‘World-travelling’: A framework for understanding students’ shifts between countries and classrooms?

Vivienne Anderson

Faculty of Dentistry

University of Otago

What is it about?

This discussion session will introduce and examine ‘world-travelling’ as a framework for considering students’ experiences of moving between teaching and learning contexts in internationalised education. The session is based on my doctoral research with international and New Zealand women students, and preliminary data from an ongoing project tracking the experiences of Malaysian international students in partnered health professions education.

The term ‘world-travelling’ comes from feminist philosopher María Lugones (1987). Lugones describes as a ‘world’ any context inhabited by people, and as ‘world-travelling’, movement between different contexts, and/or the sense of belonging to more than one world at the same time. Lugones argues that although some people travel to different worlds by choice, “‘outsiders’ to the mainstream” are world-travellers in an everyday sense (p. 3). As such, they develop a “necessarily acquired flexibility” in moving between and across behavioural, values, and/or linguistic codes (p. 3; also see Madison, 2005).

Why is it important?

In much international education literature, ‘culture’ is used as an overarching perceptual framework for understanding international students’ experiences (Bullen and Kenway, 2003). This is problematic because it perpetuates assumptions about so-called ‘Western’ versus ‘non-Western’ teaching and learning approaches (for example), and precludes attention to how we might meet the needs of all students more effectively (Doherty and Singh, 2005; Haigh, 2002). ‘World-travelling’ offers a way of thinking about teaching and learning that troubles static assumptions of international students’ ‘difference’ and local students’ ‘sameness’. It affirms the skills required to negotiate unfamiliar learning and teaching contexts while acknowledging that difficulty and discomfort are sometimes inherent in ‘travelling’.

How the session will be run:

The session will be divided into two parts. During the first twenty minutes I will introduce the concept of world-travelling and demonstrate its application to actual research data. During the remainder of the session I will invite participants to discuss six broad questions as a basis for considering and critiquing ‘world-travelling’ in relation to their own work as educators.

References

Bullen, E., and Kenway, J. (2003). Real or imagined Women? Staff representations of international women postgraduate students. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 24(1), 35-50.

Doherty, C., and Singh, P. (2005). How the West is done: Simulating Western pedagogy in a curriculum for Asian international students. In P. Ninnes & M. Hellstén (Eds.), Internationalizing higher education: Critical explorations of pedagogy and policy (pp. 53-73). Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre of The University of Hong Kong and Kluwer Academic Publishers

Haigh, M. J. (2002). Internationalisation of the curriculum: Designing inclusive education for a small world. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 26(1), 49-66.

Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, "world"-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3-19.

Madison, D. S. (2005). Critical ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Vivienne Anderson was awarded a doctorate in Education and Anthropology in 2009. Her doctoral research involved the development and evaluation of a social support group for women in a New Zealand higher education context, and an examination of women's experiences and perspectives through participant observation and in-depth interviews over two years. Participants included women who were international and New Zealand students and whose partners were international students. Vivienne is currently working part-time as a research fellow in a dental education context and undertaking part-time contract research for the Asia New Zealand Foundation. Her research interests include gender and higher education; international education policy and practice; teaching and learning in clinical education; and how critical and feminist perspectives can inform teaching, learning, and student support practices.