Revisiting Conceptualisations of the Development of Positive Intercultural Relationships at University

Author(s):

Kazuhiro Kudo(presenting / submitting)Simone Volet Craig Whitsed

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

20. Research in Innovative Intercultural Learning Environments

Format:

Paper

Session Information

20 SES 04, Educational and Mentoring Practices Related to Integration and Acculturation – What Kind of Tensions and Hindrances Can Be Identified through Research Projects on these Topics?

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

09:00-10:30

Room:

W3.16

Chair:

Raimonda Bruneviciute

Contribution

For more than four decades, the literature on higher education internationalisation has not only espoused the importance of intercultural interactions between international and domestic students, but also reported widespread evidence of limited actual interactions between the two groups. A review of the literature to date reveals only partial understandings of this vexed phenomenon. Different conceptual framings have been adopted to explore the issues, including a focus on academic and sociocultural adjustment of international students (Schartner, 2015), intercultural/cosmopolitan learning for both groups of students (Marginson & Sawir, 2011), and internationalisation of the curriculum (and related concepts, see Green & Whitsed, 2015). Moreover, numerous studies across many countries have shown that structured interventions aimed at supporting the development of long-lasting intercultural relationships, beyond superficial or functional contact, such as friendship, often fail to realise their intended outcomes at the level of the students. Against this backdrop, studies aiming to generate concrete understandings of intercultural interactions on campus settings have focused on: students’ abilities, dispositions, perceptions and behaviours (e.g. personality, past international experience, self-disclosure); as well as, educational environments (e.g. curriculum, intervention). Studies with a stronger theoretical orientation have examined the potential of such concepts as social exchange, social penetration, identity management, cultural identity and dialectics, and communication competence, with a view to better understanding the complexities of intercultural relationship development within the university context.

Our review of the literature identified major limitations. First, there is a limited focus on understanding what leads to positive, consolidated intercultural relationships (e.g. intercultural friendship: Glass, Gómez, & Urzua, 2014). Most studies reviewed, for example, examined either goal-oriented, functional interactions (e.g. goup work: Kimmel & Volet, 2012), or negative relationships (e.g. 'us and them' separation: Hou & McDowell, 2014). Second, despite the prevalence of stage models in studies of interpersonal relationships (e.g. Knapp & Vangelisti, 2005), the evolving nature of intercultural student relationships has received scanty attention (cf. Bennett, Volet, & Fozdar, 2013). Third, there are very few studies exploring how the dynamic interactions between the individual and environmental dimensions afford or constrain the development of intercultural relationships (e.g. co-contributing effects of students’ past international experience and participation in intervention programmes on the increase in intercultural interactions: Jon, 2013).

This paper aims to address these limitations by attempting to answer the following questions:

(1) What individual and environmental dimensions interact with one another to co-contribute to the development of positive intercultural relationships between domestic and international university students?

(2) How do the individual and environmental dimensions evolve over the development of the positive intercultural relationships?

Conceptually, this paper draws on an informed grounded theory approach (Thornberg, 2012), and uses theoretical/conceptual and empirical insights from the literature to sensitively interpret and code qualitative data obtained by interviews with local and international students at two Japanese universities, that differed substantially in their policy and practices related to internationalisation. This paper revisits current conceptualisations of the development of intercultural development and proposes a conceptual framework that acknowledges explicitly the evolving nature of intercultural relationship development as the dynamic experiential interface (Volet, 2001) between individual agency and environmental affordances. The proposed framework is expected to provide a basis to promote further theoretical and/or empirical scrutiny, as well as to stimulate educational practices, on intercultural student relationships in various (inter-)national/regional and institutional contexts.

Method

To enable a conceptualisation of the development of positive intercultural relationships, this study adopted a constructivist, informed grounded theory approach (Thornberg, 2012). The informed grounded theory, according to Thornberg (2012), refers to ‘a product of research process as well as to the research process itself, in which both the process and the product have been thoroughly grounded in data by GT (grounded theory) methods while being informed by existing research literature and theoretical frameworks’ (p. 249). Accordingly, this study is informed by and framed in Gibson’s (1979) notion of affordances, Bronfenbrenner’s (2005) ecological perspective, Volet’s (2001) person-in-context perspective, stage models of interpersonal relationships (Knapp & Vangelisti, 2005; Lee, 2008), agency (Bandura, 2006), and cosmopolitanism (Marginson & Sawir, 2011). Empirically, a qualitative study was undertaken at two Japanese universities with significantly different policies and strategies for internationalisation (e.g. international student ratio, medium language of instruction, curriculum). The intent of conducting research at more than one university was to examine the mediating roles of institutional affordances in intercultural relationships, whose importance has been identified (Leask, 2009), but hardly researched empirically. The empirical data for this study emerged from a series of individual, pair, and small group interviews (lasting 60-90 minutes each) with 21 domestic and 21 international students. The students were recruited through snowballing sampling and primarily based on their ability to share their own experiences of intercultural relationships. In each interview, informed consent was sought to secure the students’ privacy, anonymity and voluntary participation. A preliminary questionnaire was accompanied, to obtain demographic information, language abilities, past international experience, and satisfaction with intercultural relationships. Interview questions focused on the manner in which the students developed intercultural relationships (e.g. friendship, romantic relationships) in university settings over time, in dynamic interactions with their (evolving) dispositions, abilities and behaviours. To supplement the students’ accounts, interviews with 11 staff members at both universities (i.e. executives in charge of internationalisation, academic staff, administrators in charge of academic affairs and student support), who voluntarily cooperated on condition of anonymity, were also conducted. The data collection was followed by analysis/conceptualisation through constant comparison and theoretical coding of the transcribed interviews (Thornberg, 2012). By memo writing, continuous reflection occurred during the whole process of data collection and data analysis, leading to a conceptualisation of the phenomenon under study, that was grounded both in the empirical data and the theoretical/conceptual literature.

Expected Outcomes

Substantial empirical evidence was found to suggest that the development of positive intercultural relationships at university is a cumulative and iterative process, which involves different interactional foci at a different relational state and emerges as the dynamic experiential interface (Volet, 2001) between students’ ever-changing agency and environmental affordances. Thus, the authors operationalised the process of intercultural relationship development into three stages (interactivity, reciprocity and unity), and built a conceptual framework that links each relational stage and focus with different states of agency (situated, cosmopolitan and creative agency) and affordances (institutional, interpersonal and individualised proximity). Each stage of positive intercultural relationships was conceptualised as follows: (1) At the initial ‘interactivity’ stage, students’ situated agency (e.g. approaching a stranger) interacts with institutional affordances (e.g. seating proximity in class) to co-produce functional intercultural interactions (e.g. phatic communion). (2) The stage of ‘reciprocity’ requires students’ cosmopolitan agency (e.g. interests in and/or tolerance of cultural difference), which, together with the creation of interpersonal proximity (e.g. self-arranged language exchange), enables instrumental and/or personal interactions (e.g. continual interactions outside formal curricula). (3) The ‘unity’ stage involves students’ creative agency (e.g. offering to live together), which goes beyond institutional affordances or constraints to create individualised proximity (e.g. renting an off-campus apartment together), resulting in interactions with a personal focus (e.g. visiting each other’s family). The framework will be presented at the conference. Issues of generalisability are being considered and will be sought in future empirical work. Longitudinal research that provides more explicit evidence of the dynamic and evolving nature of intercultural relationship development, including its turning points across different relational stages (Lee, 2008), is especially warranted. Nevertheless, the proposed framework addresses aspects of positive intercultural relationships that have been neglected in the literature, which we hope will stimulate further educational research and practices.

References

Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 164-180. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00011.x Bennett, R. J., Volet, S. E., & Fozdar, F. E. (2013). "I'd say it's kind of unique in a way": The development of an intercultural student relationship. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17(5), 533-553. doi:10.1177/1028315312474937 Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Glass, C. R., Gómez, E., & Urzua, A. (2014). Recreation, intercultural friendship, and international students’ adaptation to college by region of origin. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2014.05.007 Green, W., & Whitsed, C. (Eds.). (2015). Critical perspectives on internationalising the curriculum in disciplines: Reflective narrative accounts from business, education and health. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Hou, J., & McDowell, L. (2014). Learning together? Experiences on a China–U.K. articulation program in engineering. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18(3), 223-240. doi:10.1177/1028315313497591 Jon, J.-E. (2013). Realizing internationalization at home in Korean higher education: Promoting domestic students’ interaction with international students and intercultural competence. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17(4), 455-470. doi:10.1177/1028315312468329 Kimmel, K., & Volet, S. (2012). University students' perceptions of and attitudes towards culturally diverse group work: Does context matter? Journal of Studies in International Education, 16(2), 157-181. doi:10.1177/1028315310373833 Knapp, M. L., & Vangelisti, A. L. (2005). Interpersonal communication and human relationships (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Leask, B. (2009). Using formal and informal curricula to improve interactions between home and international students. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2), 205-221. doi:10.1177/1028315308329786 Lee, P.-W. (2008). Stages and transitions of relational identity formation in intercultural friendship: Implications for Identity Management Theory. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 1(1), 51-69. doi:10.1080/17513050701690918 Marginson, S., & Sawir, E. (2011). Ideas for intercultural education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schartner, A. (2015). ‘You cannot talk with all of the strangers in a pub’: A longitudinal case study of international postgraduate students’ social ties at a British university. Higher Education, 69(2), 225-241. doi:10.1007/s10734-014-9771-8 Thornberg, R. (2012). Informed grounded theory. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 56(3), 243-259. doi:10.1080/00313831.2011.581686 Volet, S. (2001). Understanding learning and motivation in context: A multi-dimensional and multi-level cognitive-situative perspective. In S. Volet & S. Järvelä (Eds.), Motivation in learning contexts: Theoretical advances and methodological implications (pp. 57-82). Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Author Information

Kazuhiro Kudo (presenting / submitting)

Dokkyo University and Murdoch University

Soka, Saitama

Simone Volet

Murdoch University, Australia

Craig Whitsed