learning English for unversity study is mostly about learning how to learn in an English-language environment, and it’s hard.

So there has been confrontation, and negotiation, and promises made, and deadlines reset, and I am exhausted with it.  It’s a sad fact, in my experience, that tertiary education can tend to a series of hits and misses more generally, and when students have been buffered or buffetted by family and State expectations and seen the hopefulness with which they arrived ground down in translation, it’s a hard thing of which to be part.  One can set this too, in a context of near-hysteria at times, in the much wider world of marketing and funding through which these students pass en route to us.  It is again comparable with what educational marketers and admissions and administrators and all would cook up over the large numbers of students from China who used to pass through our doors.  In this discourse, any large student group is, by definition, coming with imperialism aforethought.

At a party a couple of months ago I was talking with a student support officer herself originally from China.  What had I enjoyed about teaching Chinese students back in the day, she asked me.  I told her the truth: to learn so much about the different regions of China, the way the students from the different regions see themselves and each other, the struggle of students from the large provincial cities to foot it with their more sophisticated classmates from the coastal megacities, the way national pride was a furious, cohering force but one that affected different students in different ways.  At the end of all this, she took my hands.  “You are the first non-Chinese person I have met in our field who doesn’t see the Chinese people as one monolithic group,” she said.  The same is the challenge for our present cohort, we agreed.  Administrators from the wider university had already asked her about ways in which to recognise signs of connections to terrorism amongst our new students.  We need, I think, a different way of seeing from this.  Students need not be ambassadors of geopolitics, even if these are part of the forces that bring them here.