i. THE PRODUCTION OF. CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND. CULTURAL
SAMENESS IN ONLINE. INTERNATIONALISED EDUCATION. CATHERINE ANN
...
THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL SAMENESS IN ONLINE INTERNATIONALISED EDUCATION
CATHERINE ANN DOHERTY Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Graduate Diploma of Education Graduate Diploma of Applied Linguistics Centre for Learning Innovation Queensland University of Technology
Thesis submitted for Doctor of Philosophy 2006
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Statement of original authorship: The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature: Date:
Keywords: globalisation, internationalisation, pedagogy, pedagogic discourse, cultural difference, cultural identity, online education, ethnography.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Tables.......................................................................................................................... vii Abbreviations........................................................................................................................ viii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ ix CHAPTER 1: AIMS OF THE STUDY ................................................................................. 1 1.1 The research problem in profile .......................................................................................1 1.2 The pursuit of international enrolments ...........................................................................8 1.3 Enthusiasms for online delivery .....................................................................................13 1.3.1 Enthusiastic policies......................................................................................14 1.3.2 Enthusiastic reports.......................................................................................15 1.3.3 Enthusiastic media ........................................................................................18 1.3.4 Reviewing enthusiastic discourses................................................................20 1.4 Overview of the thesis....................................................................................................20 1.5 Locating the researcher ..................................................................................................23
CHAPTER 2: POSITIONING THE RESEARCH QUESTION IN FIELDS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH................................................................................................... 26 2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................26 2.2 Understanding international students .............................................................................27 2.2.1 International students as object of study .......................................................27 2.2.2 International students as learners ..................................................................32 2.3 Understanding online educational environments ...........................................................41 2.3.1 Framing online education..............................................................................42 2.3.2 Researching online education .......................................................................49 2.3.3 Researching culture in online education .......................................................52 2.3.4 ‘How to’ do online education........................................................................60 2.4 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................62
CHAPTER 3: POSITIONING THE RESEARCH QUESTION IN THEORETICAL FIELDS AND THEIR INTERSECTIONS ......................................................................... 66 3. 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................66 3.2 Globalisation as penetrating context ..............................................................................68 3.2.1 Consciousness, relativisation and glocalisation ............................................69 3.3 Commodification of knowledge.....................................................................................74 3.3.1 Knowledges as commodities.........................................................................74 3.3.2 The postmodern condition of globalisation...................................................76 3.3.3 Knowledge markets ......................................................................................77 3.4 Cultural difference, culture and cultural identity............................................................79 3.4.1 A logic of difference .....................................................................................79 3.4.2 Proliferating difference. ................................................................................81 3.4.3 Culture, metaculture and identity..................................................................84 3.5 Network society and the virtual......................................................................................90 3.5.1 Network society and identity ........................................................................90 3.5.2 Cyberspace and virtuality..............................................................................94 3.6 Pedagogy, pedagogic relations and pedagogic identities ...............................................98 3.6.1 Pedagogy and pedagogic relations ................................................................98 3.6.2 Pedagogic identities .................................................................................... 104 3.6.3 Pedagogic identity and local identity .......................................................... 106 3.7 Mapping the theoretical framework ............................................................................. 108
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CHAPTER 4: AN ADAPTIVE METHODOLOGY WITH COMPROMISED METHODS........................................................................................................................... 112 4.1 Critical realism for ‘good enough’ research................................................................. 113 4.2 The empirical study- a critical adapted ethnography.................................................... 122 4.3 Case Study.................................................................................................................... 125 4.3.1 Selection of the case study site, with access and ethics issues.................... 128 4.3.2 Adaptive ethnography for the virtual classroom ......................................... 133 4.3.3 Analysis of the virtual pedagogic interaction.............................................. 137 4.4 Interviews..................................................................................................................... 160 4.4.1 Stimulated recall ......................................................................................... 165 4.4.2 Analysis of interview scripts....................................................................... 168 4.5 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 171
CHAPTER 5: A MACROGENRE OVERVIEW OF DESIGN AND CONDUCT ....... 173 5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 173 5.2 The sectoral context ..................................................................................................... 173 5.3 The institutional context............................................................................................... 175 5.3.1 The staff members....................................................................................... 177 5.4 Designing for interaction.............................................................................................. 178 5.5 Designing for cultural sameness/difference ................................................................. 185 5.6 Reflecting on the design............................................................................................... 190 5.7 Conducting the interaction ........................................................................................... 193 5.8 Summarising the macrogenre trajectory....................................................................... 212 5.9 Accounts of the conduct............................................................................................... 215 5.10 Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 219
CHAPTER 6: CULTURAL DIFFERENCING AS CURRICULAR ASSET ................ 221 6. 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 221 6.1.1 Boundaries, categories and their maintenance ............................................ 223 6.1.2 Voices and messages in pedagogy .............................................................. 224 6.1.3 Producing cultural categories in the instructional register .......................... 227 6.1.4 Data selection and sorting ........................................................................... 231 6.2 Knower Mode A: speaking as one of ‘us’ .................................................................... 233 6.3 Knower Mode B: speaking of ‘them’........................................................................... 244 6.4 Knowledge Mode A: expert knowledge....................................................................... 245 6.5 Knowledge Mode B: cultural difference as a fact of life.............................................. 248 6.6 The politics of representations in internationalised curriculum ................................... 251 6.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 258
CHAPTER 7: CULTURAL DIFFERENCING AS PEDAGOGICAL PROBLEM...... 260 7.1 First Problem: The trouble with names ........................................................................ 261 7.1.1 A naming complaint.................................................................................... 263 7.1.2 Invoking vocatives for mode....................................................................... 264 7.1.3 Invoking vocatives for pedagogical tenor ................................................... 269 7.1.4 What’s in a name?....................................................................................... 274 7.2 Second Problem: Genre queries ................................................................................... 275 7.2.1 Excavating rules.......................................................................................... 276 7.2.2 What’s in a genre? ...................................................................................... 279 7.2.3 Rules of realisation and rules of recognition for genre ............................... 281 7.3 Third Problem: Local time, global space and glocal identities .................................... 286 7.3.1 Textual exclusion ........................................................................................ 286 7.3.2 Glocal space and glocal identities ............................................................... 289 7.3.3 Local space and local identity ..................................................................... 290 7.4 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 294
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CHAPTER 8: CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN ONLINE INTERNATIONALISED EDUCATION .......................................................................... 297 8.1 The thesis and its implications ..................................................................................... 298 8.2 The thesis and its contributions .................................................................................... 308 8.3 The thesis and its limitations........................................................................................ 309 8.4 This thesis and the future ............................................................................................. 312
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL ON ACCOMPANYING CD ................................... 315 APPENDIX A APPENDIX B APPENDIX C APPENDIX D
APPENDIX E APPENDIX F
Extract of summary log Interview schedules and consent forms Mapping online internationalised courses in the Australian higher education sector, 2002 Quantitative analysis of e-turns in assessable small group tasks D1 = first group task D2 = second group task Mapping the shared interaction Detailed account of each week's interaction
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 316
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Acknowledgements I owe thanks to the many parties who supported me through this journey, and hope they are as happy as I am to see it to this stage. Foremost, I would like to thank the staff and students involved in my case study sites, for their courage and trust in allowing me access to their interactions and thoughts. In the competitive market of branded MBAs, allowing an unknown quantity to take a look inside is a courageous, if not foolhardy, gesture. I have not taken this privilege lightly, and hope this study helps illuminate some of the intricate cultural politics of online internationalised education. Thank you for your trust. Secondly, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Parlo Singh and Associate Professor Sandra Taylor, for taking me seriously from the outset, resourcing and disciplining my thinking, allowing me plenty of free rein, and for being there for the duration. Thirdly, I have enjoyed the support of a vibrant postgraduate and academic community at the Queensland University of Technology and want to thank all and sundry for including me in all those incidental conversations that have enriched the last four years immeasurably. I would also like to acknowledge the university’s computing support, research administration and library services that make these projects possible. I am also very grateful for the scholarship which made full-time study possible. I have also benefited enormously from meeting particular scholars who have generously given me feedback on my work in progress, and let me look inside their heads. Conversations along the way with Alistair Pennycook, Frances Christie, Karl Maton, Mary Macken-Horarik, Wendy Morgan, Johann Muller, Bill Tyler, Erica McWilliam, John Knight, Jan Connelly, Karen Dooley, Lenore Ferguson, Gary MacLennan, Beryl Exley and Leonie Daws have been really valuable in helping me untangle and articulate inarticulate ideas. I thank them. Finally, I would like to thank my husband and children for resolutely refusing to read any drafts, for sabotaging my text and for running screaming from the room if I attempted to read anything to them. You have kept me real and grounded by treating it all as routine and unremarkable. There is no greater vote of confidence.
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List of Figures Figure 1: Mapping the Theoretical Framework
p. 67
Figure 2: Genre beyond register (Martin, 2004)
p. 148
Figure 3: Rules of recognition and realisation mapped over genre p. 283
List of Tables Table 1: Bernstein’s Pedagogic Identity Orientations
p. 105
Table 2: Bernstein’s Local Identity Orientations
p. 107
Table 3: Data sources
p. 124
Table 4: Website zones and design descriptor
p. 183
Table 5: Unit A’s required assessment tasks
p. 189
Table 6: Pedagogic identities invoked in the case study design
p. 191
Table 7: Distribution of e-turns by week and zone
p. 193
Table 8: Cultural identities invoked in the case study
p. 254
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Abbreviations ALP ASEAN AV-CC C CACD CMC D DA DEST DETYA DIMA EAP ELICOS ESL ESP ESOS F GATE GATS HD IDP LA MBA MOB OECD PI PNG SFL TAFE USP WTO
Australian Labor Party Association of Southeast Asian Nations The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee Classification Computer-assisted classroom discussion Computer mediated communication Distinction grade Education designer in case study unit Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs Department of Immigration and Migrant Affairs English for Academic Purposes English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students English as second language English for specific purposes Educational Services for Overseas Students (ESOS Act 2000) Framing Global Alliance for Transnational Education General Agreement on Trade in Services High distinction grade International Development Program Education Australia Lecturer in case study unit Masters of Business Administration Managing Organisational Behaviour Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Pedagogic identity Papua New Guinea Systemic Functional Linguistics Technical and Further Education University of the South Pacific World Trade Organisation
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ABSTRACT This research investigates the cultural politics of ‘borderless’ education. In Australia, online internationalised education has recently emerged as a market innovation borne from the intersection of two agendas in the higher education sector: an enthusiasm for technological means of delivery; and the quest for international full-fee paying enrolments. The empirical study analyses how both cultural difference and cultural sameness were produced in a case study of borderless education and were made to matter in both the design and the conduct of online interaction. A core MBA unit offered online by an Australian university was selected for the study because its enrolments included a group enrolled through a partner institution in Malaysia. The study is framed in the broad context of the changing cultural processes of globalisation, and in educational markets where knowledge is business. In this more fluid and complicated cultural landscape, the technologies and social practices supporting online education were understood to offer new cultural resources for identity processes. Pedagogy, rather than providing an inert stage for cultural identities to interact, was understood to play an active role in invoking and legitimating possible orientations for student identities. The framework thus builds on a metaculture, or understandings of culture and cultural identity, more appropriate for the cultural conditions of globalising times. The study was conducted as a virtual ethnography of the case study unit drawing on: the observation and recording of all virtual interaction in the unit’s website; interviews and dialogues with the lecturer and designer involved; email interviews with some students; and the collection of course artefacts and related documentation. The methodological arguments and design addressed the complexity of grasping how culture is lived in globalised times, and how it is invoked, performed and marked in virtual interactions. Using layered textual analyses synthesising Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and Systemic Functional Linguistics, a description of the unit drew out contradictory aspects in its macrogenre design. On one hand, the design aimed for cultural saming in terms of delivering undifferentiated curriculum and pedagogy for the diverse cohort of students. On the other hand, it also aimed for cultural differencing in the ‘student subsidy’of the curriculum. The analysis showed how cultural difference was thus produced as both a curricular asset, and as a series of pedagogical problems in the case study unit. The ‘student subsidy’ design involved allocating students to purposefully mixed groups for assessable small group discussions in order to enrich the curricular treatment of cultural diversity as a topic of interest. This design invoked expressions of a range of cultural identities and knowledge claims about cultural differences. These claims were analysed with reference to how they were legitimated, and who invoked what culture on behalf of which groups.
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Despite the design of an undifferentiated process, the conduct of the unit displayed a number of pedagogical problems or ‘regulative flares’ in which groups of students complained about being overly or insufficiently differentiated. The analysis focused on three such flares: troubles with naming protocols; troubles around genre expectations for assessment tasks; and trouble over ‘local’ markers for the Malaysia students. These were summarised as trouble with the unit’s ‘default settings’ and presumptuous assumptions about whose cultural terms applied in this educational setting. The study makes a contribution to the sociology of education, in particular with regard to internationalisation and online modes of delivery. The empirical study also contributes to the sociology of the cultural processes of globalisation. More practically, it is suggested that such programs could profitably embrace a version of culture more in line with the entangled routes and global flows that have brought the students and provider together, one that can accommodate and celebrate glocalised identities.
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It is of course not accidental that 'identity' emerges as a central concept in this field of study. As long as globalization is regarded as an overall process of uniformization, there is no need for such a concept, but as soon as this one-sided view is left behind, 'identity' seems to become an inevitable analytical tool in order to grasp how globalization reinforces the production of cultural difference. (Meyer & Geschiere, 1999, p. 7)
… one paradoxical consequence of the process of globalization, the awareness of the finitude and boundedness of the planet and humanity, is not to produce homogeneity but to familiarize us with greater diversity, the extensive range of local culture ... increasing sensitivity to differences. (Featherstone, 1995, p. 86)
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CHAPTER 1: AIMS OF THE STUDY Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot yet do without. (Clifford, 1988, p. 10) 1.1 The research problem in profile
This study is situated at the intersection of two agendas shaping Australian higher education in current times. Firstly, there is a new and growing enthusiasm for online delivery of educational programs, fuelled by hopes of invigorated teaching, lower costs, increased flexibility and larger student catchments. Secondly, Australian universities continue to pursue international full-fee paying students to augment shrinking public funding with innovative responses to domestic and international competition. There is now an array of arrangements whereby international students can participate in Australian-branded higher education. These include on-shore/oncampus study; off-shore/on-campus studies in Australian programs, possibly offered by local providers under franchise or twinning arrangements; offshore/mixed mode programs incorporating intense blocks of face-to-face contact on site with Australian lecturers, then ongoing online support between students and teachers; and fully online delivery of education in virtual communicative environments. This last option of online delivery makes new market opportunities possible, but also creates new threats as Australia’s established regional market in South East Asia is opened to other global competitors. It is with this particular mode – online delivery – and with this particular clientele group – the international full-fee paying student body – that this study is concerned.
Implicated in these agendas are the larger, interconnected processes underway which are re-configuring social relations and social institutions. Firstly, the constellation of phenomena referred to as globalisation, understood here to be the marked acceleration of economic and social interdependence across the globe, is rewriting the role of the nation state, and traditional functions within it such as education. Secondly, the emergence of the network society has irrevocably infused
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information technology applications into the fabric of social life. Thirdly, what is referred to as the knowledge economy is challenging the primacy of material goods in economic exchange with the growing value of, and trade in, knowledge commodities. The online delivery of educational programs across linguistic, geopolitical and cultural boundaries is both symptomatic of, and contributing to, each of these processes.
Of particular interest in these processes is the fate of cultural specificities and diversity. For sociological and anthropological purposes, ‘culture’ as a countable noun has been widely understood to denote ‘a whole and distinctive way of life’ (Williams, 1981, p. 11), distinct that is from other ways of life, across time or space. ‘Cultures’ by inference are understood to be mutually exclusive. Processes of globalisation in terms of economic penetration, migratory flows, ubiquitous popular media texts, and diasporic communities have disrupted and fractured this presumed ‘wholeness’ and ‘distinctiveness’ of ways of life on this planet. Similarly electronic media and communications have dismantled boundaries, and interrupted the reproduction of such notionally stable ways of life. Despite widespread fear of inevitable cultural homogenisation, cultural identities have in fact demonstrated a proactive resilience in the push-pull-mix forces of globalisation. Rather than fading out, issues of cultural difference have become more urgent and pressing as we collectively learn ‘ways of relating to the otherness of others’ (Beck, 2000, p. 100).
This study is thus precisely situated at an historical juncture, where virtual teaching is the new enthusiasm in educational developments and where cultural difference is reasserting its importance in the ‘global village’. This study proposes to look inside such educational settings and see how these two fronts interact in online pedagogy, and how new virtual learning environments work for students and lecturers from diverse and dispersed settings. International education programs are intent on exploiting the former, and cannot afford to ignore the latter.
The research investigates the design and conduct of an online education program for internationalised student groups. Specifically, it will examine how the educational program takes account of cultural identity and difference in its online interaction. In simple terms, it is asking: ‘How does cultural difference 2
come to matter in such educational settings?’ Cultural difference will be present in any contemporary educational setting, and this coexisting diversity with its potential struggles and assertions of cultural identities is likely to increase under conditions of globalisation. Online learning environments in tertiary and secondary education sectors are nascent developments for which communicative practices of embodied teaching/learning are being re-invented or adapted. The business imperatives driving much of this innovative practice could well choose to ignore complicating aspects of student diversity in the enthusiasm for new technologies and new markets. The tension between these tendencies will be made all the more salient in internationalised programs offered speculatively across geographical, political and linguistic communities.
Since the reforms of the Australian tertiary education sector and the introduction of full-fee places for international students in the mid 1980s, Australian universities have aggressively and successfully competed for students in the global market. By 2004, international students constituted 24.2% of total students in Australian higher education (Department of Education, Science and Training [DEST], 2005), including 24, 914 enrolled as external students, and another 5, 575 as ‘multi-modal’ enrolments. The escalating scale and enterprising nature of this export of educational products has created new institutional structures and practices that are distinct from those associated with previous provision for ‘foreign’ students under aid policies, and those associated with provision for ‘overseas’ students under earlier open market policies. In this study, the term, ‘international students,’ will be used specifically to refer to full fee-paying students recruited from other nations.
Similarly, internationalisation will be understood here as the policies and practices pursued by state-bounded institutions to position themselves advantageously in global cultural flows and markets. The program investigated in this study could be considered ‘internationalised’ from the standpoint of the selling institution, given their strategic courting of certain South East Asian markets, and ‘global’ from the standpoint of the purchasing student or partner institution who could chose their provider from competing offers around the globe. This study will favour the term ‘internationalised education’ to highlight aspects of the provider’s design in any
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marketing, curriculum or pedagogy that purposefully orients to the targeted source of students.
Any education program will involve curriculum, teaching and assessment practices, though these should be understood as encompassing the lived enactment of these aspects as well as prescriptive charters declared in handbooks or syllabi. By considering educational ‘design’, this project intends to investigate firstly the way the curricula, teaching strategies and assessment are planned and prepared with regard to the lecturers’/ designers’ working knowledge of the student body and their needs. By considering the ‘conduct’ of these programs as well, this project intends to also investigate the way the curricula, teaching and assessment are then enacted in practice via interaction between the participating students and lecturers. The distinction between design and conduct allows the research to account for both student and lecturer agency, any resistance or influence in the ensuing interaction, and any resulting adaptation of the design or accommodation made in light of emerging developments.
This study explores the way constructions or displays of cultural difference may influence the design and conduct of the program. As raised above, previous wellestablished notions of culture seem inadequate for current times. This project aims to contribute to a reconsideration of how the concept of culture is relevant to teaching practices in these new environments made possible by electronic networks and globalised markets. Rather than provide a definitive reading of culture as some predictable phenomenon, this study intends to investigate how cultural identities are invoked and used by lecturers and students in these programs, and how such cultural categories and the attributes associated with them are used to inform the design and implementation of the education program. Thus, it becomes a question of what work understandings and displays of cultural difference do in these settings, and under what circumstances lecturers/students identify various parties, themselves included, as differently cultured. If we understand cultural identity as a work in progress and negotiated in context, then we can recognise its production in situ. Thus, this research seeks to understand how participants’ versions of cultural identity and difference shape, and in turn are shaped by, these educational settings.
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For this study, online modes of delivery are understood to be specifically those modes of distance learning that incorporate shared (many-to-many) interaction by internet-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Taylor (2001) distinguishes between five generations of distance education:
…first the Correspondence Model based on print technology; second, the Multimedia Model based on print, audio and video technologies; third, the Telelearning Model, based on applications of telecommunications technologies to provide opportunities for synchronous communication; and fourth, the Flexible Learning Model based on online delivery via the Internet… Through the development and implementation of automated courseware production systems, automated pedagogical advice systems, and automated business systems, the fifth generation of distance education has the potential to deliver a quantum leap in economies of scale and associated cost-effectiveness. (p. 2)
Taylor acknowledges that most universities are currently engaging in the fourth generation model of ‘flexible’ delivery. This study is concerned with this fourth type of program, where interaction is between people (as opposed to Taylor’s fifth generation that involves computer-generated responses), but mediated by the technologies of computer networks:
Interaction with other students, teaching staff and other experts, who act as mentors, is achieved through the use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), primarily through the deployment of asynchronous discussion groups. Students are encouraged, and in many cases required, to communicate through various electronic discussion groups, established for specific content areas as well as for informal social interaction. (p. 5)
In common parlance, online modes are often termed ‘virtual’ modes of delivery. Cunningham, Tapsall, Ryan, Stedman, Bagdon and Flew (1998) document two usages of the term ‘virtual university’. Firstly, it can refer to the conduct of university functions ‘independently of physical location’. This usage has accrued ‘cyberspace connotations … denoting the simulation through information
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technology of its physical counterpart in laboratories, classrooms, cafes and libraries, specifically via the Internet’ (p. 33). Their second sense of ‘virtual university’ connotes the organisational structure which exploits alliances and outsourcing of functions to achieve cost efficiencies, flexibility and market reach. The capabilities of information technology have enhanced the evolution of both these strategies. For this study, the first sense of ‘virtual’ with its cyberspace connotations is valuable in that it foregrounds the fact that online teaching environments seek to re-create face-to-face classrooms with an apparently equivalent interactivity and thus retain other valued teaching/learning attributes. The virtual qualities are metaphoric, that is, they are understood by reference to other modes/states, alluding to for example, ‘virtual space’ and ‘virtual community’. This study will use the two terms ‘online’ and ‘virtual’ interchangeably to maintain a sense of both the technological reality (being online) and its metaphoric references (the virtual simulation).
The study thus aims to achieve a detailed understanding of how virtual learning environments work for students and lecturers from potentially diverse and dispersed cultural settings. The research problem will be addressed through four facets, being issues of design, conduct, the online medium, and the understandings participants take from the encounter, explicated as follows:
a) How do notions of cultural identity and cultural difference impinge on the design of online programs for international students? This is explored in terms of: how lecturers and designers characterise international and domestic student cohorts; what distinctive attributes they predict amongst student categories; what differences in roles, practices and expectations the lecturers plan between themselves and their student cohorts; what significance the lecturers give to considerations of cultural difference when planning the program; and how they plan to accommodate or negotiate any perceived differences.
b) What differently cultured identities are displayed or invoked in the conduct of the program? The term ‘cultured’ is used here to focus on how aspects of ethnic, national or cultural affiliation are foregrounded from within a range of possible alternative identity aspects, such as gender, occupation, age or class status. 6
The identity is thus ‘cultured’ at the expense of other dimensions. This question is explored in terms of: what cultural differences or cultural labels are referred to explicitly by lecturers or students in the interaction; what attributes are associated with which cultural categories; what aspects of design or conduct precipitate displays of cultural identity; and whether there are identifiable moments of breakdown or uncertainty in the interaction that produce distinctions between groups of students along culturally labelled fracture lines.
c) How are such displays of cultured identities shaped by the online medium? This is explored in terms of how cultural identities can be constructed within the available means of online interaction; what effect the online medium for education has on how cultural identities are displayed, invoked or read; what differences the participants perceive online environments are making when conducting internationalised education.
d) How do the participants’ reflections on the program draw on notions of cultural identities and cultural difference? This is explored in terms of reviewing the course and eliciting participants’ reflections on how their design or predictions played out; how they made sense of what happened; how this experience might inform their future design of, or involvement in, similar programs; and how this experience may have impacted on their previous assumptions about cultural differences. More generally, this facet explores whether and in what way cultural difference mattered to the program participants.
The innovation of an online internationalised program cannot be understood as an isolated event, but rather as a development in response to a range of contextual factors and institutional conditions that render the choice of the online mode and the imagined global market thinkable, desirable, and possible. In the following section, I develop and illustrate my initial points that there is both a thirst for international enrolments and a new enthusiasm for virtual delivery in higher education producing such conditions of possibility. These enthusiasms are expressed and promulgated in higher education policy documents, government reports, and public media coverage. The following discussion profiles this agenda of enthusiasm by sampling the discourses operating in each of these domains, where a ‘discourse’ is understood 7
to be the common set of ideas, possible wordings and values from which specific texts draw, which positions any text in relation to others, and which frames and generates certain social practices (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). The shared features in the texts of the domains sampled indicate the emergence of a persuasive and increasingly influential discourse that marries the online delivery mode to furthering international business while it marginalises considerations of cultural diversity in its enterprise. These same themes are developed in the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 3, and later become evident in the study’s data analysis. 1.2 The pursuit of international enrolments The export of higher education is not a new phenomenon, but has evolved under shifting parameters, policies and imperatives. The major stages experienced in Australia are broadly referred to as the shift from the 1950s ‘aid’ discourse typified by the Colombo Plan, to the mid 1980s ‘trade’ discourse typified by the aggressive off shore recruitment of full fee-paying students, then to the current more tempered policy discourse of ‘internationalisation’. For this study’s purposes the story begins in 1984, when the Australian government received two reports, the Jackson and the Goldring Reports, which offered very different analyses and visions of how Australia might conduct this business of selling higher education to international markets. The Goldring Report offered a cautious, incremental scheme that built on Australia’s aid efforts to assist nations within the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) alliance in their economic development, and remained protective of domestic students’ perceived interests. This contrasted starkly with the more ambitious, open market commercialisation proposed by the Jackson Committee (see Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, 1985, for a comparison). While the Australian government adopted the Jackson Committee blueprint, the summary below will show that the misgivings and cautionary pessimism of the Goldring Report has nevertheless flavoured Australia’s forays into the export market with a persistent ambivalence about mixing education and business. Such ambivalence is probably evident in this thesis and its concerns as well.
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Australia’s involvement in the Colombo Plan since 1950 as a sponsor of higher education ostensibly aimed to benefit the participating ‘developing’ nations, and assist in their strategic planning for workforce and industry development. Aid programs were conducted within a discourse of bestowing economic/social development and progress, with knowledge flowing from First to Third worlds, creating and maintaining a dependency (Pennycook, 1994). Australia’s past ‘aid’ policies and motives have also been critiqued as being essentially self-serving business (Auletta, 2000; Naidu, 1997). Such developmental discourse still contributes to altruistic rationales behind online delivery. For example, the Virtual Colombo Plan, launched in 2001, to which Australia has committed $200 million over five years, aims:
to improve education and access to knowledge in developing countries, through distance education and support for policy development using ICTs. The VCP also provides a new platform for Australia’s world-class education providers, research institutions and technology companies to share their knowledge and skills with our developing country partners. (Commonwealth of Australia, 2001)
By moving to an overt ‘trade’ rationale and marketisation during the 1980s, the benefit and cost of international study was understood to accrue more to the participating individuals and institutions than to their nation. This shifted the demand away from the Colombo Plan’s favoured research higher degree to more course work undergraduate and higher degrees, as well as away from engineering and science disciplines towards studies in business and information technology. Initially, the sector had to overcome a repugnance of commercial enterprise which seemed in opposition to the core business of educating Australians (Nesdale, Simkin, Sang, Bure & Frager, 1995). Australia’s entry into the market was perceived as overly aggressive and profit-motivated (Kwon & Park, 2000), with a tension between opportunistic short term economic goals and longer term goals of regional cooperation. The ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) boom and crisis in 1989-1990, with scandals of provider bankruptcies, delayed reimbursements and immigration collusion, alerted the sector to the risks of unbridled competition in the market, and prompted operable
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guidelines and collaborative efforts to protect the quality and reputation of Australian educational products (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 1999; Nesdale et al., 1995; Jolley, 1997).
The resulting, more moderate policy discourse was initiated around 1992. It constructed ‘internationalisation’ as interdependent exchanges of mutual benefit between source and host countries (Back & Davis, 1995). Knight and de Wit (1995, p. 16) provide a widely cited, but rather vacuous, definition of internationalisation as ‘the complex of processes whose combined effect, whether planned or not, is to enhance the international dimension of the experience of higher education in universities and similar educational institutions’. Knight and de Wit outline a range of stakeholder rationales that have promoted the move to internationalisation by various nations. These include motives such as: economic growth and investment in future economic relations; internationalising the labour market for global competitiveness; international image building; income generation; catering for excess demand in higher education; cultural promotion (in response to the perceived threat of homogenisation); countering parochialism; enhancing quality of research and teaching; and institution building. De Wit and Knight (1997), in their summary of the strategies used throughout the Asia Pacific region, suggest that political and economic rationales currently dominate, ‘and are becoming more and more connected’ (p. 174).
The economic rationale behind the business of recruiting international students to Australian universities has proved to be a sensitive touch point in the public’s perception. ‘The international students program became embroiled in general issues of immigration, settlement, unemployment, the environment, future demography, race relations, social cohesion, and national identity’ (Nesdale et al., 1995, p. 67), as well as being associated in the public imagination with the displacement of local students in limited tertiary education places. There was also the ‘equity’ concern that domestic students, unlike international students, could not buy full-fee places at Australian universities, a position recently rescinded by the Commonwealth government.
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Nations are positioned differently in the internationalised market by their colonial legacies, economic situations and perception of internationalisation as either threat or opportunity (Knight & de Wit, 1997). Some countries including Australia are well established as ‘receiving’ nations, with English language nations dominant and privileged by the lingua franca status of English in the global economy. Other nations are positioned historically or by circumstance as ‘sending’ nations. Traditionally the export of education has flowed from ‘North’ to ‘South’, from ‘developed’ to ‘developing’ countries. However, a second tier of potential education exporters are jockeying for regional or religious markets on a ‘South to South’ basis (Knight & de Wit, 1997). In the future, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) under negotiation within the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will also impact on educational markets (Robertson, Bonal & Dale, 2002; Ziguras, 2003).
The engine driving demand for higher education in Western nations is the fact that competency in the English language has increased rapidly in market value. In this context, the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are well-positioned to benefit from their domestic language of instruction and have been quick to exploit the advantage. Initially the disparity between Australia’s language of instruction and the languages of its geographical catchment was considered ‘a major inhibiting factor to the export of education services’ (Bureau of Industry Economics, 1989, p. 52). However, the emerging dominance of English as a world language has reversed this ‘disadvantage’ to constitute one of Australia’s marketing strengths (Jolley, 1997). Australia, being in the right place at the right time, has since learnt to exploit this English as a Second Language (ESL) market with ELICOS enrolments leading the boom in international student numbers. With the dominance of English in cyberspace, and global communications, Singh, Kell and Pandian (2002) consider the teaching of English to now be ‘big business’, an ‘industry’ producing ‘an array of marketable commodities’ (p. 6).
Were ‘internationalisation’ to be measured solely by the number of international students recruited to higher education institutions, Australia’s sustained campaign would be considered very successful. On 31 March 1988, 18, 207 international students were enrolled in Australian universities, comprising 4.3% of the total 11
enrolment (DETYA, 2001). This had grown to 95, 607 by 2000, comprising 13.7% of the total university enrolment. In undergraduate programs, the overseas proportion of enrolments grew steadily over the 1988 to 2000 period from 3.8% to 12.0%. In the postgraduate sector, the overall growth in overseas student participation from 7.3% to 20.5% disguises a drop in the proportion of international students enrolled in research higher degrees (17.7% down to 11.9%, though a slight increase in real numbers), and a nearly five fold growth in the international enrolments in coursework higher degrees, from 6.8% to 34.0% of international enrolments.
Continuing this steady trend of growth, in 2004, 228, 555 international students constituted an increase of 8.6 per cent on 2003 numbers and accounted for 24.2 % of the total enrolments in Australian higher education (DEST, 2005). Of these international students, 46.2 per cent were enrolled in Management and Commerce fields of study, with an additional 14.6 per cent in the information technology field. 128, 715 (56.3 %) were enrolled in Bachelor Pass degrees, while 67, 195 (29.4 %) were enrolled in Masters degrees by coursework. The vast majority (198, 066) were studying on-campus, but 24, 914 were studying in external mode, and another 5, 575 in ‘multimodal’ courses.
It is interesting to note that the influential Goldring Report suggested a saturation point for international enrolments at between 5 and 10% for any institution, and 25% in any one course: ‘They (universities) would be discouraged from enrolling more than 25% of overseas students in any single undergraduate course, to preserve opportunities for Australian residents’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 1984, p. 7). In contrast, by 2002 four Australian public universities reported enrolling in excess of 30% of their students from overseas (DEST, 2003).
Most of the international students (70.7%) enrolled in 2003, the year in which the data for this research were collected, came from South East and North East Asia, in particular, Singapore (29 878), Hong Kong (29 169), Malaysia (27 267), China (27 020) and Indonesia (11 865) (DEST, 2003). Nesdale et al. (1995, p. 23) point out that the vast majority of the fee-paying overseas students ‘have been ethnic Chinese
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from a small group of Southeast Asian countries, primarily Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia.’
Internationalised education is no longer a matter of on-shore, on-campus study, as strategies of off-shore delivery, twinning arrangements with institutions in the source countries, and delivery via technological means have emerged. The pressure of the cost-revenue squeeze which prompted the venture into international markets by universities shows no signs of abating (Gallagher, 2005; Marginson, 1999; Peters & Roberts, 1999, 2000). Jolley’s economic analysis predicted that future international efforts would be virtual or exploiting markets in the home country, which is the juncture in developments at which this study is situated, and so the discourse of ‘borderless education’ constructs a new business frontier that erases previously significant national boundaries in the pursuit of markets. With the arrival of fully online capabilities, Australia risks losing its comfortable and established niche regional market to virtual universities with a global reach. However, Australia’s extensive experience in distance education modes is considered an advantage in the pursuit of business in virtual markets (Lea & Nicoll, 2002).
The review above has plotted the enterprise of attracting international students over a series of policy discourses through which the practice of online internationalised education has emerged as desirable and possible. It has also highlighted the prominence of business rationales, as opposed to pedagogical agendas, in shaping developments to arrive at the current frontier of online modes for internationalised delivery. The next section offers a similar scan of the interlocking historical and discursive context pertaining to the higher education sector’s enthusiasm for all things virtual. 1.3 Enthusiasms for online delivery
The rather dowdy image of distance learning in its earlier print, audio or video manifestations has been radically renovated with the advent of online modes of delivery. These developments are moving off-campus study from a marginal adjunct to higher education to the profit-generating centre, with hopes of it informing and transforming on-campus teaching (Taylor, 2001). Allport (2001)
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suggests the contemporary moment is one of intersecting agendas feeding off each other:
The arrival of the 'internet' or 'e' university has coincided with media, communication and information technology convergence, increased commercialisation and corporatisation of universities, and the rise of 'for-profit' education ... The new 'borderless' environments, facilitated by new technologies, channel the ways in which higher education institutions respond to internationalisation and globalisation. (p. 21)
This intersection of developments has cast online delivery of courses to international and domestic students as a popular ‘solution’ to extend markets, maximise profits, lower costs, and position institutions favourably in global developments. The supportive discursive context that sustains this enthusiasm for online delivery of education is evident in bilateral government policies, commissioned reports, and public media reportage, as summarised below. 1.3.1 Enthusiastic policies Both the present Commonwealth Liberal government of Australia and its Australian Labor Party (ALP) opposition have actively encouraged the Australian higher education sector to engage with virtual modes of delivery (ALP, 2000, 2005; Nelson, 2002; West, 1998). The online mode of delivery is considered both a business problem given the threat of foreign competitors infiltrating domestic markets, and a business solution given the opportunities to reach ‘a much more extended constituency’ (Nelson, 2002, p.11). Online education is also bilaterally extolled as a ‘more interactive experience’ (Nelson, 2002, p.12), and ‘a medium for good teaching, not a replacement for it’ (Beazley, 2001, p.10). As a response to this political climate, the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AV-CC) in its ‘Discussion Paper on International Education’ (2001) has embraced the political enthusiasm and urgency in regard to developing virtual modes of delivery to international student markets. For this committee, virtual delivery is heralded as ‘the new paradigm in international education’ (AV-CC 2001, p. 5). This political enthusiasm for online internationalised education has created conducive conditions
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of possibility that encourage, indeed urge, innovations in online internationalised education. Of particular significance to this study is how the sense of urgency has worked to gloss over complicating issues of potential cultural, linguistic or epistemic diversity in the reconstituted student body. Where the policy discourse would elide such concerns to expedite the enterprise, this research is pointedly asking how such cultural difference may come to matter in such educational settings. 1.3.2 Enthusiastic reports Between 1997 and 2002, a series of reports were commissioned by the Commonwealth government to provide ‘market intelligence’ and to project trends regarding the ‘business of borderless education’, in particular with regard to its impact on Australian publicly funded higher education. The reports (Cunningham et al., 1998; Cunningham, Ryan, Stedman, Tapsall, Bagdon, Flew and Coaldrake, 2000a; Ryan & Stedman, 2002) document shifts in the sector’s relation to the discourse and practice of online internationalised education over a five year span. These reports provide a valuable historical perspective for this research, situating its field study in the circumstances and discourses from which it arose, and in the issues, concerns, and silences that have shaped the evolution of now established practices.
The initial report, New Media and Borderless Education: A review of the convergence between global media networks and higher education provision (Cunningham et al., 1998), played down the rumours of imminent takeovers by media empires, and suggested that the ‘global market’ was actually a mosaic of targeted and customised niche markets, typically restricted to postgraduate professional programs subsidised by employers. They noted that the ‘virtualisation’ of university provision at this stage was limited to marginal and piecemeal experimentation, attractive to employers more so than to students. Advocates of technological delivery as the ‘silver bullet’ solution were accused of ‘marketing more than evaluating’ (p. 154) the use of information technology in education, while the higher education sector was portrayed as sceptical and cautious in its appraisal of technological delivery at this stage.
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In regard to issues of cultural diversity, this 1998 report outlined five ‘P’ considerations that were complicating the uptake of global delivery by technological means - practical, pedagogical, personal, philosophical, and policy issues. Matters of cultural difference arose under their categories of pedagogy (in the guise of learning styles and generic versus local knowledges) and philosophy (as perceptions and risks of cultural imperialism). In their discussion of pedagogical issues, they reported that few stakeholder informants referred to cultural differences in learning styles, and what references there were displayed no coherent attitude. Some considered the international perspectives accessed through the cultural mix in student groups as enriching and added value, challenging parochial or national perspectives. Overall their benchmark assessment was that the developments in internationalised online education underway by 1997-1998 were not threatening either the publicly funded, nation-bounded university, nor its international markets at that point, and that any associated change would proceed gradually but also inevitably, given the technological saturation of other aspects of life. This initial assessment of the ‘threat’ of online internationalised education contrasts strongly with the second report’s focus on the ‘opportunity’ of online internationalised education.
The second report, The business of borderless education (Cunningham et al., 2000a), is more overtly about honing competitive strategies, and is more firmly positioned in a business discourse. In short, the report asserts ‘the potential for communication and information technologies to reduce the fixed costs of education’ (p. xvi) in a climate of ‘growing reluctance on the part of government to fund increasing demand for higher education’ (p. xv), shifting priorities to income generation. The authors call for traditional universities to emulate the practices of the emergent ‘for profit’ online providers, advising traditional universities to speed up and diversify their response to developments, or risk losing market share to their ‘nimble’ competitors (Dolence & Norris, quoted in Cunningham et al. 1998, p. 18). The report includes only cursory mention of the potential issue of cultural difference in these educational environments. There was no development on the earlier report’s treatment, but rather an apparent sleight of hand, minimising these
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and other teaching/learning impediments that might have detracted from the business of selling borderless education.
In the wake of the ‘dot.com’ crash of 2000-2001, the third report, The business of borderless education: 2001 update (Ryan & Stedman, 2002) highlighted vulnerabilities and challenged the more excessively optimistic business projections with growing understandings of complexities and uncertainties. The raw enthusiasm of the second report gives way to a more measured assessment of pros and cons, given the learning curve of the intervening 18 months, and the failure of a number of high profile for-profit ventures. It was recognised that quality online education required time-consuming dialogic interactivity, and was not necessarily a cheap option. However, any reassessment of the complexities presented by the practice of ‘e-learning’ had not stymied developments. Online delivery was seen to be impacting the on-campus experience, and the national government appeared ‘to maintain their faith in the potential of internet-based higher education’ (p. 17). By now the push to online modes of delivery was also driven by other social, political and economic agendas: ‘to encourage lifelong learning, to spread IT skills for new economy agendas, and to attempt to leverage existing educational provision, rather than a business-case conviction that such ventures may be profitable’ (p. 17). In addition, supranational agencies such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were calling for online programs as a ‘developmental responsibility of donor countries’ (p. 33).
Any pedagogical considerations of who the students might be and how that may affect course design were subsumed into a business discourse of ‘customisation’ whereby a global product needed to be adapted to articulate with local points of consumption. However, Ryan and Stedman project that cultural differences could well reassert themselves, if not in teaching/learning, then in the market, in the form of backlash from previous consumer nations reconstructing their borders in the face of unregulated borderless education. In summary, this third report documented the events of the ‘dot.com’ crash forcing players to revisit and reassess foundational values, in particular the ‘soft issues’ (Ryan & Stedman 2002, p. 35) such as pedagogical considerations.
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The three reports offer a view of the shifts in discourse and practice over these formative five years, as the sector moved from seeing online education as a threat to seeing it as an opportunity. The case study site and its actors will have inherited this accumulated history behind their institution’s and their competitors’ strategies for engaging in online internationalised education. 1.3.3 Enthusiastic media Over this brief history, the public’s (and potential consumers’) imagination regarding the possibilities of online learning was being shaped by enthusiastic media representations, selling optimistic, futuristic visions of its potential. To represent the student experience, a common device has been the ‘cosy narrative’ of students accessing international study from domestic space, be it at home, in a hotel or on holiday. The newsworthy angle on institutions foregrounds profit-driven innovations by private providers, responding to and exploiting untapped demand with warnings that the traditional institutions ‘must adapt or die’. (R. Wild, Sunday Times (London), 11 February 2001). In Australia, the national press closely followed steps leading towards the launch of the international e-university conglomerate, Universitas 21, in September 2001 with interest. In the same way, Universitas 21’s disappointing initial enrolments were duly sensationalised.
Any teaching/learning issues have typically been addressed as a ‘pros’ versus ‘cons’ debate. The counter discourse of ‘cons’ typically laments the loss of ‘real’ human communication. Narratives in this vein recount technological glitches and inadequate support. ‘Pro’ responses typically assert either a moderate line that online pedagogy is as good/rigorous/valid/accredited as classroom pedagogy or a more radical line that online pedagogy will enrich or transform traditional educational modes, driven by students’ preference for its flexibility. Amidst this enthusiasm for ‘e-solutions’ in the changing higher education market, a number of public fears have also emerged, including the fear that domestic students might help themselves to the growing market of global providers, and warnings about off-shore ‘degree mills’.
International students in these virtual ecologies are of interest mostly as a capricious but desirable market, for example:
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Online student numbers at Australian universities have doubled in the past three years, leading to a battle for a share of growing numbers of Asian students using distance and online education. Australian universities are competing fiercely in the Asia-Pacific region, South-East Asia and China, and the stakes have been raised by the entry of other international institutions, particularly from Britain and the US. (‘Unis in fierce battle for Asia’s e-students’, J. Foreshaw, The Australian, 5 October 2004, p. 35).
One exception encountered was an advertorial promoting Australia’s MBA offerings (‘Future’s now very clear – World MBA Tour – A special advertising report’, The Australian, 8 November 2001, p. 24) in which the cultural diversity of the domestic and international student body was portrayed as an asset:
A cheaper way to achieve international exposure is by choosing a business school with a large cultural mix of students or through distance education. This will provide international business contacts ...
This ‘angle’ or discourse of international-student-as-asset recurs in aspects of the research literature regarding international students, and again in this study’s case study data.
Media reports while intended to sell newspapers also help shape what is thinkable and sayable about their subject, and influence public opinion and consumer demand. This limited sampling suggests that the enterprise of online internationalised higher education is typically represented as being driven by business/market agendas, with secondary, contested considerations of any implications for teaching and learning. In addition, there is typically little if any consideration given to the cultural differences that may be encountered in the virtual classroom, except as a vicarious asset.
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1.3.4 Reviewing enthusiastic discourses The review of policy discourses, government reports and media coverage is intended to set the stage for this study by providing its larger context, its temporal location in historical developments, and the broad discursive parameters that have framed and shaped the enterprise of online internationalised education thus far. Any evolved practices have been fed by these discourses and their promise of possibilities and rewards. Any particular instance of online internationalised education will be a response to this discursive context, either through its distinctive innovations, or its adherence to emerging patterns. This context thus allows the analysis and the reader to locate the research’s case study amidst similar enterprises. More importantly, the review has documented the rapid growth of official discourses constructing and promoting the potential for a global market in higher education, increasingly mediated by and accessible through online technologies – the very substance of globalisation as discussed in Chapter 3.
The review has particularly focused on how matters of cultural difference have been represented, silenced or foregrounded, in short, to what degree such matters have impinged on the ‘brave new world’ of the online internationalised university. The review has demonstrated how, given the increasing dominance of a business discourse, there has been a significant shift in the discursive construction of the international student which has taken the focus away from their potential cultural difference as a complicating factor for this mode of delivery. This shift would expedite and streamline the pursuit of global markets online. Cultural difference in the ecology of on-line internationalised education is considered not to matter much by these accounts. 1.4 Overview of the thesis This thesis investigates how diverse cultural identities may arise and interact in the virtual environments of online internationalised education. It will consider how lecturers’ understandings of the cultural identities of themselves and their students
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may inform the design and conduct of educational programs, and how the experiences of virtual interaction in such educational programs might produce expressions and constructions of cultural identity and difference. The research is timely in that these are new educational environments and enterprises which we need to research and document beyond the self-congratulatory ‘best practice’ or ‘potential’ genre of its advocates. Gallagher, Head of the Commonwealth’s Higher Education Division, at the time, outlined the rate of change in this field, and the difficulty this brings to knowing about it:
Clearly, some of these questions (re nature, projections and policy development for virtual university environments) are for the time being, at least, unanswerable, given the diversity of practices, contexts and purposes and the rapidity and unpredictability of change. Indeed, we may well look back in a few years to see some features that are presently prominent evaporated, options not yet realised quite potent and conservative stances on apparently passingly, marginal matters becoming cemented cornerstones of the future value set. (Gallagher, 2000, Introduction)
This chapter has described the new enthusiasm for online internationalised delivery of higher education as the outcome of two intersecting policy trajectories, and the gradual marginalisation of issues of cultural diversity in the dominant business discourse informing these developments. Is this a case of pragmatic blinkers to render the enterprise ‘doable’ and profitable, or is this silencing because such issues do not matter any more in a rapidly globalising world? This study serves to document how cultural diversity does in fact play a significant role in shaping the design and conduct of these educational environments, and, to borrow Gallagher’s phrase, might serve to re-cement a marginalised issue in the future value set.
Chapter 2 provides a review of previous research and ‘how to’ literatures pertaining to international students and online education. By way of contrast to the discourse exemplified in this first chapter, this literature review demonstrates firstly the prominence given to issues of cultural difference in theorisations of internationalised education, and secondly the evidence that cyberspace is not a culture-free zone. Common themes emerging from these two fields of research 21
include the formative influence of business interests, and their shared focus on interactivity as a core concern.
Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical tools with which to understand and interrogate educational interaction and online communication in contexts produced and permeated by forces of globalisation and the commodification of knowledge. Work by Appadurai, Robertson, Featherstone, Tomlinson, Urry, Bauman and Lyotard informs this framing, by highlighting the logic of current ‘liquid’ times, and how previous models of culture no longer adequately apply under these conditions. This study is conceptualised as implicating three fields of social theory: cultural difference/identity, (with particular reference to the work of Stuart Hall); pedagogy (with particular reference to the work of Basil Bernstein); and network society (with particular reference to Castells and Wertheim). The constructions of culture and cultural difference reviewed in Chapter 2 will be juxtaposed with the parallel literature pertaining to globalisation, the network society, and the knowledge economy as operating in educational markets. These theorisations of current times challenge previous constructions of culture and cultural difference. It will be argued that education plays a pivotal role in the individual’s process of identity building, and that any educational will serve as a site of cultural production.
Chapter 4 presents methodological arguments to support the research design of a critical ethnography adapted to the virtual environment of a case study, being a core unit in an online MBA course offered by an Australian university to international students. The ethnography is enriched with semi-structured interviews including stimulated recall with staff members and students. The methodology engages with the challenge posed by the theoretical re-framing of ‘culture’. Both the limits and the values of case study ethnography and interview accounts are explored through a critical realist frame with reference to larger questions of epistemic and ontological orientations in social science.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present the data analysis in a series of nested moves premised on Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse in dialogue with the analytic tools of systemic functional linguistics. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the design and conduct of online interaction in the case study unit, situated in a broader 22
institutional context. This account is constructed using a ‘curriculum macrogenre’ structure which allows the 2152 individual postings to the case study unit’s website to be articulated into the trajectory of one singular coherent event that weaves the instructional ‘what’ of the unit with its regulative ‘how’. From this curriculum macrogenre overview, Chapter 6 selects and analyses a series of postings wherein cultural identity and difference were foregrounded by design as curricular matters through the device of ‘student subsidy’, and the voicing this produced in the interaction. Chapter 7 selects three regulative ‘troubles’ that emerged in the conduct of the unit that served to throw cultural distinctions into relief. The analysis is then related to the broader theoretical framing of cultural processes under conditions of globalisation.
Chapter 8 reflects on the design and conduct of this study, its limitations and its contributions towards understanding how cultural difference can be produced in online internationalised education, and how the cultural politics and potentials engendered in online internationalised education can play out in various ways.
This thesis thus offers a detailed and rigorous empirical study of how new virtual education ecologies reflect and contribute to globalisation’s reconfigured cultural processes. The theoretical treatment does not shirk the more difficult work of rethinking old concepts for new conditions. Similarly, the methodology does not take for granted the traditional premises for ethnography, but grapples with larger questions of how it is possible to grasp and validate what is happening in the ephemera of virtual environments. Ultimately, the thesis offers a detailed account and analysis of online internationalised pedagogy which will contribute firstly to practitioner knowledge of how to work productively with culturally diverse student groups, and secondly to the sociology of education for increasingly culturallyinterested times. 1.5 Locating the researcher There remains the question of how my personal interest in this research problem arose. This study has grown around my persistent curiosity about how we can talk and think about culture in times of such overt and accelerating globalisation. As a
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sociologist, I am aware that ‘culture’ as a concept already carries a complicated history, yet remains a foundational concept in sociological thought which is hard to cast aside. However any analytical use of ‘culture’ in an unreconstructed form is becoming increasingly untenable because it imposes or invokes an order which is becoming increasingly specious. Everyday, commonplace facets of life, such as the meals we eat, the music we listen to, the texts we study and consume, are changing in that we are now increasingly infused with the flavours of each other. What for me was a very anglophile suburban childhood in ‘White Australia’, at resilient odds with its subtropical setting, has since been enriched with new lifestyle choices, new interactants and new texts. Once alert to cultural confluence and intersection, it is easy to see it everywhere – new condiments in the pantry, new sounds in the CD rack, Filipino ‘mail order brides’ in the outback, Roman Catholicism in remote Aboriginal communities, and ‘Hawaiian’ pizza. This gaze in turn prompts the realisation that one’s own childhood was itself a brutal grafting of cultural practices into new spaces under new conditions.
From these experiences, I have had to acknowledge that the policy discourse of ‘multiculturalism’, though productive and timely when introduced, is no longer an adequate blueprint or vocabulary to explain cultural processes of coexistence. Where it suggests an amicable, neighbourly mixture of inert particles, the lived process is much more one of productive and reactive ‘entanglement’ (Ang, 2001). We, the global populace, are symbiotically involved, bleeding into and sustaining each other in this ‘mongrel world’ (Iyer, 2002). However, like a magnetic field, there is the potential for both attraction and repulsion, in addition to the possibility of fusion and interpenetration. While increasingly entangled, we still want these contradictory worlds to exist in parallel and not displace each other. We revere each other’s high cultures, and embrace the Other’s canons in our own scripts for being ‘cultured’, yet we are hypersensitive and protective about what slight differences remain amongst us.
As an educator, I am aware that the hard-won recognition of ‘cultural difference’ as a complicating factor for pedagogy was an important step for minority groups’ access to equitable life opportunities through educational channels. However, I could see that rigid or simplistic interpretations of difference in practice easily 24
became the well-intentioned imposition of essentialised scripts and patronising limits. Similarly the Internet has proven itself a double-edged sword, a mixed blessing that we can neither do without now, nor imagine our futures without. From my limited experience, its educational uses have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, being either interpersonally enriching or highly flammable. These experiences suggest that it is no inert, neutral medium either, but is inherently unstable and unpredictable. From my limited experience, it was also self-evident that the business end of the higher education sector would embrace online delivery as an expedient way to garner new international markets. My hunch proved correct. At a recent marketing event for MBAs involving the majority of Australian universities and some offshore universities, representatives in any booth that was not already offering courses online usually reported that their institution was in the process of developing that capacity in the near future. It is an idea that has arrived at its moment.
As a research site, virtual internationalised education offers a window into processes of globalisation, where space and time differences can be erased, and knowledge products can be commodified and exchanged. Previously impenetrable borders can be effortlessly ignored or dismantled. The glib ease with which internet connections can now be made makes a nonsense of the conscientious getting-toknow-you exercises and non-threatening, student-centred diagnostics I would undertake when dealing with ‘different’ students. But the cultural swirl of our communities, virtual or located, also makes a nonsense of predictable differences derived from cultural categories that can be known in advance, planned and designed around. I therefore come to this research question not with a pedagogical agenda uppermost, of perhaps finding out how cultural difference should be handled in these settings, but for more exploratory purposes, and with the sociological agenda uppermost: is cultural difference produced in these educational settings? If so, what work are participants doing with cultural labels in these sorts of de-territorialised interactions, in these sorts of complex cultural times?
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CHAPTER 2: POSITIONING THE RESEARCH QUESTION IN FIELDS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH People and things are increasingly out of place. (Clifford, 1988, p. 6)
2.1 Introduction This study of how cultural difference is produced and negotiated in online education involving international students is asking questions on two broad research fronts. Firstly, there are the questions about the conditions and dynamics of cultural difference brought about by international markets in education, and then there are questions about how the new online educational environments work generically, and for internationalised student groups in particular. Practice in both of these fields is forcibly shaped by professional ‘how to’ literatures: how to work with international students in the university; and how to teach in online settings. Pertinent examples of each field of research and the relevant professional literature are reviewed in this chapter to situate and distinguish the current study in regard to their contributions.
This chapter firstly reviews a range of research that variously constructs the international student as a revenue source, a risk, a curriculum resource and an investment. Then, the research and professional literature that investigates the international student more particularly as a learner is considered. Next, literature regarding online educational environments is presented in its ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps. Then, in contrast to these polarised frames, a moderate, less polemic treatment by Burbules and Callister is presented as more useful for this enquiry. The emerging field of empirical research about online environments is then reviewed, followed by a review of its professional ‘how to’ literature. Finally, common themes and problematics arising from the intersection of the two research fronts are highlighted as of particular importance to this study.
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2.2 Understanding international students The literature pertaining to international students in Australian higher education will be presented from two perspectives: how the international student has been constructed as an object of study; and how the international student has been understood as a learner.
2.2.1 International students as object of study Literature examining and documenting international students in Australia stems from a variety of disciplines and their constitutive discourses. Reflecting the business motivations described in Chapter 1, the international student is variously constructed as a revenue source, a risk, a curriculum resource, an investment or a problem, depending on which lens they are being viewed through.
In economic studies, the international student has been seen primarily in terms of being a revenue source, with a range of studies attempting cost-benefit analyses (Baker, 1996; Bureau of Industry Economics, 1989; Creedy, Johnson & Baker, 1996; Harris & Jarrett, 1990; Jolley, 1997). Given the primarily economic rationales behind the 1980s’ venture into full-fee places and off-shore marketing, considerable effort has gone into monitoring the economic outcomes of Australia’s investment in internationalisation. These analyses uniformly encounter a difficulty in quantifying intangible outcomes, both positive and negative, such as future trade, diplomatic goodwill, partnership building, or neo-colonial dependencies. Despite some disagreement over pricing principles (Bureau of Industry Economics, 1989, Creedy et al., 1996), the economic opinion seems to be that ‘the export of education services to Asia has been one of Australia’s greatest successes in the area of goods and services trade over the past decade’ (Jolley, 1997, p. 1).
In other studies, the international student constitutes a risk in a number of ways. In demographic research, international study and immigration have been problematically linked. Nesdale et al. (1995) list the widely sanctioned reasons given by students for studying in Australia, then acknowledge that the future possibility of immigration, achieved through the ‘back door’ of student visas,
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played a role as well, in particular for students from South Asia and the People’s Republic of China. Naidu (1997, p. 149) suggests these motives are common in South Pacific communities as well, and is ‘particularly the case for Tongan, Samoan and Indo-Fijian students’. More recently, the phenomenon of temporary migration by ‘astronaut families and parachute children’ has emerged, as families from Asia temporarily re-locate so the children can pursue an Anglo-phone education (Pe-Pau, Mitchell, Castles & Iredale, 1998). Given the construction of international student as risk, such literature is mostly concerned with exploring strategies to manage that risk by way of visa restrictions, compliance measures, applicant screening and fee structures. Such studies have informed the development of regulatory legislation (DETYA, 1999; Educational Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 2000; Evans & Tregenza, 2002).
The literature regarding the nexus between the business of internationalised education and its migration risks also raises the implications of outward migrations from the source country as a ‘brain drain’ of valuable human capital. Sullivan and Gunasekaran (1992) report the contradictory impressions – on one hand, mainstream Australia not welcoming the Asian migrant, who is perceived as a potential drain on welfare funds, while sending countries complain about the ‘brain drain’ loss of citizens with high educational attainments and business skills. Their study showed a disproportionate flow of highly skilled professionals from Hong Kong and the five ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) nations, Singapore in particular, but with other categories of immigrant complicating any claims of an exacerbated ‘brain drain’. In fact, Nesdale et al. (1995) recommend that Australia should court international students as value-added immigrants, being young, linguistically and culturally oriented, and highly educated in local institutions at no cost to Australia. They even suggest that the government take a passive role in facilitating this flow to distance itself from recriminations of poaching from the source country. Though this study is particularly concerned with online provision which does not displace the student from their country of residence, this association between international study and migratory possibilities remains pertinent in terms of the possible life paths it opens up, and the implications this might have for students’ futures, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.
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In addition to risks of migration, international student recruitment has been portrayed as a risk to quality provision for domestic students, displacing the marginal Australian student, ‘dumbing-down’ or skewing curricula to international rather than local needs, and eroding assessment standards. Writing in 1989, at an early stage of developments, the Bureau of Industry Economics (1989, p. 25) warned that ‘some less able but qualified Australian residents could be denied a place’. Harris and Jarrett (1990, p. xiv) warned of ‘increased racial prejudice’ if Australian students find themselves ‘crowded out’ in their domestic institutions. Nesdale et al. (1995, pp. 1-2) build on this theme of institutional risk in their comment that the flows of international students have ‘embroiled the education export industry in local debates about privatisation, access and equity and the proper role of the state in Australian educational policy and planning’. Humfrey’s cognate analysis of the internationalisation of UK institutions (1999, p. 32) portrays the proliferation of coursework masters in response to international demand as risky business that may ‘debase the currency’. Such literature voices public fears about mixing education and business, fears which persist and resonate in this study’s interview data, and build the moral landscape around internationalised education.
In response to such concerns, Hacket and Nowak’s (1999) comparative evaluation of onshore and offshore business degrees is carefully couched in a discourse of quality control. Though both offshore and onshore international students were found to have performed comparatively well with low attrition rates, twinning arrangements with partner institutions in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong were constructed as risks that needed to be managed, and that Australian standards were best protected by Australian nationals.
Rather than seeing international markets as having unintended, deleterious effects on the domestic sector, Marginson (1997) construes such impact as a more intentional and manipulative process engineered by neoliberal interests. Marginson suggests that international marketing has been used more as leverage to shift domestic educational policy towards marketisation, than for any improvement on, or investment in, cross-cultural education exchange per se. He uses the international full-fee student market as a case study of how education has been infiltrated by
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market economic theory, reconceiving education as a positional good and commodity of exchange value, rather than a common good of use value.
On a national scale, the internationalisation of higher education has also been reported to pose the risk of cultural homogenisation, threatening national identities. De Wit and Knight (1997, p. 178) consider this perceived threat of neocolonialism, evident in the ‘tension between the need to preserve one’s own language and the acknowledgment of English as the academic lingua franca’ as particularly significant in the Asia Pacific region. Jolley (1997, pp. 46-47), in his snapshots of the different Asian markets, flags these concerns as significant inhibitors which are played out in nations’ higher education policies. He reports ‘considerable tension between internationalisation and nationalism’, with some nations more fragile or robust in this regard, according to their economic position.
Risks to the students themselves have also been researched. Cannon’s (1999) interview study of returned Indonesian students gives a complicated picture of the advantages and disadvantages of international study for the student. Though professional and academic benefits were reported, including personal growth and some cultural, social and career advantages, the students reportedly found their return problematic, and experienced difficulties in implementing the learning they achieved in their subsequent work placements, depending on the organisational culture. Since the events of 11 September 2001, international students have also been associated with the risk of terrorism in the public imaginary. Jaeger and Burnett (2003) report on the climate of suspicion and fear which has tightened enrolment and visa scrutiny of international students in the US, and the introduction of legislation deterring the online modes for on-shore international students, in case it masks more sinister activities.
In line with the shift to the policy discourse of ‘internationalisation’ in the early 90s, literature increasingly constructed the international student as a curriculum resource that would enrich university life, add to research efforts and internationalise education as much for the domestic student as for themselves through their mere presence (e.g. Barthel, 1993; Pittaway, Ferguson & Breen, 1998). Such vicarious presence is more tenuous in online environments, however, it 30
will be shown in Chapter 6 that such hopes and discourse were influential in the design of the case study unit. Though a persuasive argument on paper, empirical studies suggest that local student bodies may still need to be convinced of the benefit to themselves. While Pittaway, Ferguson and Breen (1998) surveyed local students and reported that ‘the opportunity to study with overseas students has, on balance, been of benefit to their academic experience’, citing personal international networks, and enhanced institution status, Smart, Volet and Ang (2000, p. 9) reveal a contrasting picture of ‘two parallel streams of students proceeding through university - the Australian and the international – within close proximity but, in the majority of cases, with little or only superficial contact and interaction’. De Wit and Knight (1997, p. 175) suggest that these cultural interface functions ‘seem to be secondary to the economic motive’. However, such official motives probably serve important rhetorical functions, redressing Australia’s aggressive reputation in the market.
The pursuit of international students is also portrayed as an investment in Australia’s future regional relations. For example Back and Davis (1995, p. 121) in their review of Australian internationalisation strategies, observe that ‘today there is clearer understanding of the many academic, professional, social, cultural and foreign relations advantages, as well as economic benefits, which internationalisation can bring’. Similar arguments have been used to ask whether such benefits to the wider community justify public subsidy when it comes to pricing the product (Industry Commission, 1990).
The various constructions of the international student reviewed above include a range of disciplinary lenses watching the field with interest, and a variety of domains shaping how to think about and cater for the international student. It is significant that the literature review thus far has been organised around business metaphors of ‘investment’, ‘risk’, ‘revenue’ and ‘resource’, as their coherence demonstrates how the practice of internationalised education has been sustained and nurtured within a dominant business discourse. Simply put, the international student as an object of study outside educational disciplines is largely viewed with dollar signs attached. In the following section I turn to studies with a more explicitly
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educational focus whereby the international student is constructed foremost as a special category of learner.
2.2.2 International students as learners With the arrival of international students in ever more noticeable numbers in Australian higher education, a research literature emerged that constructed the international student as a problem, that is, as a deficit or misfit learner with special needs stemming from their cultural and/or linguistic difference. From the outset, this construction as educational ‘problem’ has been influential in shaping institutional responses to the new student body, and over time concern about English language competency has been subsumed into the more pervasive discourse of cultural difference as ‘the problem’.
Ballard and Clanchy have written a number of influential ‘how to’ books (1984, 1988, 1991, 1997) for international students in Australian higher education and their lecturers. These publications outline a clash between Western and Eastern learning cultures and the adjustments necessary from both sides of the lecturer/learner relationship to create some ‘goodness of fit’ in order to negotiate the inevitable culture shock (Ballard, 1987). They argue through their corpus of work that the difficulties experienced by international students stem not so much from the surface difficulty of competence in the language of instruction, but from discontinuities in ‘cultures of learning’, in particular, in regard to the treatment of knowledge and academic authority. The following quote exemplifies the polarised binary produced in this ‘cultures of learning’ discourse:
In Western education it is axiomatic that knowledge is gained and extended through critical analysis, by individuals working with increasing independence … yet such a view, we often forget, is culture-bound … In Asia, for example ... knowledge is not open to challenge and extension in this way, and academic education may have little to do with the beginning of wisdom. … Similarly, the written or printed work carries great authority … (Ballard, 1987, p. 114)
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Part of this influential discourse of cultural learning styles is the reification and valorisation of normative codes of participation in the Western academy:
In Australia, these students are suddenly faced with teachers who seem dangerously informal, who raise questions and then leave them unanswered …. They are now expected to ask questions, accept criticism, participate in tutorials and seminars, and, above all, to argue … (Ballard, 1987, p. 114115)
Ballard and Clanchy (1991, 1997) juxtapose Confucian reverence for expertise against the Western academic tradition’s esteem for critical and speculative thinking, and suggest these dominant mindsets ‘gradually come to frame and determine the educational processes at work in different societies at different moments in their history’ (1997, p. 11). The international student (presumed to be from Asia) was understood to favour rote or surface memorisation over deeper understanding, to be reluctant to engage in critical discussion or questioning of ideas, and to reproduce knowledge as opposed to generating new ideas from critique or synthesis. The perceived passivity and ‘reticence’ of the international student from Asia was attributed to respect for the position of teacher, and their perceived propensity to plagiarise was attributed to their cultural practice of reverence to the masters’ work.
This theme of international students being/having/creating problems of a cultural origin has continued to frame much educational discourse about international students. For example, recent studies highlight: the ‘silent issues’ of emotional vulnerabilities of the international postgraduate (Ingleton & Cadman, 2002); the effect on lecturer workloads from how students in Hong Kong ‘cope’ with Australian curricula, pedagogies and assessment (Evans & Treganza, 2002); strategies to reduce ‘learning barriers’ amongst international students (Pearson & Beasley, 1996); how internationalisation is experienced as pedagogical problems in secondary schools enrolling international students (Edwards & Tudball, 2002); the need for ‘an incremental orientation program’ to promote the success of international students in face-to-face and online courses (Jepson, Turner & Calway,
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2002); and the adjustments international students must make in their approach to learning across time (Gordon, 2002).
In their review of research on social networks of international students, Smart, Volet and Ang (2000) outline the literature’s persistent theme that portrays the ‘problem’ and thus the solution in terms of the international student’s adjustment to the host culture. As a result, the international student is constructed as not only educationally challenged, but also socially challenged, and ‘(t)he mutual role of local students in social encounters is hardly mentioned, nor the characteristics of the local environments which may inhibit interactions between the two groups. (p. 18). This thesis attempts to address this blind spot, with close attention to how the interactions and features of the pedagogical setting contribute to the expression of cultural difference.
There is however a growing literature that challenges the ethnocentrism of this ubiquitous ‘problem’ reading of cultural difference. Biggs (1997) suggests that the internationalisation of education tends in practice to become the ‘Westernisation’ of education (p. 5). He outlines strengths in the Confucian-heritage learning culture that are commonly dismissed or underplayed by western educators and distinguishes between three possible rationales behind pedagogical practice in cross-cultural settings:
1. The pseudo-etic, (differences as fixed attributes, and thus ‘the problem’ with students from other cultural backgrounds); 2. The emic, or relativist position; and 3. The etic, claiming universals behind cultural differences, ‘good teaching/learning’ (that is, constructivism) can apply in any cultural frame.
Biggs draws on his etic rationale to conclude that ‘problems did not reside in the international students, but in the poor quality of teaching experienced by all students’ (p. 17). Similarly, Chalmers and Volet (1997) take issue with the persistent deficit typecasting of the international student from Asia as passive, rote learners who lack analytical and critical skills and avoid mixing with or adjusting to the Australian community, and suggest that ‘when the “problem” is attributed to the 34
students, teachers can avoid examining their own attitudes and practices’ (p. 96). Chan (1999) offers a less deficit reading of how and why the Chinese-heritage students display a different learning style with a treatment of Eastern philosophy and history to correct ‘misconceptions Westerners may have about Chinese learning styles’ (p.294). Biggs’ appeal to some transcendent, optimal pedagogy has informed other studies that propose pedagogical solutions of ‘transcultural’ pedagogy (Cadman, 2000), or solutions that address academic problems shared by domestic and international students alike (Mullins, Quintrell & Hancock, 1995). This counter-discourse may dispute the particular attributes and relative value ascribed to cultural learning styles, but does not deconstruct or challenge the concept of predictable cultural learning styles per se, and fails to address how pedagogy can work to construct cultural difference in situ.
In contrast, an early critique by Alexander and Rizvi (1993) also challenges the construction of the international students as ‘the problem’, but applies a wider critical lens to explore the cultural politics of internationalised education. Alexander and Rizvi criticise the practice of international marketing of education as though it were a culturally neutral, standardised commodity and the unchallenged ethnocentrism of Australia’s tertiary curricula. They suggest the latter is reliant on a dated ‘development’ view of the enterprise, at odds with post-colonial conditions. They argued that ‘issues concerning cultural formation and pedagogic relations’ (p. 16) have been consistently overlooked in Australia’s enthusiasm for garnering income via the export of education.
A number of recent empirical studies explore such cultural politics in internationalised education in more detail. Sidhu’s thesis (2002) examines how the marketing discourses emanating from major sellers of internationalised higher education construct the international student in ways that support neocolonial and neoliberal practices at odds with policy rhetoric of ‘interdependence’. Dooley (2003) shows how the classroom practices and professional discourses of Australian teachers can actively produce the behaviours attributed to Chinese students. This work articulates with similar efforts by critical and postcolonial theorists working in the field of ESL pedagogy, who have also taken issue with the reified, culturalist notions of the Asian learner frequently employed in mainstream ESL practice 35
(Canagarajah, 1999; Kubota, 1999, 2001; Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Pennycook, 2001, 1999).
This study will build on such critiques. Rather than conceiving of education as something done to students, my study will read pedagogy as a co-construction between teachers and students. This study interrogates not only lecturer and student accounts of their understanding and experience of cultural differences, but also the pedagogic exchange, to see how the interaction produces lecturer and student identities. Thus, rather than treating cultural difference as a given precursor to pedagogical interaction, it will be treated as a production of relations in these sites of globalising education.
Despite the dominant ‘problem’ image of the international student, evidence suggests that the international student achieves academic parity with the local student. Dobson, Sharma and Calderon (1998) conducted a review of government data on unit and award completion by overseas and Australian students, which demonstrated high comparative performance by overseas students in several fields of study and comparable performance in other disciplines. Similar to their respective Australian cohorts, external international students did not perform as well as internal international students, yet they performed as well as external Australian students. Dobson et al. suggest that the international student body may self-select more for success than their Australian colleagues, given the high costs involved. Hacket and Nowak’s (1999, p. 11) evaluation of parallel onshore and offshore programs concludes that ‘pass rates for offshore international students were higher than for on-campus international students. On-campus international students achieved higher pass rates than Australian on-campus students’.
The persistent orthodoxy of international student as a problematic learner, impeded by a culturally different learning style, has nevertheless informed much of the institutional responses to this student group, in particular the widespread strategy of ‘Foundation’ and bridging programs in universities. These are reception programs of typically one to two semesters of full time study that aim to introduce and socialise the international student into the appropriate dominant educational practices of the host country, thus circumventing any possible problems of cultural 36
adjustment in their future studies (see Coleman, 1998; Doherty, 2001; Humfrey, 1999). The limited research pertaining to these programs designed for international students at on-shore or off-shore campuses is pertinent to this study in two ways. Firstly, their design makes visible the institutionalised construction of the international student subject, at the point of reception where any agenda of socialisation is at its most overt. Secondly, these programs seem less evident as requirements or pathways for students in the emerging market of online internationalised study, where entrance requirements are more typically expressed as English language competency requirements and prerequisite accredited studies. So where the Foundation (for undergraduate students) or bridging (for graduate students) programs have hitherto constituted a template institutional response to manage the ‘problem’ of international students with their cultural and linguistic difference, the protocols surrounding online programs seem to have minimised overt concerns about ‘cultural difference’. This marks a significant shift in how the higher education sector is willing to understand the international student, and whether cultural difference is considered to matter much.
The Foundation program has developed as a pathway articulating the student’s home country education, English language courses and eventual entry into university undergraduate offerings in the UK and Australia. By Humfrey’s account (1999), the Foundation year serves a number of purposes, including: allowing some conversion or comparison of educational qualification across disparate national systems; an opportunity for ‘acculturation’; an improvement on the previous UK practice of enrolling international students in unaltered matriculation courses in the name of orientation and selection; and a check on disciplinary prerequisites. In a typical mixture of education, business and moral concerns, Humfrey’s book on ‘managing the international student’ also warns against the ‘seductive’ possibility of oversubscribing the foundation courses, which may result in ‘dilution of the mission’ of higher education (p. 31) unless the income generated in turn subsidises access courses for local students. Foundation programs offered within higher education institutions in Australia have grown rapidly over the last fifteen years as institutional solutions to the ‘cultural difference’ problem of the newly arrived international student. They are now recognised and endorsed as a legitimate entry path to higher education by national universities and aid funding bodies. Coleman’s 37
(1998) analysis of the Foundation programs in Australia suggests these programs play an important role beyond that of baiting the fee-paying student at an early entry point to the particular university. These programs act as gatekeepers, providing ‘an equity bridge to students who would be unable to gain entry to an international, let alone a domestic, university without it’ (p. 20) but with due attention to sifting and sorting the applicants for selection, and their preparation.
The dilemma of generic preparatory courses for discipline specific studies has received some attention. Buckingham (1993, p. 45) argues that the one-size-fits-all provision does not address the needs of diverse students with diverse disciplinary trajectories and specialised language requirements. Buckingham then suggests that oversimplified understandings of English language proficiency allow ‘English problems’ to become an easy scapegoat rationale with which both lecturers and students account for failure. In the same vein, Lo Bianco (1999) argues that the audit culture’s desire for measurable indicators has privileged generic decontextualised language/literacy performance data over the more problematic context-embedded paradigm of language/literacy researchers and educators. This derives simple cross-cultural comparative measures in which the language/literacy data can act as ‘proxy measures for, among other things, average education levels in a given society, or for the “rates of return” calculated for particular levels of investment in education’ (Lo Bianco, 1999, p. 6). In Foundation and bridging programs, English language competence measures such as the internationally recognised International English Language Testing System (IELTS) or Test of English Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores often act in this way, that is, as proxy measures of intellectual readiness for mainstream university study. Entry and exit levels into the various stages of the articulated pathways are often expressed in, and dictated by, English proficiency scores. Buckingham (1993) critiques this standard practice as poorly informed language pedagogy.
To measure the success of Foundation programs in preparing students for university study, Coleman (1998) compared the academic records of three cohorts of students – the international foundation program graduate, the international direct entry student and the local matriculant - across the years of their degree and selected disciplines. His findings reveal that evaluating the success of these programs is 38
more than simply reading a league table of results because of the complication that too much success by the Foundation graduate may indicate that the course was unnecessary.
These studies of Foundation programs have limited themselves to educational processes and outcomes, mixed with business concerns. In contrast, Singh and Doherty in a series of articles discussed below have interrogated these educational sites as ‘contact zones’ following Pratt (1992), reflecting and constituting wider processes of cultural contact, negotiation and conflict. Drawing on teacher interview data to look inside the design of such programs, Doherty (2001) suggests that the preparatory programs that attempt to deliver a ‘conversion kit’ curriculum in how to perform ‘Western student’ behaviours, are in fact sites of conflict, resistance and pedagogical compromises, riven by tensions between diverse models of student/teacher relationships. The teachers’ accounts describe resentment, passive resistance, protest and coercion in the educational interactions, rather than benign processes of mutual enrichment as envisaged under policies of ‘internationalisation’. The teachers’ accounts consistently drew on a homogeneous construction of the passive ‘Asian’ international student that reflected the ‘problem’ construction of the international student reviewed above.
Singh and Doherty (2004) analyse the pedagogic dilemmas produced for teachers in on-shore and off-shore sites as they strive to respect and cater for cultural sensibilities while at the same time provoking the participatory student behaviour idealised in their version of Western pedagogy. From the teachers’ interview accounts of their selection or avoidance of certain topics in their Foundation/English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, it was demonstrated that teachers resolved such dilemmas in markedly different ways, some choosing to carefully avoid any culturally sensitive topics, others choosing to engage in active campaigns of ‘desensitising’ such topics by exposure to them. In their accounts, all teachers drew on holistic, located notions of culture that failed to engage with the globalisation of education in which they themselves played an active part.
Doherty and Singh (2005a) then interrogate the construction of cultural scripts in the curriculum and observed classroom events, elaborated in interviews with 39
teachers reflecting on their rationales for the particular observed events. They describe the staged rehearsal and performance of Western classroom roles, in particular, the active student role in tutorial discussion and seminar presentations. From this reconstruction, it was argued that such curricula are simulating an imagined, idealised version of Western pedagogic roles that is disconnected in a number of ways from the more complicated reality of the Western academy as it grapples with processes of internationalisation and globalisation. In a more recent paper, Doherty and Singh (2005b) analyse student interview data to argue that the mobile student is better understood as pursuing a ‘biographical solution’ through speculative investments in a context of globalising economies and the transnational resources.
In a further problematisation of the dominant ‘problem’ construction of the international student, Michael Singh (2002) offers a rethinking of the internationalised university in global times as a space for innovative teaching/learning opportunities, trans-national identities, and the international student not as a problem, but as an opportunity. He argues for a critical globalism/localism that ‘offers academics the critical distance to complicate homely views of their university and protects against the unquestioning imposition on them of neo-liberal globalism from above’ (p. 4). He suggests that the international students’ sojourn be understood as fieldwork, a co-residence interested in the localisation of the institution, but inevitably bringing its own globalising influence.
The subjectivities of international students have also been probed in a number of recent Australian studies using interview data. Rizvi (2000) finds that Malaysian students studying in Australia are not victims of unbridled Westernisation, but rather knowing and selective agents, with global aspirations and a ‘global imagination’, ‘chasing economic, social, educational, and cultural opportunities’ (p. 223). Similarly, in two related articles by Bullen and Kenway, a stark contrast in constructions of the international student subject is drawn. On one hand, university staff ‘imagine’ female international students through a gendered Orientalist discourse which infantilises and homogenises them (Bullen & Kenway, 2003). On the other hand, the students themselves report a variety of strategies, being ‘the art(s) of foreignness’ (Zournazi, quoted in Kenway & Bullen 2003, p. 17) that can 40
engage, mitigate or resist such positioning. Kettle (2005) uses critical discourse analysis on student interview data to track the shifts in an international student’s self-construction from a ‘nobody’ to a ‘somebody’ in Australian higher education settings, suggesting that identity work takes place in the educational setting.
This set of studies treat the international student as more than a one-dimensional, culturally determined pawn, and educational processes as a part of larger social processes of cultural politics, entanglement and change. Thus the international student becomes a very different object of study, more difficult to objectify, or grasp without reference to particular contexts and their relations within and beyond. This last set of articles prepares the ground for this study, in that they construct the interactions in education as a co-construction realised in mutual engagement and cultural entanglement. They also entertain the possibility of new forms of cultural identity being generated on site. This approach contrasts with earlier research accounts that describe primordial ‘given’ cultural dispositions and cultural scripts being repeatedly and predictably played out.
From the literature review thus far, I also wish to highlight the prominence given to normative codes of interaction. The educational ‘problem’ of international students is repeatedly attributed to their ‘passive’ contrast to the ‘active’, participatory student behaviours desired in idealised scripts of Western pedagogy. Preparatory programs explicitly instruct the international student in this interaction code, then rehearse and assess the students’ performance of it as prerequisite to their mainstreamed studies. This code of interactivity is considered essential to the critical, dialogic production of knowledge in the Western academy. I now turn to review the literature pertaining to online modes of education, where again, codes and practices of interactivity are prominent empirical and theoretical concerns, and business motivations continue to play a formative role.
2.3 Understanding online educational environments The emerging literature about online education falls into distinct camps. Firstly, there is a growing body of work that attempts to make sense of what online educational environments are, what they should be, and how to think about them.
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This literature tends to be emotive – either making an evangelical case about the ‘potential’ of online learning environments, or making the resistant, nostalgic counter-case of what has been ‘lost’ in the move to online education. Both sides draw heavily on a binary contrast between face-to-face teaching and online teaching, while a few voices argue for some ‘third space’ metaphor that can recognise unique qualities and affordances of the online setting, with a more problematised and less polarised agenda. Given that the move to online delivery modes has been driven by enthusiasms, ‘demand’ and market imperatives rather than by educational research, the overtly value-laden nature of this literature is not surprising. Secondly, empirical research at this stage tends to be of a ‘show and tell’, ‘best practice’ or reflective after-the-fact variety, whereby a practitioner describes and explores events that occurred in an online program of study then draws some generalisable conclusions to inform future practice. This literature, though in its infancy, usefully documents the questions and concerns that people using these environments have at this stage of developments. Thirdly, there is a growing body of professional ‘how to’ literature that recommends certain practices for quality online teaching/learning, on the grounds that the mode of delivery demands certain tactics. This literature is influential in shaping a discursive orthodoxy of what is thinkable and sayable about online education, and has informed the new profession of multimedia ‘instructional/ educational designer’.
This section will review the landscape of issues and influential ideas in each of these camps to convey a sense of what is understood about online educational environments, and how this study can contribute to these emergent understandings. It will also consider how issues of cultural identity and difference have been represented in this field. The review will purposefully limit its focus to literature that addresses pedagogical aspects of online or virtual environments, and will not deal with literature that pertains more to the business aspects of online education, though, as will become evident, such aspects are inevitably interwoven to some degree, as they are in the literature regarding international students.
2.3.1 Framing online education The work of Laurillard (1993, 2002) has been instrumental in setting the agenda ‘for’ the integration of educational technology in Australian universities. Her first
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book offered a careful assessment of the educational media on offer, and their relative weaknesses and strengths, measured against her ‘conversational framework’ (1993, p. 102) for higher education, situated in the larger political context that rendered inertia and tradition inadequate responses to the emerging economy of higher education. Laurillard distinguished higher education from more general everyday learning, in that it is ultimately mediated – it is learning not about the world directly, but about interpretations of the world. Her framework focussed particularly on undergraduate programs where students are introduced to existing bodies of knowledge, and articulated four criteria for effective teaching/learning: that it be discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective. Laurillard’s analysis drew purposefully on research accounts of how each medium is in fact used in the service of contextualised learning, not on the more promotional accounts of what each medium potentially offers. Following her stocktake of what each technological medium has ‘to offer’, Laurillard offers an ‘organizational blueprint’ allocating responsibilities and tasks for the successful integration, exploitation and cyclical evaluation of educational media in the higher education institution. Versions of this blueprint are now realised in the teaching/learning units established in each Australian university, with their pool of consultant educational and multimedia designers.
Laurillard distinguished five categories of educational media: audio-visual, hypermedia, interactive media, adaptive media, and discursive media. It is the last group of discursive tools (including teleconferencing, audio-visual conferencing, computer-mediated conferencing and video-conferencing) ‘whose specific task is to bring people together to discuss’ (Laurillard, 1993, p. 164), in which this study is particularly interested. In her opinion, asynchronous computer conferencing offered a logistical solution rather than a pedagogical solution to a dispersed student body, with the added advantage of encouraging student reflection in the preparation of the written posting, and increased student control of the discourse.
Since Laurillard’s first book, the enthusiasm for educational technologies in Australian universities has typically converged on internet applications. Laurillard’s second edition (2002) retains a more streamlined framework of mediated learning and the same four criteria for quality, but her initial categories of learning media are 43
reworked to reflect the emerging common usage of some of the terms involved, and new educational technologies. The category of ‘communicative’ media now refers to technological means of interaction between course participants. In this later edition, Laurillard reports findings about students’ more extended contributions via asynchronous conferencing, and is prepared to endorse such media’s pedagogical value, where she had considered it more a logistical solution before. She couches this in a sceptical discussion of the ‘strong belief’ (p. 148) in the value of peer-topeer collaboration, balanced by the positive contribution of ‘communal eavesdropping’ (p. 150) to student learning.
Laurillard, though an advocate for technology in higher education, cannot be accused of a ‘hard sell’ evident in the arguments of other enthusiasts (for example, Maeroff 2003; Tiffin & Rajasingham 1995, 2003; Tiffin & Terashima 2001). She is more concerned with providing a balanced analysis grounded in evaluative research of educational technologies in use, with the theme of technology serving educational goals in a reflexive design process, taking the economic pressures as given and the need to be adaptive as a matter of fact. In contrast, Brabazon (2002) offers a more passionately worded case ‘against’ online educational technologies, arguing that the push to online modes of delivery masks the concomitant commodification of knowledge and education. Where Laurillard attempts to extricate what ‘is’ from what ‘could be’, Brabazon is concerned with what ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be.
Brabazon (2002) draws from her own teaching career and its growing, enforced involvement in online modes of teaching. She draws on an evidentiary basis of student evaluations, her own and student course emails, and autobiographical accounts of her teaching experiences, to create a counter-discourse which she likens to Socrates’ practice of asking questions ‘against the grain’, which led to his ‘taking the hemlock’ on charges of heresy. Brabazon situates the perceived rush to internet delivery modes in a context of widespread ‘crisis’ in Western universities, brought about by a revenue squeeze despite burgeoning student enrolments, indiscriminate application of managerialist quality controls, including the privileging of student evaluations, and increasingly instrumental ‘vocationalism’ displacing traditional values of scholarship and critical enquiry. She argues that ‘flexible’ delivery has 44
imposed onerous and unacknowledged workloads on teaching staff, and that the commodification of higher education has recreated the student as consumer with disproportionate client power. She invokes a nostalgic version of the ‘artistry’ (p. 63) of the lecture and tutorial genres, and argues that the body of teachers, ‘that clothes, gestures and grain of voice’ (p. 107), contribute to teaching, in ways that cannot be replicated in the asynchronous discussion. She similarly mourns the demise of the hard copy library and is suspicious of the concept of ‘virtual community’. Brabazon in effect is arguing that the enthusiasm for online delivery modes is not propelled by pedagogical concerns and thus demand from teachers and students, but rather by the ‘three Ms -massification, managerialism and marketisation’ (p. 136). Like Laurillard, she can see the logistical benefits for the dispersed student body whereby online interaction is better than no interaction, but is vociferous in her critique of online tools for the on-campus student. She also argues that online interaction renders course interactions ‘colour blind’ (p. 179).
Brabazon is one example of the case ‘against’ online learning models. Others include Speck (2000) who warns against the ‘rush to become wired … that appears to be heedless of the ethical fabric of academic life’ (p. 75), precipitated by economic interests in the absence of an adequate research basis. Carstens and Worsfold (2000) predict the death of a liberal education in online education’s technological environments: ‘Overreliance on visual culture … shortcircuits the brain development necessary for literacy, as well as critical and abstract thinking’ (p. 85). Clegg, Hudson and Steel (2003) argue for a more critical stance towards the spiralling investments in e-learning. They are critical of the 'boosterism' and 'cyperbole' (p. 44) and the way it is inexorably linked to managerialism and simplistic ideologies of globalisation imperatives.
In this emotionally and morally charged field, Burbules and Callister (2000a) argue for a less polarised debate that need not rely on nostalgic versions of an idealised university, ‘a mythic past of tweedy seminars and one-on-one tutorials’ (2000a, p. 274), and can engage more with current political and economic circumstances. Though acknowledging institutional trends of performativity, and a human capital/vocational bias similar to Brabazon’s scenario, Burbules and Callister seek to separate pedagogical issues of online learning arguing that ‘the fact is that many 45
of these trends are well-established in regular courses and programs already’ and pre-date the push to online modes (2000a, p. 274). They approach online learning as neither good nor bad in itself – it provides advantages and disadvantages the same as any pedagogical practice - and needs to be engaged with in terms of its unique affordances, rather than through spurious comparison with face-to-face teaching. They argue that the common metaphor of ‘delivery’ mode with its connotations of transporting a package, is unfortunate, and suggest that Internet educational environments be considered as ‘working spaces’ whose interactions are ‘not just supplements to the classroom experience; they are unique and irreplaceable learning opportunities themselves; and often they can exist only online, not in ‘real’ classrooms. (2000a, p. 277)
In the broader context of the ‘escalating stakes’ (2000a, p. 290) of globalisation, Burbules and Callister argue that universities have no choice but to embrace technological means given the fact that commercial providers will inevitably capitalise on such an opportunity. Where Brabazon accuses technological means of making access inequitable, they argue the opposite, that making university education available only on-site is itself inequitable. Most powerfully, Burbules and Callister argue for a disaggregation of the singular phenomenon of ‘online education’, ‘a finer-grained view of which technologies have educational potential for which students, for which subject matters, and for which purposes. (2000a, p. 287)
In their book, Burbules and Callister (2000b) give a more detailed treatment of their ‘post-technocratic’ approach that resists framing issues of information technologies in education as an either/or debate between ‘boosterism or rejectionism’ (2000b, p. 3), and acknowledges the much more ambivalent, contradictory and double-edged implications of technologies applied to education. This is a much more ambivalent conceptualisation than Laurillard’s balanced but essentially technocratic notion of what technologies ‘have to offer’ (Laurillard, 2002, p. 81). Burbules and Callister suggest that these technologies are employed ‘for better and for worse’ (2000b, p. 2), and their effects are not derived from technical design, but rather from the reflexive relation between the technology, its uses and its users. With this theme, they address issues of access and credibility, hypertext, critical web literacy, 46
censorship, privacy, commercialisation, and community to demonstrate the doublesideness of any innovation, and how any ‘good’ ironically produces its own form of relative disadvantage.
Of particular interest to this study, is their treatment of community, space and place on the Internet. Community is understood as an ideological project, producing a ‘politics of community’ that seeks to derive a common affiliation in the face of diversity, with an inherent tension: ‘The social space involves a re-construction of proximity, homogeneity and familiarity on the basis of a desire for conformity and avoidance of deep conflict in the face of plurality’ (2000b, p. 161). They describe how the architecture of design and usage in dialectic tension converts space to place, via the structuring of activity across five dimensions. These five dimensions are: movement/stasis; interaction/isolation; publicity/privacy; visibility/hiddeness; enclosure/exclusion (Burbules & Callister 2000b, p. 162) The conditions produced by these dimensions will shape and pattern the interactivity possible, and thus any community realised: ‘We know where we are when we know what we are supposed to do, and vice versa’ (2000b, p. 162). To this could be added, ‘and whether we belong’. The proliferation of possible communities on the Internet produces choices: ‘… in a very clear sense, here as elsewhere, choosing a community means in part choosing who one is; and changing communities, or exploring new communities, is a process of exploring or experimenting with new selves’ (2000b, p. 168). Under this lens, the choice of institution by the international student could be viewed as a significant gesture of identity construction or aspiration.
The collection edited by Lea and Nicoll (2002) offers more analyses that go beyond the for/against and technicist rhetoric, with their common approach to online learning as sets of situated social practices linked to other policy, economic and social changes. In this situated frame, learning technologies are neither neutral nor independent causal factors bringing about radical pedagogical change. Rather, they are opportunistically intertwined, implicated, and complicit with a constellation of changes reconfiguring the Western academy, including new student bodies, marketisation and commodification, ‘lifelong learning’ imperatives, performativity and globalisation:
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Globalisation and the commodification of education have gone hand in hand, and the tertiary sector is increasingly looking to offer global course delivery, harnessing the use of new information technologies to do this in apparently uncomplicated ways. The complex relationship between the global and the local context is nowhere more evident than in global courses using ICT for course delivery. (Lea & Nicoll, 2002, p. 7) This conflation of developments is shown to produce epistemological challenges (Lankshear & Knobel, 2002), new literacy practices (Edwards, Nicoll & Lee, 2002; Morgan, Russell & Ryan 2002; see also Lea 2001), new articulations with the workplace (Billett, 2002), new politics of culture and language (Mayor & Swann, 2002) and new appreciations of what the physical campus offers (Crook, 2002). Edwards (2002) argues that paradoxical tensions inherent in globalisation are also produced in distributed learning, ‘as it enables people to be kept “in their place”, while at the same time enabling them to be brought together across great physical distances’ (p. 106) with radically new forms of interconnectivity. Edwards also raises critical concerns about ‘hidden curricula’ (p. 107) of cultural design and new hegemonic forms of oppression carried in distributed education.
A more overtly post-modern lens on issues of community/identity and cyberspace education explores the complex and disorienting ‘reconfiguration’ of pedagogical practices as temporal and spatial structures that are blurred and disrupted under conditions of globalisation. Edwards and Usher (2000) argue that the technological means of online education and its associated media and information flows construct a global awareness, but also ‘paradoxically, an assertion of the local and the specific arising from the heightened consciousness induced by globalisation of the relativity and significance of place’ (p. 10). They term this paradoxical consciousness as ‘(dis)location, signifying that auto/biography is not bounded but framed in relation to diverse others, governed by alterity rather than foreignness’ (p. 40), then argue that information and communication technologies make possible more fluid forms of identity by providing new circuits to connect with. This newly imagined network geography of cyberspace’s ‘non-space’ they argue is ‘productive if problematic’ (p.46). They suggest that attempts to theorise online learning give prominence to issues of ‘relationality’, as ‘a mark, at the level of micropractices, of
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the macrolevel interconnectedness of globalisation’ (p. 71), given that the new spaces of online education are now ‘diasporan’ (p. 154) constituted in ‘new and complex patterns of interconnectedness’(p. 72).
In a similar re-imaging of online pedagogy, Cooper (1999) explores the postmodern possibilities of electronic pedagogy and, more particularly, the ambivalence it evokes in teachers. Cooper suggests it is both their utopian ideal and their nightmare, with its idiosyncratic multivocality, surface readings, disputed boundaries and lateral connections. She suggests that the ambivalence can be explained by our moment of transition between modernist and postmodernist frames, in particular in regard to knowledge, language, the self, power and responsibility, and assumptions about teachers’ roles. She links the postmodern crisis in legitimation of knowledge to the opportunity for students to distance themselves from responsibility in the ethical relativity of postmodern cyberspace.
The texts reviewed in the section above engage with the question of how we might think about online educational environments, and educational media in general. At this early stage in developments, this question needs to be understood as inextricably linked with both the political and economic agendas driving the push for online delivery addressed in Chapter 1, and the networked geography of global possibilities they make available. Questions regarding the new forms of community affiliation and a suitable ethics for virtual interaction are also raised as pertinent to this study. This study seeks to articulate with the last set of literature which eschews technicist for/against positions but rather engages with the virtual mode’s complexities in terms of social relations, and identity potentials. In particular, Burbules and Callister’s distinction between space and place will inform this study’s distinction between the design and conduct of online education. The next section reviews the growing body of literature that reports empirical studies of online pedagogy.
2.3.2 Researching online education Firstly, it needs to be acknowledged that there is a common complaint about the lack of rigorous empirical research to inform practice in online education.
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Laurillard, in her second edition (2002), complains that despite nine intervening years, there is no cumulative research literature about information technologies in education on which to draw. Wallace (2003), in a review of extant research literature on online learning interaction, also bemoans the lack of a coherent research basis to the proliferating practice: 'While interesting and perhaps useful to online educators as they plan new courses, most articles and books in these categories - advocacy, success stories, and how-to books - lack a research perspective’ (pp. 243-244). Meyan et al. (2002) make a similar complaint, noting that ‘a new form of pedagogy has emerged. However, much of it is not the result of research.’ (2002, p. 38) They propose a ‘programmatic research construct’ to prioritise ‘research needs as a way of maximising the effectiveness of e-learning designs in meeting the needs of all learners’ (p. 42). Burbules and Callister (2000a) would critique this as ‘technocratic’ dreaming, erroneously imagining that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be separated, and controlled. However, this evaluation/effectiveness flavour of thinking pervades much of what empirical work has been published, piecemeal and disorganised as it is.
In some way this desire for the definitive research basis suggests an underlying belief that some independent truth about how such environments will predictably work can be found ‘out there’. This overlooks the fact that such environments are essentially social constructions and will be what actors make of them through their design, conceptualisation and usage. For this reason, the accumulating body of ‘advocacy, success stories, and how-to books’ is formative because it sets the parameters for which paradigms, truths, meanings and values are associated with the field, and what is thinkable and sayable about online education.
Murphy, Walker and Webb’s collection of case studies (2001) is one example of such accounts (see also Aggarwal, 2000) drawn from UK, Canada, US, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Pacific university settings. ‘Case reporters’ were asked to describe and reflect on a critical incident in their practice of teaching with information and communication technologies. There is no methodological consideration in the process as such; rather, the reporter’s accounts are presented as authentic interpretations of events based on their personal involvement. Some themes emerge over the nineteen cases, including how computer-mediated 50
conferencing can produce volatile and amplified interactions; how the interactive environments created can seem ambiguous in purpose for participants; and how teachers resort to creating some interactive structure by designating spaces for different functions, assessing contributions, or invoking explicit codes of conduct to shape communicative behaviour. Alongside issues of policy, customisation, functionality and staff development, it is this interpersonal dimension of computermediated interaction that seems most fraught with tensions, frustrations and unforeseen complications.
Of particular interest to this study is the trope of ‘community building’ as the solution, and the constant valorisation of peer-to-peer interchange as a bedrock assumption in course design. For example, Robertshaw (2001), in his case study of Hong Kong students, could rationalise the eruption of severe flaming or personal attack in a class discussion space as a good thing:
By not intervening in a series of angry online exchanges between students I was not only able to provide them with direct experience of part of the course (about the Internet), but was also able to encourage them to abandon their reluctance to challenge others publicly. (Robertshaw, 2001, p. 18)
In another case, Boshier (2001) reports on destructive and confronting cultural stereotyping and taunting which marred virtual conferencing between postgraduate students in what were considered fairly culturally amicable settings of Canada and New Zealand. Despite the moderators’ efforts to establish respectful ground rules, and to intervene with pleas for civility, Boshier concludes that the virtual environment is volatile in its constraints on social cues: ‘when the usual attributes of discussion are stripped away and all that remains are words on a screen, what starts as cordial conversation can turn into a pub brawl (p. 35)’. In this report, Boshier includes a verbatim sample of the anonymous moderator’s ‘reassuring’ intervention which reads, admittedly out of context, as provocative goading in itself:
‘I hope that people are not feeling intimidated about contributing to this hui (even though I know from my own research that you probably are…). Have 51
a go! Put the dead cat on the table and tell us like it really is!! You have nothing to lose but your reputation and self-concept. Take care out there!’ (data quoted in Boshier, 2001, p. 32)
This comment exemplifies the fairly unsophisticated valorisation of peer-to-peer interchange that recurs in this literature. The collection’s conclusion highlighted how the ‘critical incidents’ selected were not issues of technical functionality, but were more ‘concerned with people, their actions, interactions, collaboration (or lack of same) and achievements, as they strive to improve their teaching and their students’ learning’ (p. 171). This empirical observation resonates with Burbules and Callister’s ‘post-technocratic’, relational framing of technology in use.
Other case study literature similarly describes volatility in the interactional dynamics of online learning environments. Hara & Kling (1999, p. 1) investigate the ‘taboo topic’ of frustrations students encountered negotiating various online learning activities. Goodfellow (2004) uses a framing of critical literacy dimensions to analyse students’ online complaints, provocations and resistance. Kitto (2003) redescribes the online learning environments as an ‘electronic panopticon’, and reports on the dubious practice of collaboration in online assessment. These reports of interactive trouble in pedagogical spaces confirm the value of this study’s research focus on the shared interaction in online internationalised programs, and its potential troubling and complication by the dynamics of cultural differences. This study however will make a unique contribution in terms of its capture and analysis of a whole unit’s interactions, enriched with interview data, as opposed to selecting ‘critical incidents’, or relying on interview data or practitioner narratives alone.
2.3.3 Researching culture in online education There has not yet been much empirical consideration of virtual educational environments as sites implicated in wider social processes, such as the processes of cultural contact and identity production as proposed in this study. There are, however, some studies that address issues of cultural identity in public Internet usage, (for example, Burkhalter, 1999; Hawisher and Selfe, 2000; Nakamura, 2002), an emerging literature addressing cultural difference as a pedagogical
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concern in online education (for example, Bates, 2001; Evans & Henry, 2000; Goodfellow, Lea, Gonzalez & Mason, 2001; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; Leask, 2000; Williams, Watkins, Daley & Courtenay 2001; Ziegahn 2001) and a third group in which cultural difference/intercultural competence is considered as a curriculum objective in itself (for example, Ess, 2002; McLoughlin 2001; St Amant 2002). This section reviews each of these facets to draw out how the literature has associated issues of cultural identity with online environments.
The first group of studies are responses to the contradiction between the public’s fear of fictive ‘identity play’ in virtual interaction, and the public’s dream of cyberspace as a new, discrimination-free space. Their accumulated findings argue that cyberspace interactions will still carry cultural markers and express cultural identities, and that virtual and real worlds are not that separable.
Hawisher and Selfe (2000) offer a collection of ‘snapshot’ articles commissioned from ten teams dispersed around the globe, investigating the impact of cultural identities, their contexts and literate practices on Web usage. They position the project as an alternative to the modernist, utopian narrative of the culturally neutral ‘global village’, which they critique as a Western ideology. The articles describe distinct culturally embedded practices, tensions, resistances and national/cultural identity projects from around the world, where different communities appropriate and ‘adapt’, as opposed to ‘adopt’, the technologies of the West. Hawisher and Selfe suggest ‘cyberspace is a culturally interested geography’ (p. 10), with its inherent assertions of, and struggles between, collective identities:
… the differential power exercised within this digital landscape – the tendential force of multinational capitalism and the related effects of poverty, the continuing operation of colonial and racist values, the export of western perspectives and language – ensures that differences based on socio-economic status, color, and power are maintained, exacerbated, and reproduced, rather than eliminated. (p. 13)
Their conclusion argues that the Internet and Web enable postmodern, decentred, hybrid and ‘blurred’ identities through ‘conscious coalition, of affinity, of political 53
kinship’ (Haraway quoted in Hawisher & Selfe, 2000, p. 281). These hybrid identities resist the ‘tendential forces’ of Western neo-colonialism with transgressive literacy practices, rendering these technological environments as an unstable, ‘messy complexity’ (p. 277) that nurtures expressions of diversity.
Significantly for this study, Hawisher and Selfe’s approach focused on literacy practices to show that online environments are fertile ground for the production and exercise of cultured identities. Nakamura (2002) also engages with the Internet as a discursive space, which is however understood to be shaped not just by the cultural context, but also by the logic embedded in the technology itself: ‘we can see that our culture is in the process of being “transcoded” by the computer’s “ontology, epistemology, pragmatics”’ (Nakamura, 2002, p. 3, quoting Manovich). Nakamura develops the concept of ‘cybertyping’ as a transcoding of race into its representation in virtual environments, ‘to describe the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism’ (p. 3). Her study, focussed on internet usage in the US, uses the vocabulary of race and racism which is muted in other ‘cultural’ studies. She takes a critical standpoint, similar to Hawisher and Selfe, that denies the simplistic accounts of globalisation as an inevitably good, homogenising influence, and instead engages with issues of diversity, identity and hegemonic ideology that reproduce racism:
As scholars become more sensitised to issues of diversity online, there is a welcome shift in emphasis from simply recognising that racial inequity does exist there to a growing concern with how race is represented in cyberspace, for the Internet is above all a discursive and rhetorical space, a place where ‘race’ is created as an effect of the net’s distinctive uses of language. Hence, it is crucial to examine not only the wide variety of rhetorical conditions of utterance, reception, audience, and user/speaker that create particular communicative situations in cyberspace, but also to trace the ways in which this array of situations creates ‘cybertypes’ or images of racial identity engendered by this new medium. (2002, p. xiii)
Nakamura analyses the absence of African Americans in the celebratory ‘cosmetic cosmopolitanism’ of accounts of the IT industry. She then considers the practice of 54
‘racial passing’ in user-user role playing games as a practice that sustains and promulgates dated racist stereotypes. She also considers cybertyping in formative fictional accounts of the Internet, and in advertisements regarding internet software, with their tropes of the exotic racial Other and the tourist Westerner. Her final study is of how race is encoded in software interfaces, often by limited, discrete categories on portals and web-forms that reproduce static and overly simplistic notions of race. With critical discourse analysis, Nakamura has achieved a nuanced treatment of issues of race and its representation in subtle but influential aspects of cyberspace interaction. Her analytic scope relates the dynamics of interaction in cyberspace to broader hegemonic discourses of race and racism, whereby what is rendered in cyberspace provides a window on society at large. Her emphasis on the user/technology/society interface informs the ethnographic reading of cultural difference in this study.
The third example for this group is Burkhalter’s (1999) study of the performance and policing of racialised identities in Usenet groups with racial themes. This research documents a similar mismatch between the purported revolutionary possibilities of the technology and the people who use it, who are ‘neither revolutionary nor perfect, armed with ordinary ways of understanding each other’ (p. 74).
This theme of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ being inseparable occurs in other work. Fitzpatrick (2000) highlights the interdependence between the ‘real’ and the virtual in his ‘transdeterminist’ approach. Murray (2000) considers the cultural advantage of the native English speaker in computer-mediated communication. In a philosophical treatment of the promise of ‘democratization’ in the Internet’s ‘global village,’ Ess (2002) assembles examples and counter-examples of Internet usage building democracy in local ‘thick’ cultures, as opposed to the ‘thin’ consumerist online community. He suggests a moral imperative to further ‘critical thinking and dialogue as essential conditions of democracy’ (p. 19) through education in order to protect cultural diversity from its commodification on the Web.
The literature reviewed above has dealt explicitly with issues of cultural, racial and linguistic difference in open or public internet interactions, and how a shared 55
communicative medium has powerful divisive forces or potentials that can generate resistance and expressions of heterogeneity to counteract any homogenising tendencies. In these accounts, the communicative spaces on the Internet are not culturally inert, nor some liberatory utopia where differences evaporate. The discussion now turns to how such issues have been addressed in reference to specifically educational applications of online technology.
There is a growing literature addressing cultural difference specifically as a pedagogical concern in online education. Evans and Henry (2000), in the popular genre of reflecting on their own practice, outline a case study of ‘off-campus, offshore’ (p. 1) higher degree supervision involving an Australian university and student cohorts in Thailand and Malaysia. Despite planning to support practitioner research grounded in the students’ own contexts, they report that their assumptions about the nature of research and research supervision were challenged, and carefully planned pedagogies to accommodate cultural difference did not produce the academic competence they hoped for: ‘Here we confronted a troubling dilemma: how to avoid being too demanding and insensitive to cultural difference while at the same time making realistic decisions about students’ chances of completing an Australian doctoral program’ (p. 12). Though not concerned overtly about technological means of delivery, this case study speaks to the production of cultural differences in the disembodied pedagogic interaction of online education, whereby neither teachers nor students are disembedded from their located cultural practices. Evans and Henry fall back on stereotypical constructions of the ‘problem’ Asian learner, and present the conundrum as an either/or dilemma similar to those described in Singh and Doherty (2004) – either commit cultural imperialism, or jeopardise the western university as an institution.
Goodfellow, Lea, Gonzalez and Mason (2001) also scrutinise their own crosscultural pedagogy in their study of student interviews reflecting on a globally marketed online Masters of Arts course at UK’s Open University. Their interest stems from their sensitivity to the ‘perils of cultural marginalisation ... (and) the spectres of pedagogical imperialism’ (p. 66). They problematise their ‘artificial’ but pragmatic construction of ‘Other’ students by linguistic and educational backgrounds, but proceed to report relatively poor performance in assessment tasks 56
by this group, and four ‘dimensions of difference’ as thematic in the student interviews: cultural otherness, interpreted as learning styles; perceptions of globality, interpreted as the curricular representation of various parts of the globe; linguistic difference, displayed as concerns of ESL proficiency shaping participation in online discussion; and academic convention, discussed as different genre and assessment conventions. They report that ‘contrast talk’ (p. 75) was a common discursive resource, and the ‘cultural otherness narratives clearly have an important place in these participants’ perceptions of their experience’.
Of particular interest to this study, are the implications Goodfellow et al. (2001) draw from their analysis. They outline how the entry requirements for the global online MA are expressed as recommended levels of ESL proficiency in IELTS terms, against which students can ‘self-test’, and that ‘until recently, there has been no pre-course preparation of a general ‘academic-cultural’ kind’ (p. 69). This echoes the observation made above that the institutional script of Foundation or bridging programs for international students to address notions of cultural difference seems to have disappeared in the shift to online delivery. As a result of their study, Goodfellow et al. report implementing more explicit cultural induction material ‘to get to grips with the academic/linguist cultural basis of the courses’ (p. 81). The material is described as:
…being designed with the aim of supporting learners in planning and writing assignments, familiarising them with the unique aspects of online study, and supporting them in taking a full role in group interaction, through awareness-raising and confidence-building exercises. (Goodfellow et al., 2001, p. 81)
This outcome draws firstly on the constructivist vision of online pedagogy, whereby peer interaction constitutes the desired performance of learning, and secondly, more subtly, the construction of the culturally different student as a problem to be fixed by some educational conversion kit.
In contrast, Leask (2000) is more concerned with challenging past constructions of the international student and how such constructions hold up in the translation to 57
online modes of education. Leask argues that with globalised, online learning, all students including those domestically enrolled become ‘international students’ by virtue of the shift to the internationalised frame of reference. The international student, Leask argues, has until now been understood with reference to the economic benefits they realise, their cultural, social and linguistic background, their mobility, their motivations, and the cultural and social benefits that accrue to the host institution and its constituents. Leask then suggests that the economic benefit will still be a powerful feature in online education, in fact, so powerful that she argues that we should avoid a ‘narrow, commercial approach’ (p. 4 of 16) and that cultural, social and linguistic difference will be more salient, given the inability to make assumptions about their access to resources or support. For Leask, ‘it is the information and ideas rather than the students that are mobile’ (p. 4 of 16). Leask then turns to various strategies to internationalise curriculum and pedagogy in online environments, in particular, exploiting the interactivity of computermediated communication to deliver the desired graduate attribute of ‘international perspectives’ (p. 8 of 16).
This seamless transition from online pedagogy for cultural diversity, to online pedagogy about cultural diversity is also present in McLoughlin’s (2001) article about culturally inclusive instructional design. From an initial premise of cultural difference as pedagogical problem, McLoughlin proposes a ‘culturally responsive’ model similar to Biggs’ (1997) ‘etic’ approach whereby good instructional design will transcend any cultural difference. Under this model, the distance learner is woven by pedagogical interaction into a social, learning community. This is very much the script of interaction that emerges from the ‘how to’ do online learning literature reviewed below. Here, it promises to deliver cross-cultural insights and sharing, to ‘create contexts where cross-cultural awareness and understanding are developed by the group’ (p. 15). St Amant (2002) provides another example of an instructional designer’s purposeful engineering of cross-cultural interaction as a curriculum objective in itself. This visionary strain of the ‘internationalised’ curriculum achieved by internationalising the pedagogic interaction suffers from an optimism that fails to acknowledge equal potential for conflict or trouble in sites of cultural contact, and as documented below, the potential for conflict in online communication. 58
Less optimistic is Gayol and Shied’s (1997) consideration of the cultural politics surrounding the knowledge distributed through the e-curriculum. They consider the ‘ethical and cultural implications’ (p. 1) of ‘how technology mediated discourses reconfigure and intervene in the shaping of distant subjectivities’ (p. 5). In an argument commensurate with Alexander and Rizvi’s (1993) critique of earlier modes of internationalised education, they warn of systemic ‘epistemic violence’ and the ‘virtual reproduction of inequity’:
Content selection, visual design, central planning, teaching-learning routines, accreditation, academic prestige of the originating site, are all centralized textualities which might work together as an assimilationist or exclusionary pedagogy. (p. 5)
They call for more nuanced research into the relational identities produced in exported virtual education to inform critical pedagogies for ‘pluralities’. This ethnography attempts to respond in part to this call, without however subscribing to such polarised attributions of victimhood and blame.
As the last example of research into the cultural politics of online education, Kramsch and Thorne (2002) offer particularly valuable insights with their account of ‘genre wars’ in a qualitative study using student online postings. They describe the tensions and misunderstanding arising from interaction between US and French students in a foreign language class conducted through CMC. They explain the interactive trouble observed with reference to subtle distinctions in cultural genre, and a mismatch between how the US and French students read each others’ texts, misinterpreting their disparate degrees of formality, and their different notions of what kind of text was considered appropriate. They suggest that such ‘dissonances and ambiguities’ (p.92) are inevitable in global networked communication: ‘what needed to be negotiated was not only the connotations of words … but the stylistic conventions of the genre (formal/informal, edited/unedited, literate/orate), and more importantly the whole discourse system to which that genre belonged’ (Kramsh & Thorne, 2002, p.98). This study is particularly relevant to this study’s focus on interactive troubles stemming from cultural identities, as dealt with in Chapter 7. 59
This section has funnelled down from empirical studies exploring cultural politics in open internet interactions, to studies more particularly concerned with the negotiating or harnessing the cultural politics of online education environments. This literature shows how cultural bias and interests can be woven into online interactions in subtle and not so subtle ways, and are not erased in the move to cyberspace as popularly hoped.
2.3.4 ‘How to’ do online education There is a growing market of professional ‘how to’ literature promising ‘best practice’ guidelines, effective strategies and principles for the conduct of online education. In the absence of a coherent corpus of empirical research beyond case study accounts, the discourse of these ‘how to’ texts is powerfully shaping online educational practices. Two such texts shall be briefly reviewed here to characterise this professional discourse of online instructional design. The first as an edited collection has been selected to demonstrate the thematic coherence across the collection, and how ‘on-line’ learning has become reified as an object of study regardless of the nature of the students or of the knowledge involved. The second book has been selected because its US authors have published a series of such books, of which multiple copies are held in my institution, attesting to their influence in the Australian higher education sector.
Weiss, Knowlton and Speck (2000) edited a special edition of the journal, New Directions of Teaching and Learning, titled ‘Principles of Effective Teaching in the Online Classroom’, which was reprinted in book form. Apart from the last two entries that have been reviewed above as contributing to the case ‘against’ online education, the other nine articles develop the theme of judicious use of technology to support pedagogic goals, couched in a theoretical frame of cognitive psychology, and ‘student-centred’, constructivist learning models. In this frame, ‘no longer is the professor an umpire, judge, and dictator; now the professor is a coach, counsellor, and mentor’ (Knowlton, 2000, p. 7). Teachers are ‘facilitators’ of interaction, while students are active ‘seekers’ (Canada, 2000). The category of ‘student’ throughout the collection is constructed as homogeneous except for one paper on assistive
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technologies for students with a disability (Buggey, 2000), with no other mention of sociological axes of diversity within the student body. As its title and the genre suggest, the collection attempts to extract generic insights.
For this study, there are two pertinent points. Firstly, Berge (2000) points out that distance education is distinguished by the time separation between the pre-packaged course development, and its implementation, which for this study, highlights the separation between course design and knowledge of the student body. Secondly, there is the intertextual theme of student interaction as essential to any constructivist design. This literature extols high hopes for student interaction, for example:
Asynchronous communication tools like listserves and newsgroups provide opportunities for students in online classrooms to engage in high-level discussions by framing and presenting ideas, formulating challenging questions for peers, and responding to those questions to clarify misconceptions that arise. (Hacker & Niederhauser, 2000, p. 55)
Thus in the emergent practices of online education, the design and conduct of interaction will most likely be considered a crucial aspect in monitoring and deciding the ‘success’ or otherwise of a program. This fixation on interactivity informs the methodological design outlined in Chapter 4.
In the second ‘how to’ book, Palloff and Pratt’s (1999) propose a highly congruent paradigm of active, constructivist learning in online education, which is realised most powerfully in peer interaction, and facilitated by a ‘back seat’ teacher whose job it is to create ‘an atmosphere of safety and community’ (p. 20). Their concept of the learning community is the pivotal aspect in their framework which draws from both business management notions of forming/norming/storming groups and notions of place-defined communities where membership is defined by adherence to norms. For Palloff and Pratt, an online learning community is distinguished by: active interaction; student-to-student collaborative learning; socially constructed meaning; and expressions of support and encouragement exchanged between students, as well as willingness to critically evaluate the work of others. 61
‘Building online communities’ has become a slogan for online educational design (Doherty, 2004), and is consistently associated with constructivist, psychological models of learning, that fail to theorise the student body as having any sociologically defined constitution. Peer interaction is the hallmark of online community, so this study’s focus on how a politics of cultural difference may arise in online course interaction may serve to enrich and complicate the feel good assertions made by this emerging orthodoxy.
2.4 Conclusion To inform the research question of how cultural difference may be produced in online internationalised education, the review of literature above has covered two substantive domains, these being studies pertaining to international students and studies pertaining to online education. The literature in both domains is permeated by business interests, and influenced by pragmatic ‘how to’ professional discourses, both of which seem to have shaped practices more than any empirical research literature per se.
The literature on international education demonstrated how the international student has been constructed as an object of study through a number of disciplinary lenses. Each construction has informed its own research design, thus international education as business is empirically reported as enrolments, revenue and market vicissitudes; the international student as risk is reported as visa breaches, brain drain and erosion of domestic standards; and the vision of the international student as a curriculum resource or investment is tested in surveys of social networks. For educational purposes, the dominant construction of the international student, promoted by a series of influential ‘how to’ books, is as a culturally different learner at odds with the normative codes of the Western academy. This ‘problem’ learner orthodoxy has been challenged by a number of empirical efforts that dispute the overly prescriptive and polarised characterisations of cultural learning style through surveys of students’ learning preferences and analyses of academic outcomes. A more recent series of articles drawing on teacher and student interviews have problematised the commonsensical construction of culture and
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cultural contact informing practice in international education, in particular the preparatory curricula considered necessary for international students. This study will build on this last group’s theorisations to explore the production of cultural identities and difference in these educational sites of virtual cultural contact.
Online internationalised education has received no attention from this body of literature beyond constituting a business prospect, but the topic is emerging as a problematic tangent to the literature on online education. As a new practice, online international education presents a particular challenge because international education has been theorised thus far as an embodied on-campus experience, which privileges the practices of the Western academy over those of the disembedded, mobile student. For online education, both parties remain embedded in their own cultural contexts and meet only in cyberspace, suggesting that this foregone power differential may be disputed, if not redistributed.
The literature regarding online education is in a formative stage, though the lack of any systematic and rigorous empirical research basis has not impeded innovative practice. The political and economic forces pushing online modes of delivery have produced an emotional debate between technicist ‘pro’ frames and nostalgic ‘con’ frames, then conciliatory attempts to moderate claims and understand online environments on their own terms, both the good and the bad. Theorisations of online environments have explored the uniqueness of online environments, their impact on educational practices, relations and identities, and new geographies of interconnectedness. Empirical accounts of online learning/teaching environments are at this stage typically case study accounts where the teachers involve reflect on events to draw ‘good practice’ conclusions. Constructivist theories of learning promoting the virtues of virtual community and peer collaboration are prominent throughout such accounts and the ‘how to’ literature about online education. Empirical research in public internet spaces is theoretically more sophisticated, and has explored issues of cultural/racial identity representation, whereas empirical efforts within the field of online education that explore issues of cultural identity are still largely reliant on commonsensical notions of culture, and the international student as both ‘problem’ and a ‘curriculum resource’.
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There has been little empirical consideration of processes other than teaching and learning going on in these sites. In contrast, this study seeks to interrogate sites of online internationalised education as zones of cultural contact and negotiation infused by larger social processes of globalisation and the commodification of knowledge, as discussed in the following chapter.
The two research fronts regarding international students and online education display a shared feature in fetishising normative codes of interactivity and participatory behaviours for students. The international student is frequently constructed as a passive, problematic learner who fails to contribute to the interactive dynamics of the Western tutorial exchange. The success of the online learning community is understood to depend on the quality and quantity of peer-topeer interchange in the virtual classroom, though these exchanges are often reported to be volatile and unpredictable. Thus there appear to be two professional ‘how to’ literatures on a collision course when it comes to internationalised online education. Given the stated importance of interactive patterns in each domain, there is a marked absence of empirical investigation of the interaction itself in either domain. Accounts of such interaction drawn from interviews, student surveys, teacher reflections, and course evaluations, and perhaps illustrative quotes from the interaction, have served as the empirical base for claims about interaction patterns in both domains thus far (Wallace, 2003). I would argue that such accounts are necessary as they attest to the sense made by participants of such interaction, but are not sufficient in themselves, and that the interaction itself needs to be analysed, in more dynamic ways than the descriptive typologies reported in Wallace (2003). There is a substantial sociolinguistic tradition of classroom discourse analysis which has provided important insights into how cultural aspects, of social class in particular, affect educational interaction (for example, Bernstein, 1990; Cazden, 1988; Christie, 2002; Delamont, 1983; Heath, 1983; Freebody, Ludwig, Gunn, Forrest, Freiberg & Herschell 1995; Pedro 1981). Such an established and increasingly refined methodology could provide a powerful analysis of what in fact is happening in these virtual communicative spaces, and how virtual spaces constructed and enacted for educational purposes are distinct from other internet
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usage. In Chapter 4, the challenges of adapting such methodologies to internet interaction will be discussed in more detail.
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CHAPTER 3: POSITIONING THE RESEARCH QUESTION IN THEORETICAL FIELDS AND THEIR INTERSECTIONS
The remoteness and unreachability of systemic structure, coupled with the unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics, change that condition in a radical way and call for a rethinking of old concepts that used to frame its narratives. Like zombies, such concepts are today simultaneously dead and alive. (Bauman, 2000, p. 8)
3. 1 Introduction From the preceding chapter it can be seen that culture has become an essential tool for thinking about the roots/routes of international students, but it has also become blunt and oversimplified in its usage. Educationally, it is now difficult to think about the international student in anything but cultural terms, such is the legacy of the cultural learning style theory. The concept of culture however has become essentialised in its everyday interpretation as discrete, fixed and inherited differences between cultural groups. In its applications, the concept as such becomes essentialising in the way cultural labels are imposed on social collectivities, forcing and acknowledging only commonness and continuities while masking inherent diversities.
Nevertheless, this study is still interested in ‘culture’ as the resilient everyday discursive tool people use to make sense of their own and others’ identities, and in how it is invoked productively to inform and interpret interaction in the enterprise of internationalised education. Dorothy Smith notes that ‘ordinary descriptions, ordinary talk, trail along with them as a property of the meaning of their terms, the extended social relations they name as phenomena’ (1987, p. 157). Thus, a politics of identity in sites of globalised education may be realised through ordinary invocations of ‘culture’.
To understand the ‘extended social relations’ surrounding and permeating the personal interactions of internationalised online education, this study draws on three areas of social theory – 1) network society; 2) cultural identity; and 3) education as
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pedagogy - to interrogate and make sense of their points of intersection being the production of cultural difference in online internationalised educational environments. These bodies of theory need to be situated in the larger permeating context of globalisation, a set of processes that have unsettled previous theorisations of culture and cultural processes. Another preliminary consideration related to globalisation’s increased cultural flows in which the business of educational exports is embedded is the postmodern condition of fractured, commodified knowledge.
The theoretical resources for this study could thus be crudely mapped as shown in Figure 1, to depict how any instance of online internationalised education is no impermeable bubble, but rather a realisation of larger tendential macro forces producing the conditions of its possibility. The overlapping domains of theory also indicate that online internationalised pedagogy cannot be adequately accounted for by enquiry into only one such domain. Needless to say, there are probably other theoretical domains that could also prove illuminating. This chapter will outline theoretical understandings framing this study’s approach to each of these selected realms and their intersections, with a view to the underlying premises of globalisation and the commodification of knowledge.
Figure 1: Mapping the theoretical framework
Globalisation Cultural identity
Commodification of knowledge
Network society Pedagogy
This study
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3.2 Globalisation as penetrating context Globalisation is widely recognised as the defining condition of current times, with its reconfiguring of economic, social and political relations in progress across the globe. The accelerating transnational movements of people, goods, finance, media products and ideas has transformed time/space relations in a way that necessitates a reconsideration of foundational concepts and habitual nation-state frames used by the social sciences (Bauman, 2002; Beck, 2004; Featherstone, 1995; Robertson, 1992; Urry, 2000). As a concept, globalisation suffers from being a singular noun, which creates the expectation of some unifying essence that explains the swirl of social change associated with ‘it’. Globalisation also suffers from its burgeoning use in a variety of discourses including disciplinary discourses, ideological discourses that are ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalisation, and regional political discourses (Robertson & Khondker, 1998). However, constant themes and problematics in the sociological literature have emerged - firstly how globalisation processes reconfigure the role of the nation-state (for example Bauman, 2002; Henry, Lingard, Rizvi & Taylor, 2001; Ong, 1999), and secondly how globalisation is experienced as the dialectic interplay between both centripetal (homogenising), and centrifugal (heterogenising) forces. Globalisation is also consistently understood to be shifting, unfinished business, that is, as processes still underway and unevenly distributed, as opposed to any static, resolved state.
Significantly for this study, globalisation is consistently theorised as intimately connected to, and enabled by, the explosion of information and communication technologies, and their colonisation of more and more aspects of our lives. Castells’ (1996) account of current social and economic realities in particular foregrounds the role of information and communication technologies in producing the ‘network society’ distinguished by an economics of informationalism, and the global economic unit. For Castells, the revolutionary explosion of information and communication technologies has enabled the compression of time and space in a new social architecture of networks and produced a global economy that depends
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not so much on material goods, as on knowledge goods, a point well exemplified by the global market in online education.
3.2.1 Consciousness, relativisation and glocalisation Globalisation denotes not just changed material conditions ‘out there’ but also the growing consciousness of these changes ‘in here’ for the social actor. Waters’ (2001, p. 5) definition of globalisation foregrounds this awareness: ‘… a social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding and in which people act accordingly.’ Thus the concept reaches from the planetary macro scale, into the micro frames of reference, motivations and actions of individuals and is necessarily both at the same time. For example, the vagaries of global oil markets and related conflicts impact quickly and consciously on individuals’ budgets, decisions and choices in living day-to-day in suburban Brisbane.
Commonsense understandings of globalisation often focus on its economic dimensions and the perceived risk of cultural homogeneity, as elaborated in the McDonaldization thesis (Ritzer, 2004). In contrast, Waters argues that it is the change in the nature of symbolic cultural exchange evident in actors’ lifeworlds that typifies the globalised condition: ‘Cultural products become more fluid and can be perceived as flows of preference, taste and information that can sweep the globe in unpredictable and uncontrolled ways.’ (Waters, 2001, p. 24). As Tomlinson (1999, p. 43) elaborates, globalisation’s ‘empirical condition of complex connectivity’ will reduce ‘cultural distance through the routine integration into daily “local” life of all the locality-penetrating experiences of cultural difference provided through education, employment, consumer culture and globalizing mass media’. In this way, my sons closely follow American basketball players, Italian soccer teams, and British ska bands, while my daughter prefers hummus on unleavened bread for her school lunches, displacing ‘local’ practices and preferences.
Such ‘globalization solvents’ (Waters, 2001, p. 7) which might be expected to produce similarities across locations are counteracted by another process of
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systemic ‘relativization’ whereby cultural differences are thrown into heightened relief by their proximity and escalating interaction. ‘Relativisation’ is a concept developed by Robertson to refer to the ‘comparative interaction of different forms of life … a heightening of civilization, societal, ethnic, regional and indeed, individual, self-consciousness’ (1992, p. 27, original emphasis) produced by the proximity brought about by globalisation. In this way, Australian public discourse since the events of September 11, 2001 and the bombings in Bali, October 12, 2002, has become increasingly self-conscious, working to define ‘Australian’ and ‘unAustralian’ values as a response to such encounters with difference.
Featherstone depicts the globalised world foremost as a singular zone, a shared field of interaction which serves to heighten this sense of increased possibilities on offer: ‘a form, a space or field, made possible through improved means of communication in which different cultures meet and clash’ (Featherstone, 1995, p. 6). Beck (2000, p. 100) describes this frisson of awareness as ‘relating to the otherness of others’. Relativisation produces expressions of local identity that are invigorated, being more conscious and more overtly distinguished through a logic of contrast. Thus globalisation will be understood as a ‘complex process involving the interpenetration of sameness and difference’ (Robertson & Khondker, 1998, p. 28), as much about encountering and exacerbating difference as it is about encroaching sameness.
As well as the reinvigoration of existing, historically inscribed cultural categories, writers on globalisation also highlight the emergence of new cultural forms. These include hybridity (Holton, 2000), a standardising ‘global culture’ (Spring, 2001; Tomlinson, 1999), ‘transnationality’ (Ong, 1999) and ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Giddens, 1999; Hannerz, 1990; Iyer, 2000; Szerszynski & Urry, 2002; Tomlinson, 1999). Capturing the process of relativisation and its production of a consciousness of difference that distinguishes an array of possible cultural positions is the central theoretical concern of this thesis.
Glocalisation is another pertinent concept Robertson (1992, 1994) uses to highlight the relational interplay between the universal and the particular – how one can only be understood in relation to the other. Localities or local identities in this view are 70
not things in/of themselves but increasingly relational categories produced through the constant process of relativisation: ‘the local is an extra-local product … the local is globally – certainly translocally – produced and reproduced’ (Robertson, 2001, p. 462). Similarly, the global can only be understood through articulations and relations across various locales. From this concept, this study develops the idea of a ‘glocalised identity’, in which the particularities of any local identity need not deny or displace global affiliations, nor vice versa. A ‘glocalised’ identity does not experience these two telescopic positions as mutually exclusive but rather reconciles or nests them in a contingent and mutually constitutive relationship, with the possibility of moving strategically between these positions. Just as empirical research draws on wide scholarly resources from other settings to inform its particular study and map its relation to that larger context, individuals can increasingly draw from global cultural flows and possibilities to inform and resource local lives.
For this study, the complexity of cultural processes of globalisation will be understood as excess potentials in, and resources for, cultural affiliation made more readily available in everyday lifestyle choices. Actors in a globalising world have more choices and less rigid social templates. These developments are theorised in Bauman’s (1998, 2000, 2002) thesis of ‘liquid modernity’. Bauman argues that the previous ‘solid’ states of modernity, built on ascribed, fixed or highly predictable social orders (such as class, nation, ethnicity, religion) have ‘melted’. In the new ‘liquid’ order, economic opportunity has ‘divorced’ social responsibility and is free to flow to pursue profits, while any alliances that constitute collectives have become more ‘liquid’, by which he means more contingent, opportunistic, transient, and strategic in design. Rather than seeking fixed territorial moorings, the ‘liquid’ subject needs to be mobile and to ‘travel light’, to respond to the new conditions of ‘unpredictability, incoherence and often inanity of a socially constructed condition constantly “on the move”’(Bauman, 2002, p. 36). For Bauman, the definitive change underway in current times is this loosening of social bonds. For this study, a frame drawn from ‘liquid modernity’ theory allows the study to focus on the production of cultural difference as opposed to its stabilising reproduction, which is more typically the focus for enquiries into ‘culture’.
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In work that has proven influential and generative for the sociology of globalisation in general and this study in particular, Appadurai (1990, 1996) disaggregates the forces at play in a globalised world, seeing their combined, unpredictable and chaotic effect as ‘a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’ (1990, p. 6). Appadurai (1990) outlines five cultural ‘flows’ which can work together or against each other, using the common suffix, ‘-scape’, to denote irregular, fluid and perspectival landscapes. These ‘-scapes’ create the ‘imagined worlds’ of individual actors, unrestricted by official versions of the imagined world. The first such flow, the ‘ethnoscape’ constitutes the flow of people in various structures of opportunity through national spaces. The ‘technoscape’ refers to the flow of technological innovations. The ‘finanscape’ of currency, stock and commodity flows, in its opportunism and disembodied transfer, can act in counterpoint to the ethnoscape and technoscape, that is, not necessarily in unison but in a disjunctural relationship. The ‘mediascape’, made of the flow of images and narratives through the channels of globalised media outlets, builds new imaginary worlds for those consuming these images at a distance from their site of production. The ‘ideoscape’ refers to the circulation of political ideologies and key concepts, that are translated into different contexts. For Appadurai these multiple axes of globalised cultural flows can work as much in conflict as in concert through local sites.
In addition, Appadurai prefaces his typology of ‘-scapes’ with a discussion of the heightened role of imagination as ‘quotidian’ (1996, p. 5) social practice: ‘the imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order’ (1990, p. 5). He illustrates this with examples of the aspirations of migrants, the new global possibilities for diasporic migration paths, and the imagined affiliations built through popular media culture consumption. His idea of ‘imagined worlds’ extends Anderson’s (1991) idea of nationalisms as ‘imagined communities’, and Hobsbawm’s (1983) ‘invented traditions,’ being the novel coinage of ritual to invoke an imagined past. Appadurai defines imagination as ‘a form of negotiation between sites of agency (“individuals”) and globally defined fields of possibility’ (1990, p. 5). Imagination will be understood in this study as constitutive of student aspirations and motivating their participation in an internationalised university program. The ‘global market’ for online higher education would not exist were it not for the global imagination of 72
both its consumers and producers. In addition, imagination as an everyday social practice will figure as an important factor enabling the reading of cultural identities from cyberspace interactions.
In summary, globalisation is understood as a complex of contradictory potentials producing an excess of cultural possibilities, and a heightened, relativised consciousness of difference; as much a matter of imagination and cultural flows as of material exchanges. Appadurai’s and Bauman’s theorisations of cultural flows present globalisation as a condition of unstable fluidity, flux and disjuncture with an inexorable impact on processes of cultural re/production. For this study, theories of ‘liquid modernity’, cultural flows and -scapes will be used to theorise the export of higher education via virtual means and the imaginary possibilities for cultural identity this practice offers. Where the study of international students has previously been couched implicitly in the ethnoscape – that is, as the movement of people across territorial borders – virtual education may be more appropriately approached as part of the mediascape, the flow of texts, and as part of the ideoscape, the flow of ideologies, and their dis-embedding and re-embedding into new contexts.
Beyond Castell’s exhaustive macro analyses (1996, 1997), empirical studies of how people engage within and across the –scapes of globalisation are rare (one example being Szersynski & Urry, 2000). This study of cultural politics in internationalised online education offers an apt empirical point of entry into the wider agenda of cultural politics in the emerging networked, globalising/globalised social milieu, if we are to understand ‘the empirical condition of complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson, 1999). By analysing the minutiae of constructions of cultural identity and cultural difference in the online interaction, this study will elucidate how people go about building cultural homes and fences in the fluid virtual spaces afforded by global networks. This empirical focus allows access to the ways in which participants are conscious of globalisation through expressions of identity or its relativisation, and how its imaginary potentials might be taken up in accounts of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
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3.3 Commodification of knowledge As well as being symptomatic of the new flows of globalisation, the pedagogical setting of interest to this study is also symptomatic of the commodification of knowledge. The following section outlines Lyotard’s thesis of the postmodern status of knowledge, related theorisations of the legitimation and marketisation of knowledge, and Featherstone’s argument that globalisation and this fractured condition of knowledge are intimately connected. In particular, the theorisation reconstrues knowledge as a commodity competing amongst alternative knowledges, shaped by its technologies of production and transmission, with education implicated in this condition as a necessary process. This theorisation reconciles the tensions between business and education discourses evident in this study’s discursive context described in Chapter 1.
3.3.1 Knowledges as commodities Lyotard (1979) outlined a crisis in the two grand narratives sustaining modernist science – that of scientific knowledge for human emancipation, and that of scientific knowledge to create social justice. This crisis, he argues, was prompted by the erosion from within bodies of knowledge, by their language games and their scrutiny of the rules for legitimating scientific knowledge. The crisis has resulted in a ‘postmodern’ condition of fragmented, heterogenous knowledges (plural) that increasingly rely on the linguistic fabric of their discourse and constant introspection regarding their rules of legitimation in order to constitute their respective truths.
Information and communication technologies are considered complicit in this change of status for scientific knowledges – firstly, as the costly means of proof in research, and secondly, as the means for the circulation of knowledges, as exemplified in online education. As the means of knowledge production and its transmission, information technology will shape what form knowledge can profitably take. This nexus was displayed in Chapter 1’s discussion of the business imperatives behind enthusiasms for online education. Significantly for this study, Lyotard states that given a choice between competing knowledges, ‘(t)he question
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(overt or implied) now asked … is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?” In the context of the mercantilisation of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: “Is it saleable?” (p. 51). By re-constructing knowledge as a commodity rather than truth, this theorisation can accommodate business considerations such as costings, profit margins, outsourcing, contractual limits, consumer demand, customer service and branding within the parameters of pedagogical and curricular design.
Lyotard suggests that knowledge will be increasingly separated from the knower, to become more a relationship between commodity and producer. Maton’s work (2000, 2004) regarding different modes of knowledge legitimation has since complicated this clean separation of knowledge and knower. His ‘knowledge mode’ coheres with Lyotard’s thesis, but his ‘knower mode’ reflects emergent practices exemplified in post-colonial writing whereby the knowledge is legitimated with reference to the personal characteristics of who is voicing the claim, and their ‘authenticity’. This distinction informs the analysis in Chapter 6 of knowledge claims regarding cultural categories and their attributes and their legitimation.
For Lyotard, knowledge as commodity takes on the monetary attributes of exchange value, or investment value. Knowledge ‘rich’ nations will be privileged, and will continue to accrue power from their access to information sources, and the spread of their knowledges and rules of legitimation. In addition, bodies of knowledge are understood to rely on consensual communities, inducted into the relevant language, evaluative criteria and legitimation mode through a necessary pedagogical process. It is here that education plays an essential role firstly in manufacturing this consensus, and secondly, in reproducing and extending the body of knowledge. Thus, while the West enjoys a demand for its scientific and business know-how and exports these knowledges through internationalised education, it is also able to recruit new members to its consensual community and advantageously proliferate its ‘truth’, values and practices. The international student can similarly be understood to be making investments by speculatively buying into these powerful knowledges that dominate the global ideo-scape.
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With Lyotard’s prescient theorisation of the commodification of knowledge, the role of educational processes in sustaining bodies of knowledge, and the impact of technologies on the production and transmission of knowledges, it can be seen that knowledge is now business, and that the postmodern condition is one in which all these concerns are entangled, and cannot be surgically separated. This study samples practices in the lucrative market of online postgraduate qualifications in Business and Management Studies, where these agendas of commodification and investing in knowledge for exchange value are prominent.
3.3.2 The postmodern condition of globalisation To marry this discussion of the postmodern condition of knowledge with the preceding discussion of globalisation, Featherstone (1995) argues that there is a strong link between the progress of the two, in that the coexisting diversity of globalisation has lead to the ‘demonopolization of intellectual practices’ (p.2):
Things formerly held apart are now brought into contact and juxtaposition. Cultures pile on top of each other in heaps without obvious organizing principles. There is too much culture to handle and organize into coherent belief systems, means of orientiation and practical knowledge (p.6) Featherstone argues that living in conditions of heightened relativisation makes it increasingly difficult to proclaim any universal truth and that attempts to impose such versions need to be scrutinised and troubled. An understanding of the proliferation and coexistence of knowledges inherent in globalised interaction is an important consideration for this study, and will be instrumental in laying out the various knowledge claims made by participants regarding cultural categories and their respective attributes. These constructions will be dealt with in Chapter 6 as competing socially constructed truths, reliant on various legitimating premises, as opposed to ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ versions of what ‘really’ is the case.
Two further aspects of commodification will now be briefly considered as essential framing of the practices of online internationalised education - the production of markets in education, as treated by Marginson, and the impact of marketisation on pedagogical relations.
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3.3.3 Knowledge markets In line with Lyotard’s theme of commodification, Marginson’s work on markets in education (1997) reviews sectors of Australian education as case studies of how market economic theory has infiltrated the policy, discourses and management of education. Market production is distinguished by: ‘individualised commodities, a defined field, relations of monetary exchange, producer competition and marketappropriate behaviour’ (1997, pp. 28-29). Under this paradigm, education becomes a commodity of exchange value rather than a common good of use value, and the cost of education is progressively displaced from the state to the private individual/family. Marketised education is reconceived as a positional good for the individual whereby educational places ‘provide students with relative advantage in the competition for jobs, income, social standing and prestige’ (Marginson, 1997, p. 38-39). Education also offers self-goods for the production of oneself in terms of dispositions, taste, and language for example. This resonates with Lyotard’s (1979) ‘investment value’ of knowledge and Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of ‘cultural capital’.
Following Marginson and Lyotard, this study will understand investment by the individual in the educational consumer item to be an important and conscious aspect of identity construction – projecting the individual into his/her imagined future position, and providing new resources for the production of self. This applies equally to international markets and online modes of delivery, with ‘their capacity to distribute positional goods on a worldwide scale’ (Marginson 1997, p. 256). Positional ‘status honour’ is now attached to international educational qualifications as well as codes of consumption among the growing middle classes in Asian nations (Pinches, 1999, p.8) and elsewhere. Educational opportunities have created new pathways to attain middle class status through professional occupations, and the cachet of high status international qualifications is eagerly sought (Luke, 2001). This belief in education as the pathway to economic success has fuelled ‘selfinvestment’ behaviours, and the ‘individual as enterprise’ (Marginson, 1997, p. 118) which in turn further stimulate the marketisation of education.
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When education is constructed as a market, the usual configuration of power in pedagogic relations becomes complicated by the dynamics of market relations, whereby consumer power through demand holds sway (Baldwin & James, 2000). Disciplinary identities and practices of academic staff become complicated by new interdisciplinary project teams, integrated vocationally oriented curricula, participation in entrepreneurial practices, and dealings with new categories of students (Allport, 2000; Luke, 2001; Marginson, 2000; Moore, 2002; Peters & Roberts, 2000; Stromquist, 2002). The academic role and mission is re-visioned:
… to facilitate the survival of the fittest as judged by market demands. The focus is on the short term rather than the long term, on the extrinsic rather than the intrinsic, upon the exploration of vocational applications rather than upon exploration of knowledge. The transmission here views knowledge as money. And like money it should flow easily to where demand calls …. [this] position constructs an outwardly responsive identity rather than one driven by inner dedication. Contract replaces covenant. (Bernstein, 1999, p. 250)
However, the evolution of such contractual pedagogic relations has developed in tension, if not in conflict, with residual institutional discourses and practices (Bernstein, 1999; Maton, 2005; Moore, 2002). Such struggles within the order of discourses were described in the series of government reports summarised in Chapter 1.
Though the analysis above has separated issues of globalisation and commodification of knowledge, it has also been argued that they are not independent trends, but rather entwined and mutually constitutive, with information and communication technologies implicated in their splicing. It becomes evident that education is exposed to the transformative forces of globalisation and the instrumental logic of market economies as much as other social institutions. The difference is that education systems still fall largely within the purview of the political nation-state. Thus governments are now showing more interest in, and exerting more control over, educational sectors and strategies, as one zone of influence left with which to manipulate their positions in a global economy (Luke, 78
2005). Chapter 1 reviewed the policy efforts in this vein by the Australian government to open its higher education sector to more global business, their imagination of a global market, and the hopes invested in information and communication technologies to deliver educational commodities profitably. Thus educational settings cannot be understood as benign or neutral spaces, separate and protected from political or economic interests. For this study, the intrusion of market relations into the pedagogic relations of online internationalised education, and its commodification may significantly impact on the pedagogic design and conduct.
The next section shifts the focus to how culture and cultural identity need to be retheorised in order to reflect the current permeating conditions of globalisation.
3.4 Cultural difference, culture and cultural identity Culture as analytical concept and culture as lived social construction have had a complex entangled history, which makes them difficult to theorise (Featherstone, 1995; Mulhern, 2000; Robertson, 1992; Smith, 2000; Williams, 1976, 1977; Zhao, 2001). Rather than commence with a definition of culture, then move on to cognate theorisations of cultural difference and identity, I will start from the underlying logic of difference for expressions of cultural identity, then consider the heightened sensation of cultural difference and its proliferation produced under conditions of globalisation and postmodernity to derive a theorisation of culture and cultural identity that can reflect and engage with these conditions. From this perspective it is the relational aspect of ‘difference’ and the process of ‘differencing’ rather than any internal essence of a ‘culture’ that emerge as its defining characteristics (Moore, 1989).
3.4.1 A logic of difference Writers on racism and cultural identity have established how knowledge of the ‘Other’, like a photographic negative, acts as the necessary premise for knowledge and construction of the collective ‘self’ image. Geertz, (1986, p114), while documenting the ‘paler’ nature of cultural difference in current times, emphasises the usefulness of a logic of difference per se, regardless of its content: ‘It is the
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asymmetries or nearly, between what we believe or feel and what others do, that makes it possible to locate where we now are in the world, how it feels to be there, and where we might or might not want to go.’ Said’s (1978) work on the power/knowledge nexus and regime of truth realised in the discourse of Orientalism highlights the self-interested cultural politics behind representations of a demonised cultural Other. Fixed, objectified difference achieved through the device of essentialised stereotypes suppresses heterogeneity and legitimises power hierarchies (Jordan & Weedon, 1995). This discursive tactic of essentialism means
… to impute a fundamental, basic, absolutely necessary constitutive quality to a person, social category, ethnic group, religious community, or nation. It is to posit falsely a timeless continuity, a discreteness or boundedness in space, and an organic unity. It is to imply an internal sameness and external difference or otherness. (Werbner, 1997, p. 228)
Werbner argues that any analysis/representation is essentialising if the subject is displaced, described without reference to its relational, historical context. However, Werbner also acknowledges the performative work of ‘self-essentialising’ (p. 230) as a ‘rhetorical performance in which an imagined community is invoked’ (p. 230). Hall’s (1996a) description of newly minted ethnicities demonstrates that it is not any ‘natural’ attributes of the category that define it, rather its relation of opposition to an Other’s attributes: ‘The marking of “difference” is thus basis of that symbolic order which we call culture’ (Hall, 1997, p. 236). While the move to essentialise the Other or Self erases differences within a category, it also works to suppress any acknowledgment of convergence, intersection or interrelation between categories. A processual notion of ‘differencing’ will be used in this study to capture this production of essentialising difference to distinguish ‘Self/us’ in relation to ‘Other/them’.
3.4.2 Proliferating difference. Also pertinent to this study is the new spatial disordering of difference, by which ‘territoriality will disappear as an organizing principle for social and cultural life’ (Waters, 2001, p. 5). Identities, capital and power become ‘extraterritorial’ (Bauman, 2002), advantaged by their dis-location, aided and abetted in their
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liquidity by electronic networks that collapse time and space into one dimension of near instantaneous speed, making ‘all places mutually contiguous’ (Bauman, 2002, p. 13). So globalisation will result not in the end of cultural difference but rather the cheek-by-jowl cohabitation with difference, ‘an altogether new condition of neighbourliness’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 29).
The concept of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000) captures the intersection in space and time of life trajectories on very different courses, that continue on to diversify, spawning new social movements and new identities unrelated to nation-, or territory-based projects (Castells, 1997). The expanding possibilities of multiple modernities suggests a sense of multiplying cultural expressions, not just ‘multiple’. Appadurai suggests the metaphor of ‘fractal’ structures (1990, p. 20) to describe both the common principles of cultural expressions, and their everdifferentiating process over time. There will thus be a growing complexity and selectivity of identity referents as people draw on globally available resources to reconstitute the local, ‘indigenize’ or resist new influences (Appadurai, 1990). Meyer and Geschiere argue that such processes have to be understood together as the dialectic between global flux and local fixity (1999). This theorisation allows the analysis of cultural expressions encountered in the data to encounter multiple differentiated versions of the ‘same’ cultural category, as the label gets re-inscribed with reference to new circumstances, new resources and various identity projects.
The cultural coexistence brought about by globalisation should be understood not as a static, inert neighbourly state as discourses of multiculturalism would have (Ang, 2001), but rather as productive politics and generative processes. Beck’s theorisation (2000) of ‘reflexive cosmopolitanization’ foregrounds the potential for struggle, conflict, and mutual impact when people of different cultural backgrounds occupy the same space. Pratt’s (1992, p. 5) similar concept of ‘transculturation’ highlights ‘… how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’. Pratt adopts a ‘contact’ perspective which ‘emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other’ (p. 6). In addition, Pratt (1998, p.175) develops the concept of ‘autoethnography’, which is ‘a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of 81
them’. Thus self-produced accounts of a minority’s culture will not necessarily represent any objective truth, but will be constructed ‘in response to or in dialogue with’ (original emphasis) the discursive resources made available to them by the colonial, or dominant group. For this study, the cultural contact facilitated by online internationalised education will similarly be understood to be potentially a generative interpenetrating process, rather than presumed to be a collection of ‘purities’ side by side.
Living together and relating to otherness will also inevitably produce ‘hermeneutic problems’ (Bauman, 1990), whenever meanings are not self evident and become problematic because cultural frames are not shared. Bauman suggests that the past strategies for managing such problems, of ‘territorial and functional separation’ (p. 147), have also served to perpetuate and reproduce such problems. Given escalating global cultural flows, strategies of separation are less tenable options but leave a legacy and investment in entrenched difference. Moreover, the proliferation of new cultural identities and their constitutive symbolic boundaries produce new sites for hermeneutic problems, suggesting that ‘hermeneutic problems are likely to persist as a permanent “grey area” surrounding the familiar world of daily life’ (p. 147). The inevitability of hermeneutical problems will be explored empirically in the analysis of interactive troubles in Chapter 7.
These various conceptualisations address the new global spatial dis/order whereby culturally diverse parties are present in shared time and space, and act as a referent in defining one’s own cultural identity by relational means. Knowing ‘them’ and their otherness helps to define ‘us’. From these theorisations, cultural contact emerges as a productive, hybridising entanglement (Ang, 2001): not an inert, passive coexistence of ascribed ‘givens’, but a field of achieved choice and design in collective identifications with, however, the potential for trouble. Engaging with culturally diverse others will produce either a repelling, heightened consciousness of difference from the cultural frottage, or some generative process of transculturation. This construction of a cultural identity through the device of difference is not a new process (Said, 1978), but the acceleration of cultural flows has increased the intensity and frequency of such encounters, and the range of cultural expressions on offer (Featherstone, 1995). Under conditions of 82
globalisation, cultural identities should be understood as fractal, that is everdifferentiating as they become embedded in new contexts, and as forged in the politics sparked between new bed partners: ‘…the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another’ (Appadurai, 1990, p. 17).
From these understandings, this thesis will treat cultural identity as the flipside of cultural difference, that is, as a relational construct. The two concepts are mutually constitutive. An assertion of cultural identity is as much an assertion of sameness with those within the category, as an assertion of difference from those excluded: ‘Cultural difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness: self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 13). The thesis will use both terms, but favour ‘cultural difference’ as the analytical focus as it foregrounds the sense of multiple parties being present, and the reflexive and relational process of knowing one’s self through contact with diversity. These choices also deploy the adjectival ‘cultural’ avoiding the nominalisation ‘culture’, a strategy which Appadurai (1996, p. 13) advocates to stress the ‘contextual, heuristic, and comparative dimensions’ that orient us to ‘the idea of culture as difference, especially as difference in the realm of group identity.’ Cultural reproduction under these conditions is transformed into a process of cultural production through imagination and choice amidst competing models:
What is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference, as critical life-choices are made, can be very difficult. … culture becomes less what Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification and representation, the latter often to multiple, and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai, 1990, p. 18)
This shift from cultural reproduction to one of cultural production, that is, to processes of inventing and reviving ways to live in new conditions, requires a rethinking of culture and cultural processes previously dealt with as subliminal
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‘primeval’ socialisation imbued through immersion in a lifestyle. This is required because any group intent on maintaining its collective identity will ‘at the same time (be) constantly confronted with competing visions’ (Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 19).
In summary, there is agreement that the globe’s population is experiencing the renewed vigour of cultural difference as a parameter for people to make sense of current ‘liquid’ times. Rather than cultural difference fading into insignificance, our ‘togetherness-in-difference’ (Ang, 2001, p. 5) will be a more obvious factor and force in how we inhabit these new times, and our heightened awareness of the other will work reflexively by making us more aware and conscious of the cultural choices we value amongst alternatives.
3.4.3 Culture, metaculture and identity With accelerated movements of people, the immediacy of global communications and media, and the increasing economic exchange and cultural interface between nation states, developments which aptly characterise the research site, past anthropological notions of cultures as fixed, bounded and discrete are no longer tenable or applicable. Any grounds for the habitual conflation of nation and culture with bounded space are unravelling. These conditions force a rethinking of past modes of understanding ‘culture’. Robertson (1992, p. 41) uses the term ‘metaculture’ to refer to the culture of culture, that is, shared understandings and applications associated with the concept of ‘culture’:
Metacultures (or cultural codes) constrain conceptions of culture, mainly in terms of deep-rooted, implicit assumptions concerning relationship between parts and wholes, individuals and societies, in-groups and out-groups, and societies and the world as a whole. ... They also shape the different ways in which - and, indeed, the degree to which - substantive culture will be invoked and applied to 'practical action'. (Robertson, 1992, p. 41)
Thus, the dominant literature pertaining to the international student as a ‘culturally different’ learner, reviewed in Chapter 2, operates within a metaculture that assumes mutually exclusive cultures each with some given essence. This study, by including the cultural processes of globalisation in its gaze, does not necessarily
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subscribe to such a metaculture, and is purposefully open to how cultural categories of any persuasion are produced in situ by participants in online interaction across imagined boundaries.
Now, perhaps more than ever, culture needs to be understood as an ongoing process (Moore, 1989; Williams, 1977) of producing and sustaining collective identity in which the mobile individual engages by choice and imagination (Urry, 2000), that is, ‘(cultural) identity, not as an archaic survival but as an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 9). Clifford (1988, 1997) critiques past theorisations of culture as stable located ways of life as inadequate for all times, not just times of globalisation, arguing that notions of culture are borne of encounters with difference at the interface and margins, where decisions about insiders and outsiders have to be policed: ‘Stasis and purity are asserted – creatively and violently – against historical forces of movement and contamination. (Clifford 1997, p. 7)
Thus, any shared culture is achieved through an ongoing process of diachronic, transitional ‘creolization’ (Wicker, 1997) through interaction with alternatives, differentiation and the constant review of boundaries and shared symbols. By privileging accounts of continuity, relativist theories of culture(s) have overlooked dynamic processes of disruption or change and worked to discursively fix and essentialise what is in fact processual. Thus, a metaculture that celebrates past purity in ‘authentic’ traditions denies these Othered groups a contemporary present/presence. Clifford argues that cultures should be understood relationally in contact with, and in contrast to, other cultural collectives. In addition, individuals should be understood as moving through these constructions of difference in multiple, imaginative and innovative ways, especially in these informational and mediated times, with its ‘cultural surplus’ (Melucci, 1997, p. 59) of symbolic possibilities (Featherstone, 1995).
This distinction between a collective’s temporal achievement of a shared culture, and an individual’s selective identity project radically retheorises the ethno-scape when compared to a metaculture of timeless, ascribed cultural identities. As discussed above, the construction of a collective identity relies to some degree on 85
the process of essentialising ‘us’ and ‘them’. From this, we can understand that the construction of difference/sameness by the individual is strategic and significant, invoking ‘differently centered worlds’ (Clifford, 1997, p. 27).
With the emphasis on processual, present tense, and relational understandings of culture, Clifford encourages the study of ‘hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as on rooted, native ones’ (1997, p. 24), not just in physical travel, but also metaphoric travel via ‘different modalities of insider-outsider connection’ (p. 28), of which online education would be one example. This processual metaculture is much better equipped to explain the forging of collective identities in liquid modernity’s flows, without necessarily buying into nostgalia (Robertson, 1992) over the ‘loss’ of tradition and authenticity.
In his consideration of the de-centred self, Stuart Hall (1996b) also highlights the relational, contingent and processual properties of identity and identification with social collectives. His consideration of identity rather than culture as the object of analysis, allows a more fluid theorisation of cultural processes as constituted in the action of, and representation by, individuals:
… (Identities) are constantly in the process of change and transformation … identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming; rather than being: not ‘who we are’, or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. (1996b, p. 4)
This theorisation underpins this study’s interrogation of representations of cultural identities produced and referred to in online interaction as important sites of cultural production.
Like Appadurai, Hall highlights the role of imagination in creating idealised, fictional accounts of identity, and the material impact of these discursive constructions. Like Clifford, Hall argues that the meaning of any identity relies on 86
the construction of a boundary between what is included and what is excluded. Hall’s conceptualisation of identity is more than the self-selection of identity markers. Through the concept of ‘suturing,’ being ‘the join of the subject in structures of meaning’ (Hall 1996b, p. 6, quoting Heath) Hall embeds the actions of the individual within larger structures such as culture. He is also concerned with how identity positions are made possible for the subject to take up, building on Althusser’s structural notion of interpellation:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’ … The notion that an effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires, not only that the subject is ‘hailed’, but that the subject invests in the position, means that suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than a one-sided process, and that in turn places identification, if not identities, firmly on the theoretical agenda. (1996b, pp. 5-6)
This concept of ‘articulation’ as a process allows possibilities, with some measure of goodness-of-fit or friction in the connection between the subject’s production of self, and the identity positions discursively offered in the particular setting: ‘It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?’ (Hall & Grossberg, 1996, p.141). Cultural identity thus produced displays its doubleedged nature: both a category self-selected, and as a category invoked or allocated by others. Ong (1999) explores this empirically in her ethnography of transnationalism in the Chinese diasporic elite, describing how her respondents temporarily submit to, or ‘articulate with’ in Hall’s terms, local discursive regimes to further their mobile pursuit of wealth.
If articulation is understood as the connections made possible under certain conditions, then different conditions may re-articulate the pieces, or make new connections possible where they weren’t before. New conditions offer new points 87
of articulation, and allow new identities to be imaginable. Bauman (1997) suggests this more fluid project-based self is itself a product of an historic shift. He draws a stark contrast between the process of identity construction in modernity, where immutable structures served to ‘anchor’ and delimit the individual’s identity project, and postmodernity, where chronic uncertainty has undermined the solidity of structures, producing a ‘floating and drifting self’ (p. 50):
That difference which sets the self apart from the non-self and ‘us’ from ‘them’, is no longer determined by the preordained shape of the world, nor by command from on high. It needs to be constructed, and reconstructed, and constructed once more, and reconstructed again, on both sides at the same time, neither side boasting more durability. (Bauman, 1997, 54)
I would argue that the process is not an effortless ‘floating’ as Bauman suggests, but rather more viscous, a purposeful striving or strategy. Some individuals will be more advantaged than others in the flows, and some patterns of articulation will be more likely than others given 'lines of tendential force' (Hall & Grossberg, 1996, p. 142) emanating from the configuration of socio-economic circumstances. An enduring cultural identity in times of globalisation is thus understood to be the result of ongoing effort to maintain, reinvent and anchor that identity and its referents in an environment of shifting cultural flows. This more fluid self needs to be understood as realised through actions and choices made in the present tense under current conditions, not effortlessly flowing from past tense legacies.
For this study, the articulation (Hall, 1996b) between the individual’s projected versions of self and the possibilities and identity positions made newly available in the social settings of internationalised online education will be of crucial significance. Education is perhaps one of those venerable, residual social structures which could impinge on, limit or progress identity projects. However, as discussed above, education systems themselves have been appropriated by broader interests, in order to produce new student (and teacher) identities. In this study, the cosmopolitan credential of an MBA, with its promise of global relevance and personal gain, is for sale online. A student’s success in this enterprise will be in the ‘goodness of fit’ or articulation between his/her personal identity project and the 88
positions promoted by, or accessible through, the educational program. To capture and sustain the understanding of articulation as ‘a process of creating connections’ (Slack, 1996, p. 114) the term ‘identity position’ shall be used in this thesis to invoke the possibilities offered to the individual, and ‘identity’ will be the individual’s expression of articulation with such a position, or their ‘re-articulation’ with an alternative construction.
To summarise, this study is building from a very different metaculture than that which typically informs studies of international students and internationalisation in the higher education sector. The theoretical framing of this study draws on Appadurai’s landscapes of contradictory flows and fluidity in globalised times of burgeoning cultural possibilities; Clifford’s theorisation of culture as processual and sameness realised in difference; and Hall’s (1996a,b) notion of the production of self through suturing and articulation. A flow comes from somewhere, passes through other localities and goes to somewhere else. The individual moving along these routes will have access to new resources, which they can choose or reject, desire and be denied. A snapshot produced at any point would give a false sense of fixity, an essential self – that is who they are and who they always will be - rather than a moving image capturing the process of who they are now in these circumstances, on their way to being somewhere/someone else. I would argue that education is a powerful means of transport in cultural flows, propelled by the motivating forces of aspiration and imagination. Education makes new resources available for the production of self, but imposes its own shaping powers on the process. The production of self, in particular through education, is a purposeful accrual of, or investment in, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) of exchange or use value to ally or realign oneself with the future community of one’s imagination.
The following section offers a theorisation of network society and the virtual axis of reality it makes available, which sets the conceptual stage for the final section which will outline Bernstein’s concept of pedagogy and pedagogic identity to theorise the identities constructed in and through pedagogy, virtual pedagogy in particular.
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3.5 Network society and the virtual The discussion thus far has touched upon the inescapable complicity of the revolution in information and communication technologies in the processes of globalisation, the post-modern commodification of knowledge, the production of cultural identity through difference, and the de-centring of identity processes. In this section, Castell’s work on the network society, and its attendant politics of identity, will be reviewed, with particular regard to how the new communicative architecture of information and communication technologies is impacting on the construction of collective identities.
3.5.1 Network society and identity In general, globalisation theorists acknowledge the fact that the penetration and ubiquity of communication and information technologies in recent economic, intellectual, social and political life has enabled the accelerated space-time compression of globalisation. Castells (1996) suggests we are living through a rare state of rapid instability/transition prompted and abetted by revolutionary technological change which affects the material, cultural and identity basis of society. Technology is seen to act in a dialectical relationship with social order – shaping and being shaped by historical, political and social circumstances – as opposed to any deterministic relationship. In his version of ‘glocalisation’, information technology facilitates the new social architecture of network, but the informational/network society is mutually constructed by its historical and cultural specificities, and is constantly adapting to circumstance and experience – flexibility and responsiveness being its hallmarks. Castells typifies this condition, which he terms ‘informationalism’ (1996, p. 20), as one of culture acting on culture, realised through image and data flows. Online education, selling information through electronic flows, is a good example of this ‘second order’, once-removed cultural exchange. This resonates with Waters’ (2001) identification of cultural exchange as the definitive feature of globalisation.
For Castells, the network society does not constitute a new cultural structure in itself; rather it carries/creates a new cultural code: ‘… It is a culture, indeed, but a
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culture of the ephemeral, a culture of each strategic decision, a patchwork of experiences and interests, rather than a charter of rights and obligations’ (1996, p. 199). He identifies this as the ‘culture of real virtuality’, meaning that technologically mediated experiences impinge on participants’ social/ material/ bodily existence. Network society is distinguished from previous eras of mass media, by its affordance of interactivity, and thus the ability to individualise and moderate consumption of any media output.
In the network society, space is reconfigured into the ‘space of flows’ and time into ‘timeless time’ (Castells, 1996). For Castells, the space of flows ‘is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows’ (p. 412), so locations are nodal points of networked flows, not bounded places. Timeless time is the ‘mixing of tenses to create a forever universe … using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present’ (1996, p. 433), creating ‘a culture at the same time of the eternal and of the ephemeral’ (1996, p. 462). Timeless time presents as both timelessness and simultaneity. The qualities of email illustrate this well.
The concepts of ‘space of flows’ and ‘timeless time’ are illuminating when applied to online educational settings. The parties meet through their connections to the shared web space, the asynchronicity of their intersection defies sequencing except with a gross sense of ‘before and after’ evident post-fact in the threading of the discussion, though later entries can disrupt this contiguity at any time by introducing new topics at an earlier point in the discussion. Harvey’s (1990) idea of space/time compression in current times in fact could be reversed to describe how the virtual classroom differs from the ‘real’ face-to-face class, in that the space and the time have effectively been de-compressed. There are now no spatial limits on who can attend these classes (though there may be material limits), and beyond the gross start, finish and assessment submission dates, the teachers have little control over the staging of time. In face-to-face classes three seconds is considered a long silence (Cazden, 1988) that warrants repair action on the part of the teacher, and a rare density of people typically congregate with eye contact around one figure. If one were to compare the tight staging of classroom discourse with the vagaries of the virtual classroom, compression of time and space much better describes the 91
former. The disconnection of any moment from a structured chronology could be seen as a defining characteristic of online learning environments, where ‘flexibility’ promises that the students can control the time frame, in contrast to the teacherdriven staging and sequencing of face-to-face pedagogy. ‘Timeless time’ transcends sequencing. Tyler (2001) grapples with this as a pedagogic conundrum when he asks in what order students will access his WWW teaching resource.
Whether the network society constitutes a radical departure from the previous social order is disputed. Kumar (1995) suggests that there has merely been an acceleration of previous trends, and that capitalism has merely profited and advanced to a new chapter on the basis of new technological means. What social changes have emanated from this progress have impacted more on the private sphere of home and family, with an erosion of public life and sociological or collective identity (also Bauman, 2002). Kumar includes ‘distance learning’ as one aspect of the privatization of life in a home-based ‘self-service’ society (1995, p. 156). Kumar suggests that ‘the information society’ acts more as an ideology and that ‘the wish is father to the thought’ (p. 161). From this more critical perspective, we can understand the enthusiasm for online delivery as a means for the university to reinvent itself, and reposition itself in the global competitive field, by subscribing to, and investing in, the ideological vision of the network society. The ideology (the wish) fathers the thought in the design and marketing of online delivery, which in turn creates a congruent reality of offerings and practice that can provide the evidential basis with which to assert and sustain the ideology. Online education is possible because it is seen to be done. Again, imagination plays a role.
The widespread use of information and communication technologies to build networks has implications for social affiliation, collective identities and action based on these identities. The process of identity construction has changed in the transition to the network society given new disjunctions and flows between local and global, and new networked means of connection and representation. Castells argues that ethnicity, understood to be the cultural expression of notional race, is being ‘unbonded’ and works now in tandem with religion, nation, territory or gender as a composite cultural identity in the network society: ‘…ethnic roots are twisted, divided, reprocessed, mixed, differentially stigmatized or rewarded, 92
according to a new logic of informationalization/ globalisation of cultures and economies that makes symbolic composites out of blurred identities’ (Castells, 1997, p. 59). Castells explains the rise of more overtly political identities as a reaction to the loss of past stability in present conditions of the globalising network society. He profiles a diverse range of social movements, and how the communication network possible through the Internet has been instrumental in creating and maintaining each collective project. The new politics of identity is understood to be a reactionary, re-centring response to the dismantling of previously stable social boundaries as people strive to maintain a primary identity, ‘that is self-sustaining across time and place’(1997, p. 7). Thus, Castells’ concept of identity can be seen to cohere with Hall’s production of the self, in terms of its basis in the individual’s choice and identification with collective labels or symbols.
Castells offers a typology of identities according to their legitimation in power relations, as opposed to the time frames of Bernstein’s typology of pedagogic identities (2000) described in the next section, though there is some overlap. For Castells, legitimising identities are those that mesh with established, longstanding hegemonic positions, however it is these identities that are under stress in uncertain, globalising times. Resistance identities run counter to the dominant version, for example Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms, while project identities are active agents of transformation, working at shifting the dominant version. Examples of the latter would include feminist and environmentalist movements. Castells points out that any particular identity can occupy any of these positions as societies change over time. This resonates with William’s (1977) processual and diachronic notion of culture as embracing both residual and emergent forms as well as the dominant.
For this study, Castells’ work offers a theorisation of now, that is, what forces are shaping our current condition, and how it differs from previous ‘nows’. Information and communication technologies perform a major role in transforming social practices, and fundamental understandings of identity with new means of connection and representation. The primordial anchorage of ethnicity as cultural identity now competes or colludes with new affiliations available through the affordance of electronic information flows, for better or worse. As one example, the cultural resources of global educational choices are now available where they were 93
not before. Students through their choice of provider/program enter into new alliances and depart on newly available trajectories. Meanwhile, Kumar’s caveat reminds us of the power of discourses to create and assert imperatives based on desire, of ‘the wish fathering the thought’. The discussion now moves to theorising the ‘cyberspace’ created through the means of information and communication technology networks, and how its culture of ‘real virtuality’, and ‘timeless time’ can be understood as an interactive environment that can shape pedagogical relations.
3.5.2 Cyberspace and virtuality The term ‘cyberspace’ was derived from a fictional work, a book named ‘Neuromancer’, by Gibson (1995) originally published in 1984, but the fiction has provided a powerful metaphor for producing fact. Attempts to theorise the nature of cyberspace have typically been concerned with individuals’ voluntary dealings with/in the Internet’s World Wide Web, chat room, MUD (multi-user domain) and email environments. Interaction on the Internet to this stage has typically been by textual representation, not visual, so it offers more readily the possibility of identity play or invention. Making sense of this potential split between the real and the virtual has dominated the literature, to an obsessive level (Hine, 2000), and has encouraged excessively ‘fluid’ notions of identity. This distinguishing feature or potential of the virtual presumably does not operate in educational contexts, where the virtual self is carefully tied to the real self, with paper trails for assessment/accreditation, and verified names as default identities in electronic interaction. For this reason, the following discussion focuses on other features of cyberspace and virtual environments that could colour the virtual classroom – in particular its promise of a utopia of desires, its invocatory potential, the concept of virtual community and its device of simulation.
Wertheim (1999) draws from the religious distinction between physical and spiritual space to depict cyberspace as a religious realm, sustained through our belief and desire for what it offers:
The ‘spiritual’ appeal of cyberspace lies in precisely this paradox: It is a repackaging of the old idea of Heaven but in a secular, technologically
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sanctioned format. The perfect realm awaits us, we are told, not behind the pearly gates, but beyond the network gateways, behind electronic doors labelled ‘.com’, ‘.net’, and ‘.edu’. (1999, p. 23)
Through a history of space starting with Dante’s complex topology of heaven, purgatory, and hell, Wertheim plots how the Enlightenment reduced our world(s) to the one physical realm of scientific reality, which has only been challenged recently with theories of relativity. Cyberspace, for Wertheim, is where secular modern society has reclaimed a spiritual space – ‘a dualistic theatre of reality’ (1999, p. 229), which is exploding in size, and where identities are flexible. She depicts cyberspace as beckoning the citizen to dwell in a cyber-utopia remote from the material stresses and exclusions of the physical world. Such notions of a transcendent place of infinite promise were evident in the enthusiasms reported in Chapter 1, and in the evangelic case ‘for’ online learning profiled in Chapter 2. It was also demonstrated that any utopia will however reflect the society from which it has sprung, and carries its own dystopian shadow.
Chesher (2002, forthcoming) builds on Wertheim to argue that the cultural practices associated with magic and religiosity of earlier times still recur in current times through digital technologies, which he renames ‘invocational media’: ‘What makes new media new is that they mediate powers of invocation: powers to call things up’ (2002, p. 1). He distinguishes between the first order event executed in binary circuity often invisible to the operator; second order events which realise the illocutionary intent of the ‘invocation’ (for example opening a webpage); and third order events, which call up and reanimate familiar discourses or practices in the technological environment. For example, ‘Electronic mail is a translation, or a remediation of the cultural practice of mailing. It invokes traditional mail. It is a third order invocation’ (2002, p. 11). For this study, this theorisation helps focus on the translation necessary to invoke or ‘call up’ educational practices or cultural identities by the semiotic means of the online platform, so familiar constructs, meanings and practices of cultural differencing can be played out as ‘third order events’. The term ‘invoke’ shall be used throughout this thesis to maintain awareness of this ‘re-semiotised’ (Iedema, 2004) translation.
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LikeWertheim and Chesher, Turkle argues that virtual environments are seductive in their promise, both feeding and sustained by our imagination and fantasies. Turkle (1995) maps the virtual world differently again – not as a separate, removed and transcendent space, but as an overlapping and impinging world that sustains the multiple, fluid, de-centred self of postmodernity:
In the story of constructing identity in the culture of simulation, experiences on the Internet figure prominently, but these experiences can only be understood as part of a larger cultural context. That context is the story of the eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self, which is occurring both in advanced scientific fields of research and in the patterns of everyday life. (1995, p. 10)
Turkle argues that early technicist, ‘calculation’ approaches to living with the computer have been replaced by the ‘culture of simulation’ (p. 20), exemplified in the virtual desktop iconography, and with new ways of relating to both the machine and to ourselves, being: ‘… increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real … In the culture of simulation, if it works for you, it has all the reality it needs’ (pp. 23-24).
This concept of simulation is drawn from work by Baudrillard (1988) whose treatment of simulation and hyperreality, though conceived before widespread usage of the Internet, has proved productive in making sense of cyberspace and cyberculture. Baudrillard is concerned with the play of meanings on the surface of interaction, and how these do not in fact connect with deeper realities, but rather are linked only metaphorically to their referents through the device of simulation. Simulation is understood as ‘the generation by models of a real without original or reality: a hyperreal. …It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself’ (pp. 166-167). Baudrillard (1988) argues that the mediated signs we consume achieve semiotic simulation rather than representation. This frame is a provocative challenge to any simplistic link of equivalence drawn between the
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‘third order’ invocation of cultural identities in online text, and whatever ‘first order’ lived realities that it purportedly refers to.
Hine’s study (2000) of internet usage surrounding a media event, draws another pertinent distinction between the internet as culture, and the internet as cultural artefact. Hine argues that the Internet is experienced through contextually situated goals and practices and that each setting creates its own interactional order and means of stabilisation. She then demonstrates how criteria of ‘authenticity’ are played out very differently in two different newsgroups according to their congregational purpose. Rheingold (1994) uses an organic metaphor of cultures and subcultures evolving in the petri dish of virtual environments, to similarly argue that the internet affords ‘an ecosystem of subcultures’ (p. 3). This disaggregation of the monolithic concept of ‘cyberculture’ or the Internet (singular) is an important conceptual step for this study. The unique qualities of the ‘petri dish’ for online learning will be later drawn out with reference to theories of pedagogic discourse and pedagogic identities.
Virtual environments thus can be seen to offer an unstable balance between on one hand, liberatory and imaginative potentials, and on the other, translations and extensions of practices of the mundane ‘real’ world. There is recognition of how cyberspace can tap into realms of desire, magic, simulation and imagination, juxtaposed with arguments that the virtual is as real as the material world for its participants. Hine’s (2000) argument that research should engage with particular, contextualised usages of the Internet, understood as a complex composite of situated social practices, helps disaggregate these broadbrush characterisations seemingly at odds, and focus on the particularities of what online participants make of their virtual interaction, the relationships that are produced and the identities that are invoked in any case study. 3.6 Pedagogy, pedagogic relations and pedagogic identities
The above discussion has conceptualised how education relates to the larger context of globalisation; how economic policy and postmodernity have impinged on the conduct of education; and the impact of globalisation and the revolution in
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information and communication technologies on social relations and identity potentials. This section explicates education more precisely as pedagogy, then explores how pedagogy works to construct and shape student identities through the projection of pedagogic identities. The last section will then explore theorisations of the point of intersection between pedagogy and network society, by considering how pedagogic identities are constructed in the simulated environments of virtual educational programs.
3.6.1 Pedagogy and pedagogic relations Theories of pedagogy have emerged in opposition to universalist theories of didactic technique to capture the social co-construction of pedagogic relations:
…pedagogic thinking recognizes that all forms of teaching and learning coexist in a web of economic, social, and cultural differences that links, yet also separates, teachers and learners. (Hamilton & McWilliam, 2001, p. 18)
Pedagogy as a concept foregrounds the relations, context, and politics in the combined process of teaching/learning, and their role in distributing what is learnt by whom. Thus, pedagogy as a theoretical lens becomes pedagogies in practice, where relations between teachers and students are shaped by context, relations and ideological purpose (Christie, 1999a; Gore, 1993). What is more, pedagogies that look similar on the surface can be underpinned by quite different philosophical and social premises (Alexander, 2001). To look inside educational processes, and see how macro ideological or socio-economic agendas are played out in the microsettings of pedagogic interaction, Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and pedagogic identities provides a network of powerful analytical concepts.
For Bernstein, pedagogy is not a matter confined to the classroom, but rather is the means by which symbolic control, or control of the ‘thinkable’ and ‘unthinkable’, is legitimated and maintained, and thus, culture on a macro scale is re/produced (Bernstein, 2000). The ‘pedagogic device’ works through its distribution of knowledge, its recontextualisation or translation of knowledge between the site of its production and the pedagogic site, and its evaluation of the acquisition of knowledge. Of particular interest to this study, is Bernstein’s theorisation of
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pedagogic discourse as the principle whereby ‘other discourses are appropriated and brought into a special relationship with each other, for the purpose of their selective transmissions and acquisition’ (2000, p. 32). Pedagogic discourse is a mechanism for the combination of two separate discourses that are both ideologically derived: the enabling regulative discourse, which shapes the social order (how the learning is to be conducted and displayed), and the the instructional discourse, which shapes the discursive order (what is learnt):
First, the rules of social order refer to the forms that hierarchical relations take in the pedagogic relation and to expectations about conduct, character and manner. … Second, there are the rules of discursive order. The rules of discursive order refer to selection, sequence, pacing and criteria of the knowledge. … the instructional discourse is always embedded in the regulative discourse, and the regulative discourse is the dominant discourse. (Bernstein, 2000, p. 13)
This theorisation helps identify discourses and meanings at work within and through pedagogic interactions, and will underpin the analysis of the online interaction.
Bernstein’s body of work is often considered structuralist in terms of being overly concerned with matters of cultural reproduction, and in describing the deeper structures that produce any surface instantiation. If this were the case, it would sit uncomfortably with the theorisations of global complexity, liquid modernity and postmodernity presented above. In contrast, I would contend that such readings do not engage with the cumulative complexity, dynamism and generative potential inherent in his network of concepts, their interrelations and their tensions (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; P. Singh, 2002) nor with their relevance to both postmodern and poststructural theory (Tyler, 2001).
His theory of pedagogic discourse is what he metaphorically refers to as ‘a grammar’ (Bernstein & Diaz, 1984, p. 79) which can account for the mechanics of cultural reproduction through pedagogy, but can equally account for the mechanics of cultural production and change, in terms of the ‘yet to be voiced’ emerging: 99
A complex set of variations, changes and contradictions may arise between pedagogic practice and its regulating discourse. These variations and contradictions have their source in the relations between transmitters and acquirers, as these relations generate realizations relatively independent of the assumptions, principles, rules and regulations of pedagogic discourse. (Bernstein & Diaz, 1984, p. 82)
To this end, Bernstein (1990) distinguishes between the voices and the messages enabled by the ‘relay’ of the pedagogic device, and the generative potential of pedagogy in their interrelationship. To summarise, the ‘voice’ is the categories of identities offered, from which to legitimately speak. The ‘message’ is what is actually spoken in practice. Thus the messages produced in the conduct, may not necessarily adhere to the voicing envisaged in, and legitimated by, the design:
The positioning of the subject creates the 'voice' of the subject but not the specific message. The 'voice' sets the limits on what can be a legitimate message. To create a message beyond those limits is to change 'voice'. Such a change entails changing the degree of insulation, which initially was the condition for the speciality of the original 'voice'. (Bernstein, 1990, p. 28)
Thus pedagogy can either produce or suppress the ‘yet to be thought’ (Bernstein, 1990).
This dynamic nexus of pedagogic roles with their respective agencies, pedagogic discourse and pedagogic practice, is exactly where the distinction between design and conduct made in the research question is focused in recognition of the play of competing potentials in the relations. Bernstein’s ‘grammar’ provides not just one design on how pedagogy operates or should operate, but rather shows how the different pieces can be assembled, reassembled, shifted, tweaked and customised to produce different outcomes in design and conduct.
Moreover, Bernstein firmly historicises any empirical account of pedagogic practice and guards against ahistorical structuralism, by evoking the variety of agents and 100
their positions in relatively autonomous ‘arenas’ filtering and shaping what eventually happens in any classroom. Bernstein’s chosen term ‘arena’, ‘containing agents with positions/practices seeking domination’ (2000, p. 202) equates to Bourdieu’s (1971) concept of ‘field’, being a set of interdependent positions defined through their relative positioning and influence, rather than intrinsic individual properties of the positions’ occupants. A field is thus, ‘like a magnetic field, made up of a system of power lines’ (Bourdieu, 1971, p.161). To historicise the pedagogical interactions of interest in this study, the first two chapters of this thesis situated the study in the progress of thought, debates and practices in the policy and the professional arenas that have shaped agendas in online internationalised education, which in turn influence the parameters of what is possible and thinkable in the case study site.
According to Bernstein, any pedagogy involves a theory of instruction which draws on the regulative discourse, and its inherent ‘model of the learner and of the teacher and of the relation’ (2000, p. 35). He suggests that these models are ideological in nature, and the recontextualising arena, where knowledge is reconstituted for pedagogical purposes, is made up of agents ‘with practising ideologies’ (2000, p. 33) and the struggles between them for relative power. Ideologies here refer not to ‘false consciousness’ but rather to competing sets of values and beliefs that imbue regimes of truth in relations of dominance and subordination (see Hall & Grossberg, 1996). Thus, the metaculture that produces the ‘cultural difference’ model of the international student, as reviewed in Chapter 2, could be re-described as a dominant ideology that has informed such a model of the learner, and its complementary model of the teacher as cultural informant. Whether or not these imagined models are comfortable positions for articulation by the teachers or learners will be played out in the conduct of any pedagogy. This capacity to deal with the complexity and interplay of potentials distinguishes Bernsteinian theory from theories of didactics, or decontextualised theories of learning, that would argue some transcendent, optimal model of good teachers and learners.
By recontextualising knowledges, that is, drawing knowledge from its context of production and reanimating it in pedagogical settings, the pedagogic device creates ‘an imaginary discourse… unmediated discourses are transformed into mediated, 101
virtual or imaginary discourses’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 33). This could be understood as the discourse of heuristic devices, generalisations or hypothetical examples, produced and tolerated for consumption only in the pedagogical setting. This ability to create the imaginary is made possible by the discursive gap produced in the dislocation and re-location of the original knowledge discourse into the pedagogical discourse (Muller, 2000). This imaginary discourse, like a hologram, thus enables simulations in the sense of Baudrillard (Tyler 1995, 1999, 2001), or helps sustain and reproduce ‘zombie categories’, redundant concepts that have lost their purchase on a shifting reality (Beck, 2004, p. 146). This will be explored empirically in reference to the accounts of cultural categories produced in the case study’s interactions.
Bernstein’s analysis of pedagogy does not just explain static order, but also deals with the dynamics of change inherent in any relations of control, and the inherent pressure to weaken that control. His foundational concepts of classification and framing (Bernstein, 1971) describe respectively the strength of relations of power between, and the relations of control within, categorical orders. Such orders may involve curricular disciplines, staff/student categories, institutions, or for this study, cultural categories, as discussed further in Chapter 6. Classification will reflect the degree of specialisation and demarcation between the categories, ‘the apartness of things’ (Bernstein, 2000, p.11). Bernstein also uses the term, ‘insulation’, to refer to and measure the gap between categories. Framing will reflect how the roles within the category may legitimately interact, ‘who controls what’ within the order established (2000, p.12). Student or teacher resistance may contest the framing of any pedagogical order to either weaken or strengthen its control. By thus theorising pedagogic relations as a series of arenas with degrees of autonomy, Bernstein (2000) highlights the capacity for transformative struggle within pedagogic relations for relative power over the pedagogic device. This inherent struggle will be understood and operationalised as moments of ‘interactive trouble’ in the online interaction, as developed in Chapter 4.
Tyler’s work applies Bernsteinian concepts to online pedagogy in particular, to argue that the features of hypertextuality, its interactivity between text and reader, and its impact on teacher/student relationships, result in a ‘de-institutionalisation of 102
teaching and learning’ (Tyler, 2001, p. 347). Hypertextual education is thus understood to unsettle traditional scripts for pedagogy. Firstly, hypertext collapses the boundary between the teaching and the taught - ‘the communicative basis of instructional discourse is “de-authored”’ (p. 348). It dissolves the regulative charter/presence of educational institutions as the participants are ‘de-schooled’ (p. 348): ‘Learners and teachers become consumers, rather than producers and reproducers of knowledge’ (p. 348). In addition, time and space are compressed, in effect displacing ‘the distinctions between the partitioning of knowledge (classification) and its sequencing (framing)’ (p. 348). Thus, it can be understood that online, hypertextual environments can challenge normative assumptions about how the regulative discourse within pedagogy should operate.
Tyler also applies the Bernsteinian concepts of classification and framing to the hypertextual educational environment. He challenges the myth of ‘openness’ (that is, weaker classification) of hypertext, which overlooks the hierarchical structuring of any course’s home page, the selectivity of links, and censorship or selection by search engines. He uses the term ‘hypervocality’ to capture the ‘apparently unconstrained and prodigious multiplicity of voices or formalised channels of communication, whose surface feature is that of an unrestrictive inclusiveness’ (p. 353), that is, the apparently weaker framing, and addresses the new regulative problem this poses in deciding the authority of each voice. This is empirically explored in Chapter 6, in terms of modes of legitimation for knowledge claims in the instructional discourse regarding cultural groups, and the tactics used by students to ‘authorise’ their claim. Tyler’s treatment coheres with Burbules and Callister’s (2000b) ‘post-technocratic’ frame to demonstrate how the openness of hypertextual educational environments can serve varied pedagogical purposes, rather than determine how pedagogy will necessarily unfold. It also serves to predict volatility in the regulative order of online pedagogy. How this prediction plays out in the particular setting of the case study is explored in Chapter 7 in terms of ‘flares’ of regulative trouble.
3.6.2 Pedagogic identities With this suite of analytical concepts, Bernstein was able to distinguish various curriculum codes (collection/integrated, singular/region/generic), and pedagogies
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(competence/performance, visible/invisible) whose regulative discourses were produced in different political, economic and ideological contexts, and which in turn, produced different identity positions for their students.
The moral of the story is … that recontextualizing fields, both official and pedagogic, are fields of contest with various social fractions with different degrees of social power sponsoring pedagogic regimes which, despite some similarities of rhetoric, will have quite different policy implications and, more to the point here, will construct different teachers and learners. (Muller, 2000, p. 109)
For Bernstein, a pedagogic identity is the identity positions projected for both students and teachers in the larger discourse(s) shaping pedagogic practice. In other words, a pedagogic identity is produced in the relation between the learner or teacher and the socially constituted body of knowledge, and will reflect the distinctness of that body of knowledge from others, relations within the knowledge community, and its relation to the broader economic context. Thus, enrolment in an online MBA may offer an identity position for students and teachers flowing from membership in the esoteric or rarefied nature of the instructional discourse imparted through the curriculum. It may also be a source of identity due to the material rewards flowing from the credential and its status. Bernstein’s concept of pedagogic identities and his typology of four macro orientations competing in current educational reforms will be used to interrogate the identity positions offered in the globalised and commodified educational settings of internationalised online education. These positions allow the micro interactions and identities invoked and displayed in a particular educational setting to relate to the wider socio-cultural context of commodification and globalisation.
Bernstein identifies four orientations ‘for designing and distributing pedagogic identities’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 205) – retrospective, prospective, therapeutic, and market orientations. Each of these orientations attempts ‘to construct in teachers and students a particular moral disposition, motivation and aspiration, embedded in particular performances and practices’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 65). A ‘retrospective’ identity recaptures the past in the present, and is pedagogically realised in tight 104
control over the inputs of education. A ‘prospective’ identity reflects the neoconservative effort to undergo change in order to retain desirable aspects of the past in conditions of the present, controlling inputs and outputs. These two identities are considered ‘centred’ as they are driven by top-down national policy, and aim for convergence, that is uniform outputs, whereas de-centred identities encourage divergence. A de-centred, ‘therapeutic’ identity, less prominent in formal educational models, is premised on progressive theories of personal development and constructs multiple ‘presents’ through stable, integrated personal identities. The de-centred ‘market’ identity is competitive and contingent as it responds to market values and market opportunities – ‘the transmission here arises to produce an identity whose product has an exchange value in a market ... the identity is a reflection of external contingencies’ (2000, p. 69-70). These identity positions are differently projected by the competing discourses informing the design and conduct of pedagogy. These categories are summarised in Table 1. Table 1: Bernstein’s Pedagogic Identity Orientations PEDAGOGIC IDENTITY ORIENTATIONS Centred Retrospective
Decentred
DESCRIPTION Tight control over inputs, recaptures the past in the present
Prospective
Tight control over outputs, neo-conservative reform
Therapeutic
Premised on progressive theories of personal development and constructs multiple ‘presents’ through stable, integrated personal identities
Market
Competitive and contingent as it responds to market values and market opportunities
The competition between these models of pedagogic identity is played out in the governance of educational inputs (curriculum) and outputs (evaluation) with the decentred market model currently considered to be dominating higher education reforms, with ‘profound consequences for professionals, particularly with regards to their relationship to knowledge, to clients, and to the organizational structures within which most of them now work’ (Beck & Young, 2005, p. 183; see also Maton, 2005). It is significant that the positions can exist and operate in conflict, with different ones driving different curricular aspects, or temporarily achieving
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ascendancy (Moore, 2002). Tyler (2001) suggests that the ‘deconstructive potential’ (p.356) and ‘hypervocality’ (p. 353) of the online medium might also help de-centre or open up unintended identity positions. Taking these models to the field of management studies as in this study, a centring model for curriculum may favour the study of classic texts and disciplinary paradigms, while the evaluation of the learning favours a de-centred market pedagogic identity, in the application of these paradigms to work-based problems. Importantly, these pedagogic identities condition teacher identity positions and practices (Moore, 2002) as much as the students’.
3.6.3 Pedagogic identity and local identity The concept of pedagogic identity intersects with theorisations of local (including cultural) identity in that the pedagogical identities projected will interact and could potentially conflict with the personal and cultural identity projects of individual students. In arguments congruent with Castell’s and Hall’s work, Bernstein defines local identities as: ‘contemporary resources for constructing belonging, recognition of self and others, and context management (what I am, where, with whom and when)’ (2000, p. 205), and acknowledges the increased capacity for disembedding identities, and the weakened logic of stable collective identities. This definition is thus compatible with processual and relational conceptualisation of identity by articulation. The important link is Bernstein’s acknowledgment of education as a source and forceful process of identity formation. The pedagogic positions he describes should be interpreted as equivalent to a typology of identity positions created with which the student can articulate their local or cultural identities.
Bernstein agrees with Hall’s characterisation of the changed, more fluid conditions for the construction of local identities, and suggests three dominant identity positions as competing models/resources under current conditions of ‘re-organising capital’ (2000, p. 205). These positions are conceptualised on similar analytical axes to his typology of pedagogic identities, being the convergence/divergence axis of ‘centring’, and the temporal axis (past/present/future) of retrospective and prospective orientations. For de-centred local identities, he describes the subcategories of instrumental and therapeutic. For retrospective identities he describes the two subcategories of fundamentalist and elitist. He does not
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differentiate prospective identities. The de-centred identities pursue multiple paths – the instrumental identity driven by external local market circumstances, the therapeutic driven by internal processes of sense making in search of a coherent self. The retrospective identities are shared, centring around stabilised collective identities such as nation or religion in the case of fundamentalist, and around high cultural aesthetic tastes in the case of elites. The prospective identities cohere around the sense of becoming a future collective (similar to Castell’s project identities). This is considered re-centring because subscribing to a political and collective project overwrites past collective and personal identities. These categories are summarised in Table 2. Table 2: Bernstein’s Local Identity Orientations LOCAL IDENTITY TYPES
DESCRIPTION
Retrospective
Past oriented, centred around nationalism, religion or other stabilised collective identity
Fundamentalist
Decentred
Prospective
Elitist
Past oriented, centred around high cultural/aesthetic taste
Therapeutic
Present oriented, concerned with internal processes of sense making in search of a coherent self
Instrumental
Present oriented, driven by external local market circumstances Future oriented around the sense of becoming a future collective
Bernstein (2000) also addresses how the pedagogic identities created or offered in official educational settings may (or may not) marry with the types of localised identities the individual chooses to articulate with. He suggests that as educational institutions are increasingly shaped by market discourses, people in their local identities seek to revive or institute new ‘forms of the sacred’ external to such discourse, the result being ‘new sources of tension, change and possibility in the relation between the official pedagogic identities, … and the local identities of the emerging field’ (Bernstein 2000, p. 78). This in essence, is the problematic for this study.
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From this theorisation, we can draw a sense of how pedagogy can work with or against local cultural identities through the process of articulation, and how the field of pedagogy can be in itself a competition over the kind of identity resources and positions to be produced. Pedagogy is involved in designing and assigning identity positions, with which the individual may articulate either cooperatively or by resistance. Hypothetically, the curriculum of an MBA offered internationally by online means, may offer a cosmopolitan, market-oriented identity position, projecting the supra-national professional with marketable skills of high exchange value, that attempts to overwrite any local cultural allegiance the student brings with them. The management discourse transmitted may offer the student a prospective identity in terms of membership in some imagined culture-neutral, global business community, which might conflict with any alliance to Western dispositions the student seeks through their study, or their allegiance to their local cultural community.
This theorisation accords pedagogy a particular and unique status in being able to project and legitimise certain identity positions, through the mechanism of both the regulative and the instructional discourses. Such pedagogic identities for Bernstein are understood to be distinct from the students’ local identities, but they will interact through processes of articulation. Thus pedagogic interaction will produce identity resources that can enhance, exacerbate or reconfigure any operative logics of unity or difference.
3.7 Mapping the theoretical framework This chapter has synthesised a wide variety of conceptual work to theoretically frame this study concerned with understanding the production of cultural difference in sites of online internationalised education. This research problem was mapped as a nexus which intersects theories of cultural identity, pedagogy, and network society, and is permeated by processes of globalisation and the commodification of knowledge that make global markets in education thinkable and possible. This section fleshes out the schematic mapping presented in Figure 1, summarising the relevant concepts drawn from each area, and how they interconnect to conceptualise the research problem.
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Globalisation will be understood through both the macro consideration of accelerating, disjunctural cultural flows across national boundaries (Appadurai, 1996), and the micro concerns of global consciousness (Waters, 2001) fuelling actors’ imaginaries and resourcing new identities (Appadurai, 1990). The resulting more liquid life-politics (Bauman, 2000) and escalating ‘togetherness-in-difference’ (Ang, 2001) are understood to heighten awareness of comparative difference. This relativisation (Robertson, 1992) of self viz a viz others, can also be compounded by the process of glocalisation (Robertson, 1992) whereby the local can only be understood with relation to its positioning in the global, and vice versa.
This condition of flow and flux, and different relational ‘range of foci’ (Featherstone, 1995, p.110) challenges former theoretical understandings, in particular that of the dominant metaculture (Robertson, 1992) that conflates nation and place with stable, mutually exclusive cultures. For this reason, this study subscribes to a metaculture whereby cultural identities and cultures are understood as processual and relational constructs (Clifford, 1997; Hall, 1996b), produced and achieved by a necessary logic of difference (Hall, 1997) through the generative processes of contact and entanglement. In the excess of cultural resources in global flows, the related process of identification is understood to be one of articulation (Hall, 1996b) between the social actor and the identity positions or identity resources made available.
Education is understood to be an important source through which new cultural resources and identity positions are made available for the student to articulate with. My own doctoral journey provides a good example of this, potentially drawing me into global and local communities previously closed to me, while forcibly shaping and disciplining my thinking, defining who I can be in these contexts, and who I should become. This proliferating complexity of cultural potentials feeds and exacerbates the postmodern condition of knowledge (Featherstone, 1995) whereby specialised knowledges compete increasingly on the basis of their market appeal and saleability (Lyotard, 1979). Markets in education are understood to be selling knowledge for
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exchange value and positional self goods, more so than use value (Marginson, 1997). These goods could be considered as self-investments by students in their ‘process of becoming’ (Hall, 1996b, p.4) or identity trajectories.
Information and communication technologies are deeply implicated in both the production and circulation of knowledges by enabling the separation of knowledge from knower (Lyotard, 1979). The ‘complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson, 1999) of ICTs is also deeply implicated in facilitating the singular field (Featherstone, 1995) and network architecture of globalisation thus enabling the cultural flows of globalisation (Castells, 1996). This in turn has enabled the pursuit of new, deterritorialised identities that speculatively mix, match and realign what were previously nested sets of cultural markers (Castells, 1997). Interactions in the ‘space of flows’ and ‘timeless time’ of cyberspace are understood to be able to animate imaginary potentials through its ‘invocational media’ (Chesher, 2002). Invocations of cultural identity in the online medium thus will be understood as not necessarily linked to lived ‘reality’, but as significant discursive acts of representation semiotically producing cultural boundaries and notional difference.
Pedagogy, understood through Bernstein’s (2000) network of concepts, is similarly capable of sustaining imaginary discourses, and projecting identity positions for students and teachers to articulate with. Following Bernstein, pedagogic discourse is understood to involve both a regulative discourse and an instructional discourse, and to be premised on ideological models of the learner, teacher and their relation. Online modes of pedagogy are understood to potentially disrupt normative assumptions of the regulative order (Tyler, 2001). In the same way, marketisation of education has disordered the usual regulative order of pedagogic roles. For these reasons, this study will treat moments of ‘trouble’ as significant distinguishing aspects of this online, commodified mode of education.
These concepts help to distinguish both the elusive materiality and the distinctiveness of interactions of online internationalised education in the nodes of networked flows, and their relations to larger cultural processes of globalisation. There is an emphasis in this summary on potentials, and more specifically, competing potentials. This theoretical framework can therefore inform the 110
researcher’s gaze and mode of enquiry, but cannot be used to predict what will happen in the particular case study. Nor will it be used to limit the study to its parameters alone. As becomes evident in later chapters, the case study ethnography threw up unforeseen aspects that warrant further theoretical treatment to make sense of events.
Online internationalised education is a means for the social actor anchored in a material location to elect to engage with global commodities and global cultural flows without losing access to local cultural resources and identities. This synthesis of theory has arrived at a complex ontology (Zhao, 2001) for what is to be understood by the concept of culture and its derivatives: cultural identity and cultural difference. It is both a discursive construct, an imaginary state and a contingently lived, socially constructed fact realised in the individual’s processual articulation with social structures of meaning and practice. The next chapter addresses the challenge of devising a workable methodology that can address this complex ontology.
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CHAPTER 4: AN ADAPTIVE METHODOLOGY WITH COMPROMISED METHODS This study faced two particular methodological challenges: firstly how to operationalise the complexity of the concept of culture in times of globalisation, and secondly how to research the virtual. The former challenge has two aspects in itself – firstly in how culture is now theorised, and secondly, in how culture is now lived. In respect to the first aspect, culture as an object of study has been redefined through the logics of different paradigms such as Marxism, cultural studies and semiotics from a relatively stable, ‘out there’ phenomenon and object of analysis, to become an object that is constructed in dialogic relations, subject to cultural politics and discursive conditions, necessitating a different methodological approach (Smith, 2000). On this challenge’s second aspect, Eisenhart (2001a, b) questions the appropriateness of past methods as tools to understand the cultural spaces, flows and exchanges in today’s world of mobility and interconnectivity. The second challenge is how to make empirical investigations of virtual interactions, which take place in the ephemeral, elusive substance of cyberspace. Both challenges question the value of that which is empirically accessible.
These challenges are situated in larger disciplinary issues facing social science regarding fundamental questions of epistemology and ontology. Ontology refers to the philosophical notion of what is understood to constitute reality, that is, what is, while epistemology refers to how we are able to know it. Stones (1996) offers the metaphor of a ‘bridge’ to explain the relationship between, on one hand, sociological theory with its infused metatheoretical understandings of ontology and epistemology, and on the other hand, any operationalisation of theory in empirical work. Stones warns of a ‘chasm’ between these two levels that must be negotiated rigorously if sociological research is to do justice to the rich complexity of any social reality. Zhao (2001) similarly advocates conscious metatheoretical reflection both to engage with the complex ‘mutability of meaning contexts and social practices’ and to acknowledge the material effects of social theory in that ‘social theory constitutes an essential part of the condition of social action’ (p. 388). The
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concept of ‘culture’ and its current range of meanings and applications is a good example of such conceptual escape from theory to social practice. This chapter accordingly makes explicit the methodological bridge between the research problem of how cultural difference may be produced in online educational environments and the empirical research program of ‘classroom’ ethnography of a case study unit, supplemented with semi-structured interviews including stimulated recall.
The chapter is structured in five parts. Firstly, a critical realist frame is explicated as the basis to the methodological design. Next the empirical study and data collection program is outlined briefly. Then each method is reviewed with regard to what informs its application to this research project, and how it relates to the critical realist frame. This discussion considers: case study as an empirical design; issues of access and ethics; adapting ethnographic methods to virtual settings; and how the textual data from the online interaction will be analysed using the synergy between Bernsteinian theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics. The next section outlines the use of interview data as an adjunct to the online interaction data, and the final section summarises the methodological arguments.
4.1 Critical realism for ‘good enough’ research A critical realist frame (Bhaskar, 2002; Outhwaite, 1987) asserts that there is a layered reality ‘out there’ independent of our interpretation. In summary, the premises for a critical realist ontology rely on: firstly a stratification of reality that asserts firstly the reality of potentials or tendencies inherent in objects or actors (what is possible); secondly the existential reality of any social event or practice, and its ‘intransitivity’ (Bhaskar, 2002, p. 9) or independence of any theoretical interpretation of such (what is, what happened); and thirdly, the reality of the empirical event which is observable in some way (what can be sensed). Bhaskar’s contribution creates an ontology for open systems such as social interaction, in contrast to the closed systems of scientific experimentation that failed to cater for complexities that could not be controlled. In an open system, coexisting forces may work together or counteract each other, and inherent tendencies may or may not be realised in an actual event. This ontology is also opposed to the more extreme social constructionist assertion that reality exists only in our interpretations, rejecting any
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ontology of a reality that can be known objectively, independent of an ideological standpoint (Crotty, 1998; Schwandt, 2000). For critical realists, there is a reality of potentials and events that is enacted in complex social dimensions, which may thus be difficult to isolate, grasp or capture empirically, but is no less real.
In the wake of the linguistic turn, the hermeneutic turn and the contributions of postmodernist thought that have provoked the social sciences to re-examine methodological assumptions, Stones (1996) argues that critical realism’s mantra of ontological richness and epistemological caution should work alongside an additional principle of textual reflexivity in sociological research. Reflexivity refers to turning the gaze of enquiry inwards, back onto itself, reflecting on, critiquing, and informing the process underway. Following an explication of these three criteria (ontologically rich, epistemologically cautious, textually reflexive), the methods of case study, semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall, and ‘classroom’ ethnography selected for this study will be explored in terms of working in concert towards fulfilling these criteria.
The ‘linguistic turn’ refers to the work of Foucault, Derrida and their followers who argued that any social reality is mediated and experienced in terms of linguistic or semiotic representations, as much as by material experience. It has ‘undermined any sense that facts speak for themselves, that reality can be represented directly and transparently by words and narrative forms that simply mirror the world’ (Stones, 1996, p. 5). In terms of ontology, this requires the researcher to enquire into the discursive regimes operating in the field of interest as an essential constitutive force in any social reality. In terms of epistemology, this requires the researcher to be sceptical and reflexive in terms of accounts and representations of social realities by the researched and the researcher, and in terms of how truths can be produced textually. It also requires acknowledgement that any empirical study will be partial, selective and attenuated. These considerations in turn inform a methodology that investigates discursive constructions and social actions as mutually constitutive, and both of empirical interest, as Hall explains:
… while not wanting to expand the territorial claims of the discursive infinitely, how things are represented and the 'machineries' and regimes of 114
representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role. This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation - subjectivity, identity, politics - a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life. (Hall, 1996a, p. 443)
Thus, for this study, culture is understood to be a social construction constituted discursively and invoked semiotically in wordings, texts and images, as well as through lived social practices.
The ‘hermeneutic turn’ refers to the work following Wittgenstein, Weber and Habermas to argue that any social reality is contextualised, and to understand a social event, one has to understand its context of shared meanings or practices that shape actions, and the meanings attached to those actions. The emphasis on understanding events/processes in their contexts, and from the actors’ perspective is opposed to logical positivism’s predilection for extracting and abstracting events/processes from their contexts in order to understand them. For educational research, Hamilton and McWilliam (2001) use Weber’s distinction between verstehen and erklärung to draw a line between efforts to theorise ‘didactics’ as context-independent generalised knowledge of education and more recent efforts to theorise ‘pedagogy’ as education constituted in the power and social relations of particular contexts. In practice,
[t]his means, of course, that educational researchers who study classrooms … must take into account the meanings of what happens as articulated by the students, teachers, administrators, all who are involved. (Greene, 1993, p. 435)
Ontologically, embracing the hermeneutic turn means that social actions cannot be extracted from, nor exist independently of, their context. This creates another problem, as discussed later, because delimiting ‘context’ in globally connected times is becoming more problematic: ‘the geographical local does not exhaust the contextual’ (Stones, 1996, p. 49). Epistemologically, this applies as much to the researcher, and the meanings they draw from events, as to the social actors under 115
study, and demands caution as to whether knowledge generated in one context will be applicable to others. Methodologically, these considerations demand enquiry into the social actors’ biographies, settings, motivations and perspectives as contributing factors informing and processing social actions, plus similar recognition and presentation of the researcher’s contextual framing, given that ‘an interpretation of a text is not presuppositionless. The interpreter cannot “jump outside” the tradition of understanding he or she lives in’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 49). This is realised by textual interruptions in the reporting, to reflexively expose researcher presuppositions and decisions that may have shaped the conduct of interviews or analysis, ‘by putting [myself] in the picture [I] paint’ (Bhaskar, 2002, p. 21).
Hermeneutic contextualisation poses a particular challenge for this study, situated as it is in virtual space, without any necessarily shared space, time, or context beyond the educational contract that has brought the actors together, at least metaphorically. The hermeneutic frames of meanings that the students and teachers bring to the shared context of online educational interaction did not necessarily cohere around contiguities of space and time such as one would find in face-to-face educational settings. This problematisation does not displace the need to build a detailed account of the online context itself, but demonstrates that such a focus is not sufficient in and of itself. The study focuses consideration on the hermeneutics of cultural affiliation, but methodologically needs to consider other aspects of the actors’ identities and biographies (for example work roles, age, gender, locality, education, aspirations) that possibly shaped their perspective. Conditions of globalisation and media/technological penetration also complicate the hermeneutic method, given that no context can be considered hermetically sealed any more. Even defining a time frame as context has its complexities:
The make-up of the present event is never contained within the present but stretches beyond to absent memories and meanings, without which the present moment would be very different, or not at all. (Stones, 1996 p. 49)
Social structures pre-exist the individual’s actions, however transformative the social actors’ actions may prove (Bhaskar, 2002). This conundrum will be
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considered in more detail in the consideration of case study as a method, and its criteria of ‘boundedness’, in regard to borderless space.
In light of the postmodern ‘rhetorical turn’ (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1998, p. 122), Stones argues for the third methodological criterion of textual reflexivity, to mitigate the construction of truth and authoritative voice through purely textual means of representation. Research accounts should ‘expose the device’ (Stones, 1996, p. 85) in order ‘to reveal the text as much more – and also as much less - than just a transparent representation of “the way things are”’ (Stones, 1996, p. 87). Ethnography, as the methodology typically associated with studies of culture, has in particular been criticised for its conventional construction of textual truths about minority groups (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1998). Working within ethnography, Luttrell (2000) suggests that a ‘good enough’ ethnography can engage with this ‘representational crisis’ by ‘naming’ the ‘tensions, contradictions or power imbalances’ (Luttrell, 2000, p. 500) including accounts of how labels are chosen, documenting decisions behind theorisations, and acknowledging the intersubjectivity of research. Through such mechanisms of exposure, Luttrell argues that ethnography can find a middle ground between realist and reflexive forms, an argument which resonates with the critical realist’s search for some middle ground between epistemological objectivism and constructionism (Crotty, 1998). Thus the strength of a textual account will lie in whether the author makes its weaknesses explicit.
In light of these understandings the textual treatment of the concept ‘culture’ needs consideration. If presented as a noun the object is endowed with an objective, factual substance ‘out there’, stripped of its human agents, a status that masks the fact that it is processual - engendered, maintained and modified by human agents. The noun ‘culture’ also grammatically lends itself to making a countable plural – ‘one culture, two cultures’ – which textually infers that these are discrete, mutually exclusive entities, and thus cultural difference is inevitable. Hall (1996b) favours the term ‘identity’ precisely for the ease with which it slips into the verb form, ‘to identify’. This text will continue to use the noun ‘culture’ to refer to the achieved social construction of shared patterns of behaviour and meanings, but will also use verb forms such as ‘cultural differencing’ and ‘cultural saming’ to highlight 117
processual aspects of the theorisation of cultural production, as well as the adjectival form ‘cultural’, such as in ‘cultural identity’ to highlight partial, contingent and potentially overlapping attributes of social collectives.
The other reason for continuing to use the noun ‘culture’ is to reflect the ongoing commonsense usage of the term, and therefore its constitution of a social reality of sorts. Outhwaite (1987, pp. 56-57) explains the importance of the common sense conceptualisations to social science:
Common-sense descriptions of social phenomena can and must be taken as a starting-point in social scientific theorising. Can, because they provide the beginnings of definitions of the phenomena and thus help in the otherwise bewildering activity of object-constitution …. Must, because however imperfect they may be, to the extent that they are the perceptions of agents involved in that situation, they will influence the very nature of that situation.
Further, ‘culture’ is what Bhaskar would describe as a transitive object of study – ‘a product of the interpretations of human beings’ (Outhwaite, 1987, p. 57), dependent upon our descriptions and historically located/ negotiated definitions. What lecturers and students make of, and ascribe to, the ‘culture’ of each other becomes a force in itself.
The discussions above have addressed three methodological criteria drawing on a critical realist frame for social science. Acknowledging the inherent complexity and contingency of social processes has the mitigating epistemological consequences of acknowledging that empirical work can at best only be partial, will fall short of the utopian ideal of ‘ontological exhaustiveness’ (Stones, 1996) and offer explanation rather than a predictive basis as commonly sought in the natural sciences (Bhaskar, 2002). While ideally the researcher would seek ontological saturation - knowing all there is to know - pragmatic concerns inevitably impinge on methodological decisions, and any research is necessarily limited by its selectivity. The issue then becomes one of assessing the status of the ‘evidential basis’ (Stones, 1996, p. 232), and whether the research design has selected valid types of evidence to support its 118
epistemic claims given its theoretical question. The issue of evidential basis will now be considered in three ways – firstly, scoping the research task and drawing boundaries around what it can and cannot achieve; secondly, what kind of valid claims can be made from the types of data collected; and thirdly, pragmatic concerns that inevitably limit what kind of data can be accessed.
The first issue regarding the ‘evidentiary basis’ of a methodology pertains to the scoping of the research task and marrying the empirical task to its theoretical aims. Within the range of theory types, analyses (for example, at systems level, at the level of agent conduct, or attempting theoretical generalisations across contexts) should be judged on their own terms, distinguished by their scope and intent, and be cautious of overreaching their inherent constraints. A process of ‘methodological bracketing’ (Stones, 1996, p. 70, quoting Giddens) helps focus and scope the research task in appropriate ways. This study could methodologically be termed a ‘agent’s conduct analysis’, intent on understanding how a process unfolds according to both the constraints of structure and the actions of the actors, through ‘the analysis of the hermeneutic frames of meaning of lay actors’ (Stones, 1996, p. 75).
Methodologically this will require seeking insights into moments of disruption, disjuncture, negotiation and repair, and the meanings and motivations actors attach to their actions, as well as documenting normative practices. By making this choice of focus, other fields of vision and thus levels of theorisation are excluded. For this study, the aim is to understand the nature of these virtual educational contexts, and how the actors understand or perform the influence of cultural identities. Thus, by this methodological bracketing as an agent conduct analysis, the insights should not be indiscriminately extrapolated beyond this setting, or to settings without many shared contextual qualities.
In regard to the second issue of ‘evidential basis’, that of what valid truth claims can be made from qualitative data, validity is understood to come ‘from logic – soundness of argument, rather than truth of statements’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 55) while truth is understood to be socially constructed, reliant on the ‘agreement of the cultural community’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 56) and thus relative to socio-historic context. Validity is thus the ‘quality control’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 236), testing the 119
‘evidential basis’ relationship between data and truth claims generated: ‘Validation here comes to rest on the quality of craftsmanship in research’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 240). Considerations of validity should thus infuse research design, data collection/generation, and any analytical reconstruction and redescription. Validity is also achieved textually through convincing or satisfying the research community through the communication of persuasive argumentation to sustain the interpretations or inferences made (Kvale, 1996), reflecting the critical realist criterion of textual reflexivity whereby the researcher exposes the mechanisms involved in the construction of the textual truth claims. This study will pursue validity as craftsmanship, including procedural processes such as member checks, and as communication, attempting to deliver a transparent account of the research process. Judgements of the validity of the truth claims, and their legitimation will inevitably be in the hands/minds of the reader.
Different ontological realms produce different types of truth claims, and demand different validity conditions ‘to win the consent of others’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 20). Any act of inference (such as in operationalising a subjective concept such as attitudes into some objectively rendered scale) and any act of reconstructive or interpretive analysis thus carries a risk to validity. Carspecken offers procedures to promote or ensure the validity of data generation/collection and analyses, and to protect against distortions stemming from power imbalances in research relationships, through a five phase critical ethnography process. The phases work from a primary observational record, through reconstructive analyses at increasing levels of inference, the generation of dialogical data through interview, towards an investigation of other related contexts and finally to wider social constructs. These validity procedures will be discussed in relation to each of the selected methods below.
In regard to the third issue of evidential basis, that of pragmatic limits, this study will inevitably be limited in the time and resources available to access participants and their interaction. Total contextualisation might allow one to interview a teacher or student following each move in the educational interaction, however, this was not possible nor desirable given the degree of reflexivity it would engender in the process and the burden it would place on participants. Funding was not available to 120
visit each international student to conduct face-to-face interviews, but email exchange did allow some dialogic access to students’ discourses, reflections and rationales with which to enrich the classroom observations and interpretations of their interaction. The evidence of electronic text in online interaction gives access to the product of student action, but not their process – we cannot ‘see’ for example, how long it took them to compose the posting, whether they translated their posting from their first language, and what emotions surrounded the process. However, in the online text, we are given access to the same ‘evidential basis’ as the lecturer from which to understand the students’ actions. In some ways, this one-dimensional online text was in this sense closer to ontological saturation than a transcription of classroom dialogue that in its rendering would efface paralinguistic and contextual data that were originally available to students and teachers in that setting. Similar compromises will be made throughout the empirical project, with the understanding that while ‘total contextualisation’ may be desirable, but rarely achievable, the chosen methods should allow the best possible access to the rich ontology in any social setting within pragmatic constraints.
Luttrell’s idea of ‘good enough’ ethnography (2000, p. 500) is helpful in suggesting a workable solution to pragmatic limits and their implications for the epistemological project:
I want to make a case for what I call ‘good enough’ methods, whereby researchers view their fieldwork as a series of ongoing realisations that lead to complex choices and decision-making. By ‘good enough’ I mean thinking about research decisions in terms of what is lost and what is gained, rather than what might be ideal. Accounting for these good enough decisions is, in my view, the nittygritty of researcher reflexivity.
In this vein, where circumstances limit optimal research design, any compromise solution should be seen as a gain as well as a loss. Overt researcher reflexivity performs the role of reminding the reader of such compromise positions, and the implications for truth claims.
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The above discussion has outlined Stones’ three methodological criteria for critical realist sociological research in the wake of the linguistic turn, the hermeneutic turn and the rhetorical turn. His criteria of ontological richness, epistemological caution, and textual reflexivity will inform this study and its methodological design. The discussion then addressed three issues regarding the adequacy of the ‘evidential basis’ of the empirical project – scoping the task, acknowledging a differentiated conception of validity in regard to the type of truth claims being projected, and pragmatic constraints. The empirical design builds from this metatheoretical basis.
In simple terms, empirical data may be produced or collected. Given a critical realist ontology that recognises three levels of any reality, being the inherent potentials, the events and any empirical realisations of these events, this study sought to broaden the ‘evidential basis’ (Stones, 1996, p. 232) by collecting data that constituted the observable events of an online internationalised education program, and also by producing data to access the meanings and sense made by the actors involved through their accounts of events. The production of data, such as in an interview – an event that would not have occurred were it not for the research process – sought to access an ontology that is not observable (and therefore not collectible). The fact that the data have been produced alerts the researcher to proceed with more epistemological caution, given the artificial, or intermediary, status of the research artefact. Similarly, a rich ontology alerts the researcher to proceed with epistemological caution when analysing collected data, given that it only samples that which can be observed, sensed, captured or recorded, and is therefore partial in its reach. In the following discussion, the selected methods of case study, semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall and virtual ‘classroom’ observations are described and evaluated in terms of their contribution to achieving these criteria.
4.2 The empirical study- a critical adapted ethnography Empirical data to inform this study came from three main sources:
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°
Observational data, being the electronic text generated in the pedagogical interactions constituting the conduct of the online program. This set of data was collected across the duration of a semester-long unit, from the shared (many to many) ‘discussion’ which takes place in the unit-specific website, roughly equivalent to the classroom discussions that would occur in a face-to-face educational setting. This method of data collection is termed ‘observation’ given that the data were produced without any prompts from the researcher, and was the exchange occurring between participants. As discussed below, the term ‘observation’ has problematic connotations of visual witnessing, which is difficult to sustain in virtual environments. The term is retained however for its metaphoric link to research traditions of classroom observation, and the fact that electronic dialogue was accomplished in a textual, that is, visual medium. It is however acknowledged that there is much relevant activity that could not be ‘observed’ through access to the electronic textual interaction.
°
Interview data pertaining to the design and conduct of the online case study unit. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the lecturer and educational designer involved with the selected unit prior to its implementation. Additional semi-structured interviews were conducted with the lecturer and designer on completion of the unit. These second interviews were conducted as a stimulated recall, reviewing and making sense of certain events in the unfolding of the unit, as well as a more general reflection on the conduct of the unit and future design implications. Semi-structured ‘interviews’, or rather exchanges, were also conducted via email with self-selected students including domestic and international student involved in the observed unit, after its completion. These exchanges included stimulated recall, inviting students’ interpretations of particular events in the unfolding of the unit, as well as general reflections on the design and conduct of the unit.
°
Documentary data, being the publicly available marketing brochures, websites, course materials and policy statements which frame and contextualise the research site. These documents were systematically sought and arranged as two concentric fields: the inner being the documentation of the particular institution,
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shaping practice within that research site; the outer being the larger context of national policy making, regulatory frameworks, relevant markets and representation of higher education issues in public media, as reviewed in Chapter 1.
These data sets, as summarised in Table 3, were drawn from a case study site, being a core unit in an online Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program, offered in 2003 by an Australian university to international students as well as domestic enrolments. Table 3: Data sources Data type
Number of cases
Class/teacher interaction via email or virtual
Electronic capture for the duration of a semester long
discussion tools.
unit. 2152 e-turns in total.
Semi-structured interviews with lecturer and
2 interviews
instructional designer involved in the unit.* Follow up stimulated recall interviews with
2 interviews following completion of the unit and
lecturer and designer.*
additional email exchanges and phone interviews on an ad hoc basis during the unit’s conduct.
Semi-structured interviews with domestic
7 student interviews conducted by email following
and international students*
completion of the unit.
Course materials, documents, marketing
For case study institution and its competitors as
brochures etc.
accessible.
* Interview schedules and ethical clearance forms are reproduced in Appendix B. The study as a whole could be termed a critical ethnography to the extent that it adapted Carspecken’s (1996) five stages to produce a rich description of a case study of online internationalised education, and of how processes of cultural production played out in the pedagogical interaction. These five stages were interpreted as follows: 1. The electronic storage and summary log (see Appendix A for an extract) of the virtual classroom interaction produced a Stage One primary record. 2. Classroom discourse analysis produced a Stage Two preliminary reconstructive analysis (see Chapter 5) that typified ‘interaction patterns,
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their meanings, power relations, roles, interactive sequences’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 42). 3. Semi-structured interviews and email exchanges generated Stage Three dialogic data whereby participants’ constructions of events, intentions and meanings could be gleaned. 4. A Stage Four analysis related the design and conduct of the virtual classroom interaction to other social sites, such as marketing seminars or institutional policies that impinged on the case study site (see discussion in Chapters 1, 2, and 5). 5. The final Stage Five analysis analysed selected features and events of the case study interaction with regard to the theoretical problematic of cultural production in times of globalisation (see Chapters 6, 7, 8). Each empirical method selected – case study, semi-structured interview, stimulated recall and virtual classroom observation – will be explored in the following discussion, with reference to the theoretical frames and issues informing their use, and the analytical processes that were applied to the data generated.
4.3 Case Study This study selected a case study unit from amongst the postgraduate, full-fee coursework units offered online by public universities in Australia to an internationalised student market. Choosing a case study as an empirical strategy is ‘not a methodological choice, but a choice of object to be studied’ (Stake, 1998, p. 86). In the social sciences, a case is generally understood to be a ‘bounded system’ (Smith, 1978):
… it has working parts, it probably is purposive, even having a self. It is an integrated system. … its behaviour is patterned. Consistency and sequentialness are prominent. It is common to recognise that certain features are within the system, within the boundaries of the case, and other features outside. (Stake, 1998, p. 87)
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Under this definition, an educational unit offered online could be seen to constitute a case – it is bounded by its time frame (unit commencement and completion dates) and its participants (being the enrolled students and the staff involved) whose behaviour is patterned by their allocated and integrated roles; it is purposive (as expressed in the unit outlines); and has a clearly identifiable ‘self’ (as distinct from other offerings, and by its identifying codes, course artefacts and online protocols). When it comes to interaction between staff and students, or between students and students, these boundaries may be less clearly defined. For example, participants might incorporate social agendas considered ‘out of bounds’ into the pedagogical interaction. Similarly, participants may stray off the topic in discussions, thus threatening the ‘purposiveness’ of the exchange. Where such departures might blur the boundaries, there will still remain some sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, delineated and mediated by access to the unit’s web-based communicative platform, if nothing else.
However, Luke (2002a) raises concerns about any boundedness of case studies in the new globalised spaces of virtual semiotic exchange in his problematisation of the methodological notion of ‘context’:
... what will count as a 'context', as the 'local', or for that matter, as 'a community', or a 'site' … is never self evident. We should persistently ask: Is that a context or an artefact of design and discourse? (Luke, 2002a, p. 209)
Luke thus provokes the understanding that the virtual classroom as a site, instance or context, is not bounded by either foundational understandings of time or space, but rather by its nexus of disembedded and ephemeral social relations.
The ‘troubling of culture’ (Eisenhart, 2001a, p. 17) creates similar problems for drawing boundaries around a case. ‘Conventional assumptions of culture as coherent and coterminous with social background, language use, region, religion, or ethnicity have become impossible to sustain’ (Eisenhart, 2001b, p. 214). As argued
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in Chapter 3, globalisation has blurred previously clearer boundaries that spatially marked spaces, times and cultures, and that methods and assumptions of standard descriptive ethnographic research no longer ‘fit the conditions of life and experiences we are trying to understand’ (Eisenhart, 2001a, p. 18). The challenge is to capture the more fluid, less stable cultural productions occurring in more fluid, networked and transitory social encounters:
… we would seem to need some new ways of doing ethnography ... Field sites of the past, such as a single school, may be a place to start. But from there, researchers will be pushed by theoretical and social currents to trace cultural forms 'upward' and 'outward' so as to consider how they are manifested and produced in networks of larger social systems ... Ethnographers also are likely to be pushed 'downward' and 'inward' to see how cultural forms become part of individual subjectivities or imaginations. (Eisenhart, 2001a, p. 22)
Eisenhart recommends ‘multi-sited’ methodologies that understand the educational field site as points of intersection in a network of cultural flows and influences across time to explore the active construction of culture in the shifting identification by individuals with different cultural resources in different circumstances: ‘attention is redirected to the cultural forms that connect and construct various people in context, regardless of their previous social affiliations or cultural traditions’ (Eisenhart, 2001b, pp. 221-222).
A more open and complex interpretation of context erodes the ‘boundedness’ of the case and of the case study community, thus alerting the researcher to be more cautious about interpreting the events that do fall within their gaze (Thorne, 2000). For this project, the case study was understood to constitute one node within the complex of relationships that constituted the actors’ social worlds. Interactions in this node cohered around a shared purpose and some agreement over roles and responsibilities that defined the shared metaphoric space/time, but these interactions were also informed by relationships, resources and experiences beyond this node.
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To ‘look inwards’, this study firstly offers a description of the unfolding of the unit, derived from the capture of the electronic interaction. Where a student’s silence or non-participation in the online discussion might be interpreted from an educational perspective as poor, recalcitrant or lazy student behaviour, it might also stem from technological difficulties, absence, illness or whatever. Thus the electronic interaction data set should be considered to be incomplete, its one textual dimension lacking the redundancy of other mediums to affirm more valid interpretations. On the other hand, this data set, though not the ‘ontologically exhaustive’ ideal (Stones, 1996), was in its own way more complete in its sampling than a video-taped classroom, and less mediated than a transcription of talk, in that the data, that is, the electronic text of interaction, constituted the same sensory information, in the same form, that participants had to inform their interaction in this metaphoric space (putting aside at this point considerations of the openness of any text at the point of its consumption).
This study also ‘looked outwards’ through interviews with the lecturer, designer and students to explore contexts beyond the intersection of worlds that located the unit. These interviews may not be the same as first hand exploration of each participant’s other, impinging contexts, but did allow the researcher a ‘good enough’ point of access to participants’ perspectives, discourses, meanings and motivations that derived from their positioning elsewhere beyond the unit’s space/time. The status of these interview accounts will be addressed in more detail below.
4.3.1 Selection of the case study site, with access and ethics issues Analytic work does not start after data collection, but rather, it starts with the selection of sites and texts, as an analytic derivative of the research question: ‘What is [the site] a case of?’ (Ragin, 1992b, p. 225). The study selected its case study site as a ‘found’ empirical case or instance of the relatively new phenomenon of fully online internationalised learning environments in the higher education sector. Through the analysis, the theoretical ‘case’ is ‘made’ (Ragin, 1992a) that these are
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sites of globalised cultural contact, in which cultural identities and cultural difference are produced and negotiated. Titscher et al. (2000) offer a typology of how texts function in relation to research questions:
1) texts may themselves be the object of study…; 2.1) texts may be approached as utterances … in order to be able to make some statement about the selected groups of people who produced the text … and 2.2) texts may be approached as a manifest reflection of communication and constitute an aid or an indicator to make it possible to analyse the communication (or communicative situation) that is documented in this form. (p. 32) This study falls into their last category, whereby the texts collected in the online interaction function as the means to understand cultural relations within the specialised communicative setting of online internationalised education. Thus, the first analytic decision is the selection of the case study site to satisfy its ‘membership of the class of problems that are of interest’ (Titscher et al., 2000, p. 43) in ‘the universe of possible texts’ (p. 33).
To this end, a web search was undertaken during 2002 to identify the population, that is, all programs that were being offered in online mode by Australian universities, and which were also being marketed to international students (see Appendix C). From this analysis, it was evident that postgraduate coursework offerings, particularly in Information Technology and Business, were the most prevalent courses in an online, internationalised mode (DEST, 2003). One consideration in the selection of the site was the ethical protection of the site’s and participants’ identities (Christians, 2000). To this end, the largest common category of such programs – the Master of Business Administration – was targeted, and within these, a core unit whose predictable content would not indicate the provider’s identity in any way.
Another criterion derived from the research question was that the unit be designed as an entry point unit, a first point of contact between the staff and students, so issues of socialisation at any cultural interface would be most salient. By socialisation, I am referring to the establishment of, and induction of newcomers 129
into, routines, norms and expectations regarding how the social practices constituting the situation should be conducted. In other words, it is at this front end of institutional relations that work is done to establish the requisite shared understandings, and ‘Rules, norms and procedures are more likely to be made explicit’ (Delamont & Galton, 1986, p. 44). These routines cohere with Carspecken’s (1996) ontological level of normative truths, though I am more particularly interested in the processes of ‘norming’ or constructing such truths – catching them in the making, or under stress, due to competing frames. Other educational researchers have similarly highlighted the importance of empirically investigating entry points into educational systems or initial encounters to capture their ‘process of establishment’ (Ball, quoted in Delamon & Galton, 1986, p. 45) and to interrogate what becomes routine and implicit later. In this vein, the research site selected constituted the point of entry for a number of possible socialisation agendas being: socialisation into Masters level study; socialisation into a style of online learning for all students; and possibly socialisation into an Australian university environment for the international students
Whether or not any program or unit could be considered ‘typical’ is problematic in the current race for innovation and competitive edge. Universities are experimenting with a range of delivery platforms, both commercial and inhouse, each with their own interfaces, frameworks and quirks. However, the feature of shared ‘discussion’ space accessed via the Internet is standard across the available commercial platforms such as ‘Blackboard’, ‘Top Class’ or ‘WebCT’. This study limited the pool of possible cases to universities using this type of commercial platform, rather than atypical in-house platforms that may have inadvertently identified the site. Potential programs in this pool were approached, and possible units identified. The final selection depended on the availability of such a unit in the necessary time frame, and the informed consent of the staff involved. As it eventuated, the selected case study happened to involve a pilot group of international students from a newly forged partnership agreement, so the case study constituted the first point of contact and issues of socialisation between the university and its new business partner as well.
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Brown and Dowling (1998) are dismissive of the ‘mythologizing’ (p. 167) surrounding case study methodology, arguing it is better represented as merely a sampling technique. This study originally aimed to sample and describe more than one case study with the intention of broadening the evidential basis. Given the current early stage of enthusiastic experimentation with online delivery, it was reasonable to expect a diversity of practice mushrooming in disparate contexts. For this reason, a single case study risked giving a detailed description of an idiosyncratic example, from which little could be extrapolated, or which could be easily discounted. On the other hand, a design of multiple case study sites could not necessarily presume to deliver a representative sample:
… they may be similar or dissimilar, redundancy and variety each having voice. They are chosen because it is believed that understanding them will lead to better understanding, perhaps better theorizing, about a still larger collection of cases. (Stake, 1998, p. 89)
Access to a second case study was negotiated, but on further enquiry, this second unit (at a second university) was found to operate a more hybrid mode of pedagogy to on-shore international students than the fully online mode for off-shore students targeted by the research question. The decision was eventually made not to pursue the second case study, though at the time, this was as much a matter of pragmatic considerations as of research parameters, given the wealth of data generated in the first case study.
As it eventuated, gaining access to these sites through ‘cold calling’ proved quite difficult. Eventually, with the assistance of my supervisors and our pooled personal networks, access was negotiated with the two target universities’ senior management. With endorsement from this senior echelon, and more careful documentation of the researcher’s credentials, the project became easier to dignify and represent as a legitimate enquiry to the target program staff. To access case study sites, permission was sought firstly from a member of senior university management through the enabling channels of personal contacts, and then the head
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of each business faculty, who in turn identified the staff involved in delivering such core introductory units. These staff members were approached, with firstly a brief introduction to the nature of the research and an outline of the steps to be taken to protect the confidentiality of data sources. The teaching staff identified the instructional/educational design staff with whom they worked, and they were approached in a similar way. Access to the web discussion space also had to be negotiated for each site. This gave the researcher access to the ‘public’ shared discussion space, but not to the other ‘backstage’ or staff only functions such as the compilation of grades, one-to-one email or the administrative functions of the online platform.
The first university required that I submit an application for ethical approval through their ethics committee, as well as through my own university, a condition I was more than willing to fulfil. In this case, the lecturer of the case study unit was included as a co-researcher and local sponsor. The second case study university did not require an internal ethics review and accepted my university’s approval to proceed. For this second site, it was at the point of the first interview with the unit’s lecturer that it became evident that the unit thus identified did not in fact fit the study’s parameters, and this case was not pursued further.
With the informed consent of the first case study’s staff, an email approach was made to students enrolled in the selected unit via their shared online interaction, once the unit’s website was operative. This approach included a similar background to the project and its confidentiality processes as supplied to the staff. The text designed for this approach (see Appendix B) made it very clear that their participation or otherwise would have no bearing in any way on their results in the unit. Students were asked to reply to this email to indicate their informed consent or otherwise, and their willingness to participate in an email ‘interview’ on completion of the unit. In the event that not all students had granted consent, it was planned that these students’ contributions to the shared interaction would not be used in any verbatim reports. It was intended that this consent be sought as soon as possible, so the researcher fulfilled the necessary protocols to proceed. As events unfolded, the
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lecturer decided to delay posting the prepared text for two weeks, until relations within the unit had been established. In an interesting reversal of power relations between researcher and researched, he also chose to reword my introductory text, which he re-titled, ‘Please help a fellow student’.
Active responses to this approach via the broadcast announcement were few though all replies granted permission. To ensure that students were duly informed of my research and my presence/ observation, I then emailed each student individually within the courseware’s email function. This garnered a few more responses, again all positive. By this stage, I had received explicit permission from 18 of a possible 85 students. At this point, advice was sought from my university and the case study university’s ethics committees on how (and whether) to proceed. My university representative advised that for the purposes of email consent processes, no response was interpreted as a positive response. This decision was supported by the host university, so the study could proceed as planned. This account of my experiences of gaining access and informed consent is offered in the spirit of proffering insight to other researchers venturing into the e-learning environments.
4.3.2 Adaptive ethnography for the virtual classroom By their linguistic etymology and traditions of practice, the methods of observation and interview project a taken-for-granted privileging of visual, face-to-face encounters as a source of authenticity and thus a commonsense validity. But how can one employ these methods in the faceless virtual classroom of no shared space or time? This study thus far has been framed as a ‘critical ethnography’. This section considers how the broader ethnographic tradition may be applied, and must be adapted, to virtual environments.
Ethnography is widely understood as extended, exploratory observation that immerses the researcher in the bounded community that constitutes its object of study, with ample opportunity for observing or experiencing events and exploring the meaning of these events according to community insiders (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1998). As a methodology, it has come under considerable criticism, in
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particular in terms of the politics of representing the cultural Other in authoritative text. Waves of critique have resulted in diverse practices under the umbrella of ethnography informed by different philosophical and political frames (Delamont, Coffey & Atkinson, 2000). For Eisenhart (2001a, b), another substantive challenge to ethnographic methods is the ‘troubling of culture’ and the way it has been used in research designs in the past in the guise of an independent variable that anchors any community. In contrast, Eichhorn asserts that ethnographic methods can be applied to what she terms ‘textual communities’ (2001, p. 566) if alternatives are found to ethnography’s past privileging of site and sight:
In a world where people’s experiences of community and culture increasingly exist across geographic and temporal boundaries, ethnographers committed to understanding people’s every day experiences on an in-depth level may need to abandon their commitment to place and face-to-face encounters. (Eichhorn, 2001, p. 577)
Working from within this problematised tradition, Hine (2000) asks a similar methodological question, ‘How can you live in an online setting?’ (p. 21). She argues that a singular construction of the Internet as one culture is not possible and it needs to be disaggregated and studied in its varied contexts. To this end, Hine proposes an ‘adaptive’ ethnography (p. 13), with three main adaptive moves. Firstly the virtual object of study requires a dual construction, as a unique culture constituted in these environments and as a cultural artefact of wider situated social practices, advice which resonates with Eisenhart’s ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ research gaze (Eisenhart, 2001a, p. 22). Secondly, to deal with the ‘problems of translating an approach traditionally applied in specific bounded social settings to a communications technology which seems to disrupt the notion of boundaries’ (Hine, 2000, p. 10), objects should be defined by their connections, rather than by their location. The methodological notion of field as site needs to be reconstrued as ‘a field of relations’ (p. 60). Thirdly, the research orthodoxy of privileging certain modes of interaction, that is, face-to-face over online interaction, needs to be challenged if the object of study is itself online social practices, rendering the default research design of face-to-face interviews a potential distortion. Authenticity in these contexts becomes a matter of tapping the context-dependent identity within 134
the field of social relations constructed in connectivity. This rationale would support this study’s pragmatic choice of email exchange as a means to access the student actors’ accounts of the design and conduct of the courses. They can remain ‘in persona’ and respond from that frame of reference and through that set of relations.
Where Hine was concerned with Internet practices and texts that were publicly available to anyone with a personal computer and a modem, the educational settings with which this study is concerned are significantly different. Firstly, they are closed communities wherein all players are presumably known by their ‘real’ as opposed to ‘virtual’ identities, and the outcome of the activity will adhere to these real world identities. To enter the interaction, the individual must have access to an institutional username and password. This entry protocol typically produced the default insertion of their name on the top of any posting they make, unless the moderator had specifically set up anonymous functionality. This setup reduced the room for ‘identity play’, though there is still room for any interactant to choose not to reveal or to concoct aspects of their selves. Secondly, for the purposes of this study, non-participation had the particular character of marked silence (Tannen & Saville-Troike, 1985), given the online education orthodoxy’s expectation of high student participation (see Chapter 2). This obligation is often inscribed and enforced by assessing students’ performance in such discussion. The silent interactants, in this case, will be known and identifiable unlike the passive lurker in newsgroups, and their accounts can be sought. Thirdly, Hine’s analysis of how authority and authenticity are negotiated in various internet spaces are in some ways redundant in this setting because the educational roles ascribed to teacher and student allocate authority which precedes their interaction. Thus the social roles and practices in the Internet may be overwritten or at least shaped by pedagogical relations. However, Chapter 6 investigates how ‘authenticity’ and ‘authority’ are produced in regard to knowledge claims about cultural categories.
The hybrid nature of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as both interaction and as text warrants a dual approach to its analysis (Hine, 2000). Both approaches are relevant and valuable, Hines argues, but are derived from quite distinct understandings. Interaction is understood to be based on the shared understanding achieved between parties, whereas texts are consumed in isolation from their 135
production, with more emphasis on the ‘interpretive work done by readers’ (Hine, 2000, p. 50) and the authority of the text. The analysis of CMC exchange as text needs to process the text as a cultural artefact in relation to its contexts of production and consumption, suggesting discourse analysis methods. A dual analysis can capture both facets of electronically mediated interaction.
One last consideration in regard to the collation of the online discussion texts is its ethical storage, and ethical reportage. Knobel (2002) organises the ethical considerations of online research into three stages – ‘front end’ concerns regarding gaining access to public/private online spaces, and issues of informed consent; ‘in process’ concerns of whether researcher participation can distort the online interaction and reciprocity; and ‘back end’ concerns of ethical and respectful reporting of data in order to protect subject identity given the searchable nature of electronically archived interaction. These issues of research design contribute to the ‘moral consequences’ of any online research. In this study, access to the site and its designated electronic communicative spaces was decided and granted by the sponsoring institution. Reciprocity will be realised in any contribution the study may make to informing pedagogy in such sites. In addition, copies of papers reporting research outcomes have been forwarded to the university staff involved, and seminars offered. Confidentiality and respectful representation has been a major concern to protect lecturers, students and their institutions, particularly in this lucrative and competitive educational market of postgraduate coursework. Any textual reference that may indicate the institution or participants has been overwritten with coded inserts. Data have been stored in a password-protected drive, with backup CD copies and hard copies stored in a locked filing cabinet. Like Knobel (2002), Hine (2000) raised the issue that using verbatim quotes from electronic discussions may identify the source in searchable archives. I believe that concern is not applicable to these educational settings which are not open to public access, and whose limited participants will already have access to the raw data as such, that is, they will already know who ‘said’ what.
The two perspectives of internet exchange as interaction and as text informed the staged analyses of this study’s online interaction data. Firstly, all postings to the discussion space were collected, with their time and connection to previous postings 136
mapped to provide a bird’s eye view of the course as it unfolded as interaction (see Chapter 5). Then selected episodes identified in this mapping of interaction, were subjected to further more detailed analysis as text (as reported in Chapters 6 and 7). The next section outlines how both lines of enquiry are informed by Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and Systemic Functional Linguistics, allowing the analyses to build from each other with principled selections of episodes for more detailed analysis.
4.3.3 Analysis of the virtual pedagogic interaction How does one proceed to read macrotheory of cultural processes in globalisation and mesotheory of pedagogic identities from the isolated micro-actions of individuals scattered across time and space? How does one make sense of the scattered 2152 pieces that made up this textual jigsaw and which could be assembled in any number of ways? This section introduces my approach to the analytical process in general, then outlines the analyses undertaken in more detail. On a broad scope, the first analysis presented in Chapter 5 offers a description of how the course was designed and conducted as a whole, to orient the reader, contextualise the following more detailed analyses, and to counter ‘fragmentation’ of the data set (Atkinson quotied in Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 80). That is, it attempts to show how the jigsaw pieces cohered in various ways to produce a singular interactive event. The second more detailed analytical layer involves the selection and detailed interrogation of a variety of texts in which cultural difference was produced, as presented in Chapters 6 and 7, using the analytical tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse. Chapter 6 interrogates the production of cultural difference in aspects of the instructional discourse, while Chapter 7 interrogates the production of cultural difference in aspects of the regulative discourse. This analytical distinction grew from the data, in particular, the lecturer’s account of his pedagogical design, as outlined in Chapter 5. Thus, the first layer of analysis engages with the cumulative text as social interaction, where the second layer of analyses engages with the exchanges as texts (Hine, 2000) using more detailed linguistic analysis. This strategy of different levels of analysis attempts to engage comprehensively with the complexity, uncertainties, and richness of the case study (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak
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& Vetter, 2000). It also helps resist the temptation/risk of under-analysis (Antaki, Billig, Edwards & Potter, 2003) when over-supplied with interesting, illustrative data bites.
Bernstein (2000) calls for a rigorous analytic ‘process of translation’ (p. 133) whereby the internal theoretical concepts and the ‘syntax’ (p. 132) of their relations can be made intelligible, or operationalised, in an external language of analytical description that can then be used to read empirical data. For this thesis, the internal language regards the potentials inherent in the intersection of cultural processes of globalisation, commodified knowledge, and pedagogic relations, as outlined in Chapter 3. The external language to be constructed needs ways to identify and translate empirical events into some relation with this conceptual network. Bernstein however profiles the ‘ethnographic position’ (p. 134) as an extreme case where the researcher is as much concerned with ‘constructing the tacit model’ (p. 134), rules and interpretations of the researched, as with translating the theoretical model the researcher brings. This produces a two-fold process:
... the real problem is that the two processes of constructing description are not discrete in time. They are going on together, perhaps one more explicit than the other. … From this point of view, L2, the external description, becomes an interpretative interface, or the means of dialogue between the agency of enactments and the generation of the internal language of the model. (Bernstein, 2000, p. 135)
Bernstein also highlighted the need for a ‘permeable’ (p. 135) external language of description that can be reshaped by the empirical field and is not confined to rigidly reproducing the internal model. This permeable interface is perhaps best exemplified in my dual analysis in which I come to the data both from ‘below’, working inductively from the content and form of participant’s text, and from ‘above’, working deductively making links from theoretical and analytical concepts. Where Coffey and Atkinson (1996, p. 155) invoke Peirce’s notion of ‘abductive reasoning’ to describe this generative, dialogic interaction between data and theory, I prefer the metaphor of a lens zooming in and zooming out. Coffey and Atkinson (1996) suggest that data coding be conceived as making links to establish relations, 138
patterning, or variety. Thus there are two sorts of links being made to create the ethnographic and the theoretical descriptions: the first seeks links (and their opposite, being the negation or disordering of patterns) within the empirical domain; the second seeks links between the empirical and the theoretical domains (and again, their opposite being the anomalous or disruptive). For the former ‘zooming in’ mode, I am thus looking for patterning and its disruption amongst the texts/interactions. For the ‘zooming out’ mode, I am looking for links or ruptures between the empirical patterning and the theoretical language of description.
As outlined previously, Carspecken’s (1996) five stage process for moving from reconstructing ‘what happened’ to a theoretical explanation has informed the methodological design and gathering of data for this project. These stages are designed to move cautiously and incrementally from description to analysis through increasing levels of interpretive inference. In contrast, Coffey and Atkinson (1996) argue that ‘we should never collect data without substantial analysis going on simultaneously’ (p. 2). They also highlight how the construction of any textual representation is analytic work in itself:
It is unthinkable to divorce analysis from representation. We certainly cannot conceive of analysing one or more social worlds without at the same time reconstructing such domains through textual or other formats. (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 121)
Brown and Dowling (1998, p. 56) similarly display how data collection can proceed hand in hand with preliminary analysis through the process of keeping disciplined fieldnotes. Rather than be disabled by these competing frames, I find that Carspecken’s cautions have enabled me to remain reflexively alert to how the inevitable intrusions of my interpretive and textual contributions may colour the events I am representing, and have tempered my more speculative ‘editorialising’. Coffey and Atkinson’s contribution has similarly reconciled me to the impossibility of separating description and analysis.
As process, I have followed Carspecken’s steps in spirit, as interwoven threads of investigation rather than chronologically ordered steps: 139
1. producing a ‘primary record’ in my ‘impressions log’; 2. undertaking a preliminary reconstructive analysis in my mapping of interaction and construction of a meta-text; 3. collecting and analysing dialogic data to sample and represent participants’ reconstructions as well as test my emerging interpretations; 4. collecting peripheral documents and documenting events that helped to construct and contextualise the observed events and their context; 5. relating the empirical event to the theoretical problematic of cultural processes in times of globalisation.
As product, this thesis will similarly interweave the two languages of description – ethnographic and theoretical – zooming in and out in its reportage. Analytic layer 1 – virtual interaction as meta-text and macro-genre To handle this sizeable corpus of data, and ‘reduce’ it (Huberman & Miles, quoted in Coffey & Atkinson 1996, p. 7) to a manageable but illuminating account, I have undertaken a number of analytical passes through the set of all online e-turns in the shared forums (not the assessable small group discussions), course materials and interviews with staff to produce a ‘meta-text’ – that is, a text about how the sequence of texts unfolded. Following Thorne (2000, p. 5 of 17), the basic unit of analysis will be the ‘e-turn’ understood as ‘a bounded individual submission to a CACD [computer-assisted classroom discussion] dialogue that takes its final form, and placement on the screen, as a combination of a user's typed message, the recast and tagging of this message by the … server software, and its final display by the client.’ The e-turn, by responding to or provoking replies, builds a thread, being the chain of mutually referential e-turns. Thorne points out that computer-mediated discussions tend to be display ‘loosened coherence’ (Herring quoted in Thorne, 2000, p. 6 of 17). Coherence can be performed through the technological device of ‘replying’ to the earlier e-turn, and the subsequent e-turn is then indexed by the server at a subsidiary rank to the original. It can also be performed via the author’s textual means of explicit lexicogrammatical cohesion, such as quotation and anaphoric referencing. More implicitly or loosely, it can be achieved by purposeful collocation in the same interactional zone or space made available in the online
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design. For this reason, this thesis will use the term ‘thread’ to designate interaction collocated in the zones made available, and ‘sub-threads’ where necessary to designate more tightly referential exchanges within.
To produce the meta-text a number of analytical steps were taken to map, identify and extract the intertextual linking in time, topic, authors and interactions between the textual fragments that produced the shared experience.
1. An ‘impressions log’ was kept (see Appendix A for an example extract). This was paramount to a chronological set of field notes, noting my observations, impressions, tentative understandings, and recording developments for each ‘visit’ I made to the online site. It also served as a vehicle for reflection on the research process. For the real time duration (approximately 19 weeks) of the unit’s interactions, I accessed the site three times a week to read, download, print, file and log the e-turns that had accumulated since my previous ‘visit’. My log used identifying codes to refer to individual e-turns derived from the zone they were posted in and the order in which I accessed them (for example, ‘E10’ = the tenth eturn downloaded within the E zone). Where relevant the nature of the relationship of one e-turn to another was noted in the log. Topical linking was also evident in the hyperlinked threading in each Zone’s index. My log also drew links of authorship across zones, and to similar events elsewhere in the ‘space’ and time of the unit.
Another important aspect of the log was recording introspective observations of how I came to read, or alert to, cultural identity in the textual representations. I purposefully did not seek any definitive list on which students were enrolled through domestic or international arrangements, allowing that to unfold in the site as it would for participants. Hence my log captures moments of my asking, ‘Is this an international/domestic student?’ with a record of what textual feature might indicate such.
2. At the completion of the unit’s interaction, the index and corpus of e-turns in each zone and each small group discussion were sorted and stored electronically in three ways: by author of e-turns; by chronological date of e-turn; and by topic
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threading. This electronic re-sorting allowed the data set to be accessed in a variety of sequences, and interrogated by different schema.
3. From the various sortings, a simple quantitative analysis was possible, mapping the interaction according to its distribution in the variety of interactional zones designed in the unit’s website, and its ‘time’, as logged by the university’s server on receipt of the e-turn (See Table 5 in Chapter 5). The unit of analysis for this map was a week. Given that the students could log on whenever it suited them, this unit was effectively an arbitrary device for ordering, rather than a regular lived unit such as a weekly timetabled tutorial. A more detailed analysis by 2 day intervals was done for the ‘closed’ interactions in the two assessable small group tasks, with the added aspect of analysing what mix of ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ students was present in each small group (see Appendix D).
4. Using the quantitative maps of interaction as a guide, the corpus of ‘open’ e-turns was reread to produce a qualitative summary of what happened each week (See Appendix E). This reading was guided by three analytical questions:
a. What is typically happening? b. What is disruptive of the typical? c. How does any mention or display of cultural difference arise?
By ‘typical’, I am referring to the ‘social routines’ Carspecken (1996, p. 34) highlights as operating in and constituting any social site and its relations to its wider context:
A typical social site will be characterized by fairly predictable settings. Many different conditions will explain the usual course of settings constructed by actors on a single social site: institutional rules (like school and classroom rules); relations between the site in question and other nearby sites to which actors routinely go and from which they routinely come ….
In regard to this particular site of online internationalised education, ‘typical’ will refer to the kind of topic, text or interaction that flows in an unmarked manner from 142
the preceding texts to contribute to an established shared agreement regarding who is participating, what is being discussed, and how the discussion should proceed. By ‘disruptive’ I mean the kind of topic, text or interaction that is marked by the manner in which it interrupts and seeks to change, challenge or subvert the preceding flow. The third question was an open-ended, exploratory search to flag any possibly significant event that textually invoked ethnic, national or other cultural categories. A more explicit external language to describe concepts of ‘interactive trouble’ and cultural categories is developed in the second level of analysis described below, while this first ‘zooming in’ stage is more interested in producing an inductive ethnographic description.
5. Using this summary as a frame, the corpus of shared e-turns was read again, with the aim of producing a more detailed textual account (see Appendix F) of each week’s developments, zone by zone, week by week, so links across and between zones and time could be made more evident. These links include describing how the interaction between actors, textual topics and e-turns unfolded. This account also drew from the dialogic data (interviews with designer and lecturer) and other textual accounts (for example, emails made available by the lecturer) to interweave and reconcile my and the participants’ interpretations of events. An effort was made to include frequent verbatim quotes from the e-turns, interviews, and emails, as an evidentiary trail or resource to readers to support and validate the interpretations I make. Though this stage was initially undertaken with Carspecken’s ‘low inferential’ preliminary reconstruction (1996, p. 42) in mind, inevitably links emerged to theoretical concepts. These were retained in this formative account, as additional insights and evidence of formative ‘zooming out’ thinking.
When recounting ‘what happened’, there is the temptation to produce a coherent narrative, with beginning, middle and end. This kind of textual ‘packaging’ (Coffey & Atkinson 1996, p. 54) or construction can impose order on an empirical field where it may not be warranted. This is particularly risky in this kind of virtual case study where only those that choose to make their presence evident are represented in the analysis of the cumulative text. This unit forms a ‘case’ by some criteria as discussed previously, with a beginning and a form of closure, in the lecturer’s signing on and off. However, the question whether it is the beginning of its 143
constituent processes and relations, their middle or their end, is unresolved, and probably differs for each participant. To disrupt such packaging as a narrative, this account also reports ‘dead ends’ in terms of e-turns that on initial reading had the potential to disrupt but which were not pursued by other participants. The text is structured to also allow a reading of the developments as structured by the Zones, rather than by weeks.
6. From these multiple readings and analytic passes, I have produced a meta-text, that is, a text about the snowballing textual interaction produced in the conduct of the case study unit. This meta-text draws on the concept of curriculum macrogenre (Christie, 1995, 1997, 1999a,b) used to analyse structure, coherence and relations between activities/lessons in a curriculum cycle over a complete program of related and staged pedagogic work. This macrogenre map also helps set up the second layer of analysis, being the more detailed interrogation of selected postings as texts. For this reason, the concept of macrogenre is developed in more detail below.
Chapter 5 presents this first level of analysis, that is, an account of ‘what happened’ in the total interaction as a meta-text. From a detailed reading of the data corpus, the various modules and activities designed in the case study unit (Unit A) are described with reference to topical themes in the instructional discourse and in the regulative discourse, and then in terms of how each ‘particulate’ activity relates to those that come before and those that come after. This account will address both the design and conduct of the case study unit, the derivation and validation of which comes from the series of analytic passes outlined above. Its construction has been guided by the following analytical questions:
1. What, if any, notions and categories of cultural identity and cultural difference did the teacher and designer draw on to explain the design of this online unit for an internationalised student group? 2. How were the unit’s interactions patterned in their design and their conduct? 3. How did the interaction within the conduct of these programs display or invoke differently cultured identities?
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The analysis up to this point has been concerned with producing the ethnographic language of description – understanding the events from the actors’ point of view, and within their frames of reference for the concept of ‘culture’, accessed through content analysis of their texts’ surface meanings. Analytic layer 2 - virtual interaction as text To engage with the jigsaw pieces as text as opposed to interaction (Hine, 2000), this second layer of analysis will draw further on the analytical vocabularies of Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and the growing body of work that explores their articulation. The theoretical contributions of Halliday and Bernstein are capable of a metadialogue (Hasan, 1999) given the compatability of the theories in regard to the role of language as constitutive of, and constituted in, social relations, and the way one body of theory can be used to elaborate on the other. Where Tomlinson (1999, p. 159) summarises the ‘mediated interaction’ of CMC as a restricted medium with ‘a characteristically narrower range of symbolic cues than is possible in face-to-face interaction’, SFL allows any linguistic text, CMC included, to reveal its intricacies and carefully nuanced tailoring to purpose, audience, communicative mode and context. Thus what seems a one-dimensional medium can be appreciated as a multidimensional relay of interpersonal, experiential and textual meanings via the available communicative means. Following Macken-Horarik (2004), the intention here is to use the SFL grammar ‘lightly’ to allow a wider readership but still garner the benefit of a linguistically informed gaze when dealing with such a textually mediated environment. Selected aspects of these two bodies of work will be profiled briefly and then each analytical concept will be defined, then ‘translated’ into its rules of realisation (Bernstein, 2000; Brown & Dowling, 1998) with which to interpret the empirical data. The rules of recognition will also be made explicit through an indication of what empirical data will be selected to investigate this aspect.
Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (1985 a, b; 1994) offers a thorough analytical vocabulary with which to understand the multi-faceted construction, complexity and functions of any text. A text is understood as any meaningful stretch of language, be it spoken or written, and textual meanings are 145
understood as constructed or ‘realised’ through a series of choices available to the speaker/writer. These choices need to satisfy the three meta-functions of communicative text, being: the ideational representation of meanings about the world; the interpersonal negotiation of relations between text creator and consumer; and the textual aspects of making meanings in the selected medium. These three metafunctions are understood to contribute and shape the variable dimensions of field, tenor, and mode which together constitute the ‘register’ of realised choices in any particular linguistic performance (Halliday, 1985a, p. 44; also Hasan, 1995). The concept of field refers to the subject matter being constructed, the ‘systems of activity, including descriptions of the participants, process and circumstances these activities involve’ (Martin, 1997, p. 10). The concept of tenor refers to the social relations invoked and reflected by the text, ‘through the dimensions of power and solidarity’ (Martin, 1997, p. 12). The concept of mode refers to the nature of the communicative conduit and its textual constraints, that is, ‘the kinds of interaction various channels enable or disable…’ (Martin 1997, p. 12).
While any language can be inherently creative, choices about how meaning is to be made tend to cluster around certain systemic patterns or grammars that have become conventional for the particular context of use. Halliday (1985a, p. xvii) argues that any discourse analysis must engage with the chosen grammar (the ‘wordings’), as well as the content conveyed in the surface of lexical choices (the ‘words’), because both are working to realise textual meaning. Additionally, he argues that discourse analysis has to move between the available system (langue) and its instantiation in a particular text produced for a particular situation (parole), ‘otherwise there is no way of comparing one text with another, or with what it might itself have been but was not’ (Halliday, 1985a, p. xxii). This theorisation of systems of choice resonates with Bhaskar’s (2002) distinction between the ontological levels of the empirical and of the potential and its tendencies.
SFL situates any text in an immediate ‘context of situation’, and within its broader ‘context of culture’, with the outer layers understood to be shaping or resourcing the inner. Halliday (1991) carefully explored these notions of ‘context’ and ‘culture’ as applied in SFL. In regard to ‘context’, he traces its origins as an idea back to a purely textual meaning (‘co-text’), through its application to wider social 146
environments, then back full circle to a textual meaning, given the discursive order sustaining any social order. He also explicates the two levels, context of situation and context of culture, as being a relation not of two separate things but a continuum of how close up the focus is, situation being an ‘inner’ instance of culture, and a particular case of a larger ‘outer’ system.
In regard to ‘culture’, Halliday distinguishes between the commonsensical interpretation of culture as ethnic background and the concept as used in SFL:
… we have to go beyond the popular notion of culture as something defined solely by one's ethnic origins. All of us participate in many simultaneous cultures; and language education is the principal means by which we learn to do so. ... usually this sense of culture as tradition is not relevant as a cultural context for language education. When we talk of the 'context of culture' for language activities we mean those features of culture that are relevant to the register in question. If we are looking at a secondary physics syllabus, then the cultural context is that of contemporary physics, combined with that of the institution of 'education' in the particular community concerned. (Halliday, 1991, pp. 18-19)
The concept of culture here is thus a sociolinguistic notion of culture as speech community whose conventions presume some focal or convergent agreement on who/what that referent community and what its practices will be.
In the case of online internationalised education, that baseline premise becomes problematic, and perhaps this version of ‘culture’ needs to be troubled too. Does this neat nesting of mutually constitutive levels of context of situation within the context of culture do justice to globalisation’s disjunctural flows as English is appropriated into new settings (Appadurai, 1996; Kachru, 1996; Widdowson, 1994) and cultural routes cross paths? Given the relativisation produced by increasing ‘togetherness in difference’ (Ang, 2001), can we presume a common context of culture will cohere around a shared context of situation? More and more shared communicative situations will involve the intersection of multiple and disparate contexts, so a presumption of ‘co-membership’ or a singular ‘common community’, 147
be it a cultural or speech community, may not be warranted when the linguistic code, in this case English, serves as a situational lingua franca (Firth, 1996, p. 239).
Martin (1997) interprets the context of culture as evident and realised through the linguistic/semiotic structure of genre, being ‘the system of staged goal-oriented social processes through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives’ (p. 13). More particularly, genre impinges ‘where the principles for relating social processes to each other have to do with texture – the ways in which field, mode and tenor variables are phased together in a text’ (p. 12). There is some debate (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Hasan, 1995) surrounding whether genre as a linguistic construct sufficiently captures the notion of context of culture as a sociological construct. Notwithstanding these issues, for the empirical purposes of this study of interaction by textual means, the concept of genre will be understood to be the additional analytic layer of culturally inscribed, conventional and endorsed templates which shape linguistic interaction. Martin thus maps genre structure as being ‘above and beyond metafunctions (at a higher level of abstraction) to account for relations among social processes in more holistic terms, with a special focus on the stages through which most texts unfold’ (Martin, 1997, p. 6). Figure 2, reproduced from Martin (2004), attempts to capture this visually.
Figure 2: Genre beyond register (Martin, 2004)
This figure is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library
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Genre theory has a long history with debates over persistent, idealised or universal forms and the empirical proliferation of new ‘species’ (Williams, 1977, p. 183) of texts in response to new social conditions. ‘Genre’ as a concept thus has to account for both continuity and change over time and contexts. Bakhtin’s contribution allows this dynamism-within-conventions to be understood as an intertextual process. Bakhtin (1986) argued that no linguistic utterance (written or spoken) carries meaning without employing one of the appropriate speech genres, being the ‘compositional structure’ or ‘forms of construction of the whole’ (p. 78), chosen from ‘certain relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of utterances’ (p. 64) developed in various domains of human activity. Bakhtin argued that genres operate as conventions within social domains, not immune to change or the author’s individuality, but relatively stable over time, each utterance serving as a link in the intertextual chain that sustains or evolves such conventions. Importantly, he argued that we acquire our extensive, heterogeneous repertoires of genres without realising or articulating that expertise. Moreover, ‘the better our command of genres, the more freely we employ them, the more fully and clearly we reveal our own individuality in them’ (p. 80). Macken-Horarik meshes Martin and Bhaktin’s insights to argue that ‘… the relevant context for a text which realizes its context linguistically is intertextual – other texts which are like (and unlike) it in some ways’ (1996, p. 63). This begs the question of which intertextual experiences students in this case study will be drawing upon to derive their tacit genre repertoires, and whether their accretions of learning through socialisation into ‘like’ contexts are in fact commensurate.
The practices and context of transnational education within the affordances of ‘network society’, whereby students connect via local internet connections to global flows of ideas and ideologies, challenge heuristic models of context premised on the assumption of a centred, homogenous culture or a singular self-referential intertextual community. A variety of theorists from a variety of frames (Firth, 1996; House, 2000; Luke, 2002b; Pratt, 1998; Schegloff, 2000; Shaw et al., 2004; Widdowson, 1994; Wong, 2000) have argued that such assumptions are no longer tenable, in particular in regard to the English language as it is appropriated into more and more new settings as the current global lingua franca. Where knowledge
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products/processes are being sold and sourced across disparate settings their efforts suggest that the referent ‘context’ in such conditions will no longer be as singular, convergent, bounded or self-equilibrating as such heuristic sociolinguistic models suggest, and that uncertainty, dissonance, divergence and makeshift pragmatism need to be equally accounted for.
Genres operate as tacit, transparent understandings, naturalised and self-evident to those within the subscribed community, as captured in Bauman’s notion of ‘nearness’: ‘Near, close to hand, is primarily what is usual, familiar and known to the point of obviousness; someone or something seen, met, dealt or interacted with daily, intertwined with habitual routine and day-to-day activities’ (Bauman, 1998, p. 13). Online internationalised education produces an entirely different form of circumstantial ‘nearness’, that is near to the potentially unfamiliar, and possibly the unknown. Thus, ‘genre troubles’ being some overt disagreement, query or instruction regarding how texts should proceed, or what constitutes legitimate textual practice, would empirically indicate competing contexts of culture, and the production of cultural difference. This is discussed further in Chapter 7.
Essentially, the texts in this empirical case study ‘encapsulated’ (Hasan 1999, p. 24) their own context of situation, but this was potentially situated in and informed by multiple, shifting, overlapping or competing referent contexts of culture. To address the research question about the production of cultural difference, the analysis is in essence asking how the texts produced in the situation speak to, and of, their larger, potentially diverse, and shifting contexts of cultures (plural). To highlight the context of situation as a hybrid point of cultural intersections rather than a centred core, Hasan poses a relevant question: 'Who are the sharers, what is the extent of their sharing?' (Hasan, 1999, p. 11) to which I would add, ‘What are they sharing in this context?’ and ‘What are they not sharing in this context?’ In this study as distinct from the more text-focussed investigations typical in SFL, the empirical evidence of the online texts can be supplemented with the dialogic data of stimulated recall interview accounts, whereby the social actors could explain their dilemmas, reasons, meanings and choices in their own terms.
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Using the SFL concepts field, tenor, mode, and genre, the operationalisation of the research question can thus be rearticulated as a set of linguistically informed analytical questions, in which the opposition of ‘culture/cultural difference’ allows for the possibility of different cultural contexts: •
What culture/cultural difference is produced in the field of the texts? In other words, what explicit reference is made to cultural identities, their attributes and their differences?
•
What culture/cultural difference is produced in the tenor of the texts? In other words, how do the relations encoded in the text assert cultural expectations and differences thereof?
•
What culture/cultural difference is produced in the mode of the texts? In other words, how does the mode of electronic, online script encode and display cultural identities?
•
What culture/cultural difference is produced in the genre of the texts?
There are a series of more detailed linguistic analyses (Eggins 1994; Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) associated with the interrogation of each of these aspects of textual register and genre, to be dealt with in more detail when applied in later chapters. However there is still an additional layer of understandings regarding the distinctive nature of pedagogic discourse to be built into the analysis of the online texts.
As discussed in Chapter 3, pedagogic discourse for Bernstein is the specialised interactional practice through which knowledge is recontextualised, transmitted and acquired, consciousness is distributed, and ultimately culture is re/produced. As outlined in Chapter 3, pedagogic discourse is the communicative mechanism whereby two ideological discourses act in concert: the instructional and the regulative discourses, the former ‘embedded’ in the latter. To allow an empirical exploration of pedagogic discourse, I will build from Wodak’s distinctions between discourse, genre and text, which is compatible with the definitions developed above:
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‘Discourse’ can thus be understood as a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as ‘texts’, that belong to specific semiotic types, that is genres. (Wodak, 2002, p. 66)
Thus a text is understood as both the empirical instantiation of a conventionalised structure in its genre, and an empirical manifestation of a set of meanings in its selection from a discourse (or two, in the case of pedagogic discourse).
Christie (1999a, p.160) marries the Bernstein and Halliday frames in an operationalised language of description when she reconceptualises the instructional and regulative discourses as realising two registers, of which the regulative register ‘projects’ the instructional, in the same way that a sentence can ‘project’ the content of reported speech through an embedding grammar. This captures in a linguistic sense the ‘recontextualization’ of the instructional register, and its dependence on the regulative to reconstitute it and bring it to life in educational settings. Christie (1991, p. 239) terms the distinction as between a ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ register but with the understanding that they are complexly interdependent:
A first-order or pedagogical register has the function of operationalizing and maintaining the teaching-learning activity that takes place with a curriculum genre, while the second-order or 'content register' realized the activity and/or information which is to be dealt with by the children as they learn.
This conceptual translation from discourse to register allows an empirical investigation of the textual instantiation of the double stranded pedagogic discourse, that is, of the choices that were made of the available larger sets of meanings constituting the instructional and the regulative discourses. The instructional register construes the intended product or knowledge outcome of teaching/learning, and the regulative register construes its intended processes. These choices will be made in regard to the field, tenor and mode of the register, that is, respectively, ‘what is going on; who are taking part; and what role the language is playing’ (Halliday, 1985b, p. 44). As explained below, either the instructional or the 152
regulative register can be foregrounded, or tacit, at any time, however linguistic choices can be resourcing both registers at the same time. For example, a didactic statement by the lecturer resources the instructional register in its field, but the tenor evident in the mood choice of declarative sentence by the teacher sustains the regulative register’s teacher/student relation whereby the teacher is understood as having the right to impart content knowledge didactically. In addition, the instructional register is often syntactically parasitic on the regulative so textual data can not always be neatly sorted into the two categories and dealt with separately. The case study’s design however did aim to separate the fields of the two registers (that is, topics pertaining to the curricular content, and topics pertaining to the pedagogical and assessment processes) into different textual zones, as explained in Chapter 5.
The instructional discourse refers to the discursive order being re/produced, and is constituted in the ‘selection, sequence, pacing and criteria of the knowledge’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 13). This will be understood as the ‘what’ of the curriculum, which in this case study, refers to the broad discourse of managing behaviour in organisations, and its sub-topics as selected and structured in the course modules. Following Christie, the instructional register will be empirically evident in ‘on task’ discussions of the unit’s content, the lecturer’s input on curricular content, the performance of assessment tasks, and in curricular material such as textbooks, and set readings.
The regulative discourse refers to the social order being produced/reproduced in the pedagogical settings, and its constituent roles: ‘the forms that hierarchical relations take in the pedagogic relation and to expectations about conduct, character and manner’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 13), including its inherent ‘model of the learner and of the teacher and of the relation’ (p. 35). This will be understood as the ‘how’ of the curriculum, and refers to the variety of processes, activities and dispositions students are directed to engage in, in order to accomplish this unit’s design. Following Christie, the regulative register will be empirically evident in the lecturer’s instructions to students on how to engage with the instructional material, feedback on their performances as process, and any overt ‘classroom management’ efforts. 153
To demonstrate how the online texts can been read as an instructional discourse projected by a regulative discourse, the following e-turn (Text A) has been reproduced from the data set, with lexical choices from the instructional register underlined, leaving the wordings from the regulative register in plain typeface.
TEXT A: I define an organisation as follows: An organisation is a bounded and structured set of groups of individuals who are coordinated in performing different functions to achieve common goals. I invite you to critically comment on this definition. What are the key terms in the definition and what do they tell us about organisations? Feel free to suggest modifications or alternative definitions. The idea is to get you thinking and sharing views.
It can be seen that, were the unit of study on another subject matter, the italicised realisations, that is, the instructional register, would be drawn from a different discourse, for example:
TEXT B: I define a dinosaur as follows: A dinosaur refers to members of extinct Mesozoic reptiles, many gigantic, including herbivore, carnivore and omnivore species. I invite you to critically comment on this definition. What are the key terms in the definition and what do they tell us about dinosaurs? Feel free to suggest modifications or alternative definitions. The idea is to get you thinking and sharing views.
Similarly, if the regulative discourse were drawing on a different model of the teacher/learner relation, the regulative register would differ, perhaps choosing different curriculum genres and their lexical realisations (Text C), for example:
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TEXT C: I define an organisation as follows: An organisation is a bounded and structured set of groups of individuals who are coordinated in performing different functions to achieve common goals. I invite you to memorise this definition. What are the key terms in the definition and what do they tell us about organisations? Read the set textbook chapter and give three examples of organisations, with an explanation of how they fulfil the definition. The idea is to get you applying this definition to real world settings.
With this ability to identify the empirical surface of both the regulative and the instructional discourses in their register choices, Christie takes this analytic distinction into her theorisation of curriculum macrogenre processes.
The concept of macro-genre builds from the sociolinguistic concept of genre, which is understood as a conventionalised textual form that accomplishes a staged, purposive, goal-oriented process of communication (Martin, 1992). Using this frame the commonsense notion of ‘lesson’ is construed as a curriculum genre, understood to be ‘temporally sequenced and serial in character, reflecting those requirements of pedagogic activities to do with pacing and ordering the steps in which teaching and learning are done’ (Christie, 1997, p. 136). In turn, a curriculum macro-genre is the larger picture of a program over a series of interrelated curriculum genre:
A curriculum macrogenre is so called because it constituted a sustained sequence of curriculum genres (a curriculum cycle, to use less technical language) occurring over several days, sometimes over several weeks, in which new understandings are taught and new kinds of consciousness are formed.
For Christie, the definition of a macrogenre requires not only a sequence, but also ‘a state of interdependency, in terms, metaphorically, at least, either of expansion or projection’ (p. 148), such that
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there will be some growth in the logos – some changes logogenetically – as the classroom text gains momentum, moving forward across its ‘beginning, middle, end’ progression, opening up possibilities in using language, closing others, and hence building forms of consciousness.
Using the notation developed for relations of parataxis and hypotaxis in clause complex structure (Halliday, 1994), Christie (1995, 1999a) has distinguished between different macrogenres operating in the typical pedagogy of different disciplines. The concept of macrogenre has productively informed empirical research in primary and secondary school settings (for example Christie 1995, 1997, 1999a, 2001) and to this point reflects the classroom parameters of these settings, with shared and tightly controlled class space/time as an empirical given. In such contexts, Christie (1999a, p. 162) can describe the constituent genres as ‘particulate’ in their contribution to the macrogenre. In contrast, this study explores how the ‘loosened coherence’ (Herring quoted in Thorne, 2000, p. 6) of online interaction may challenge such assumptions, and how curriculum genre might otherwise interlock in online pedagogy. Where Christie can use ‘lessons’ as a basic unit of analysis in school settings, the online mode in the commercial platform has a different structuring of time and space zones through its technological design of fora, announcements, and small group discussion tools in ‘timeless time’ (Castells, 1996). However, there are alternative means and affordances for framing activities as separate but related to each other and the pedagogical intent of producing change or growth still applies. With the necessary adaptation, macrogenre structure offers a valuable analytic tool to describe how the various learning, teaching and assessment activities in the case study unit articulated to form a whole.
Christie draws out a number of principles explaining how the instructional register and the regulative register can operate across an extended sequence or chain of educational activities to produce a larger coherent whole in its trajectory and outcomes. These principles include:
1. The relational nexus between particulate curriculum genre can be represented through the typology of logico-semantic relations developed by 156
Halliday and other systemic functional linguists with regard to describing clause complexes (Christie, 1991). Halliday’s network of logico-semantic relations distinguishes between relations of projection (of locutions or ideas) and of expansion. This latter category breaks into three sub-categories – relationships of elaboration (=), extension (+), and enhancement (x). Elaboration is the expansion through restating, exemplifying or greater detail. Extension is expansion through the addition of new knowledge such as exceptions, alternatives. Enhancement is expansion through embellishment that circumstantially qualifies or modifies the original statement (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 378). Thus a representation of how the curriculum genres build the macrogenre can be annotated not just as a series (for example: Stage1 ^ Stage2 ^ Stage3), but more fruitfully as logical relationships that construct meanings in their relations (for example: [(Stage1 + Stage 2) = Stage 3] x Stage 4, where Stage 1 and 2 activities produce complementary knowledges which are exemplified in Stage 3’s activity, then critiqued or qualified in Stage 4).
2. Macrogenres themselves fall into types, in the way that the logico-semantic links between their constituent parts are patterned. For example, Christie (2002) contrasts the incremental linear sequence structure to the ‘accretive’ orbital structure where subsequent genres are exemplifications of the ‘nucleus’ presented in the first genre (Christie, 2002, p. 159).
3. Different curriculum genres will offer/shape different identity positions for the students to participate in, and either the instructional or regulative register will be prominent at some stages and overshadowed at others. Thus the macrogenre gaze can map how the students are variously positioned and directed across the sequence of activities and how the regulative and instructional registers move in and out of focus across the larger trajectory, ‘in terms of sets of language choices, the nature of which changes over the course of a series of lessons, as a necessary aspect of successful teaching and learning’ (Christie, 1995, p. 241).
4. Over the life of an ideal or uncontested macrogenre, that is one that proceeds according to design, the regulative discourse will gradually become
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sublimated or relatively invisible while the instructional discourse is increasingly foregrounded. Christie (1999a, p. 161) explains the general principle:
… the regulative register will be foregrounded at the start of a curriculum macrogenre, and it will remain foregrounded while the curriculum goals are being established and negotiated … At points where the regulative register is foregrounded, the instructional register may find no expression in the discourse, but in general as curriculum activity proceeds, the instructional register will also find expression … If the curriculum macrogenre succeeds, the regulative register eventually disappears, while the instructional register is foregrounded. … the regulative register continues to operate tacitly.
For Christie, an ideal or ‘successful’ macrogenre is one in which the regulative register is gradually sublimated but highly operative in its tacit status. On a larger scale, Iedema (1996) tracks similar changes in the trajectory of typical regulative discourse across primary and secondary schooling, whereby the regulative register displays increasing use of grammatic metaphor to background and linguistically camouflage the regulative discourse such that its function of social control is rendered more implicitly as an objective reality through a technology of ‘interiorised’ self-disciplining. Given this ideal pattern, both Christie and Iedema highlight the potential for its disruption which effectively winds the process back to more overt work in the regulative register (Christie, 1999a), and more congruent, direct register choices (Iedema, 1996) such as imperatives.
For this study, such a retrograde flare in the regulative register (for example, where the intended sequence is disrupted, needs more directions, or the proposed routine fails to eventuate in successful and legitimised learning) will be interpreted as interactive trouble. Interactive trouble is understood to be ‘jointly produced’ (Freebody, Ludwig, Gunn, Forrest, Freiberg & Herschell, 1995, p. 297) between teacher and students, and arises when student responses fail in ‘the business of hearing (or reading) the teacher correctly’ (p. 298). Freebody et al. in their study of school literacy practices for disadvantaged students distinguished between types of interactive trouble that they observed in their classroom data. These included epistemological trouble, organisational trouble, reasoning trouble, pedagogical 158
difference, relational trouble, and stylistic trouble. This study, however, is more particularly interested in how cultural difference may be produced and made empirically evident as interactive trouble which could manifest itself through any of these, and possibly additional, categories. Using the meta-text developed in the previous analytical stage, incidents and matters of interactive trouble can be identified as flares in regulative register activity and the chain of relevant texts selected for further analysis. This is the focus of Chapter 7.
5. A successful macrogenre will accomplish logogenesis, understood as the development of a shared technical vocabulary and meanings that encapsulate the ‘uncommon sense’ knowledge of both the instructional register and the regulative register. Logogenesis offers another source of cohesion across the series of curriculum genres, and involves both making some linguistic choices available and making others unavailable.
In this particular study, the macrogenre concept and Christie’s insights will be used in two ways. Firstly the concept of macrogenre helps frame an analytical account of the unit of study in its entirety, how it was designed in its intentions and then how it was conducted as interaction between the lecturer and student ‘protagonists’ (Delamont, 1983). Christie’s translation of sociological concepts to their linguistic realisations is crucial here, in helping unpack and isolate elements of the text. This meta-conceptualisation helps to draw together all the various texts and interactions that made the case study unit happen, as presented in Chapter 5. Secondly the conceptualisation of an educational course as a macrogenre, woven from the instructional and regulative discourses, also allows informed and purposeful selections from the data set for more detailed analysis. Matters of cultural difference as solicited for the logogenesis of the instructional register through the design of ‘student subsidy’ will be explored in Chapter 6. These are instances where cultural difference has been purposefully produced in the field of the instructional register. In Chapter 7, the fourth principle above will help to identify regulative ‘flares’ of interactive trouble, that can be further analysed as possibly implicated in the production of cultural difference in the regulative register. These are instances where cultural difference was produced in regard to the tenor and mode of interaction. 159
This section above has outlined how the case study’s ethnographic ‘observational’ data of online interaction will be treated, and the linguistic and classroom discourse theory informing the analysis. The next section considers how the adjunct interview data will be treated in this study.
4.4 Interviews The choice of interview as a method for generating data, once the mainstay of sociological survey research, has come under considerable scrutiny to the point that the compromised status of data thus produced needs to be cautiously assessed and theorised, and should not replace observational data (Dingwall, 1997; Fontana & Frey, 2000; Silverman, 2001). The following discussion will outline how semistructured interviews producing ‘dialogic data’ (Carspecken, 1996) were used in this study as an adjunct to the ‘observational’ data to contribute to a richer ontology.
The ‘unresolved debate’ regarding the status of interview accounts and ‘whether such accounts are: true or false representations of such features as attitudes and behaviour; or simply “accounts” whose main interest lies in how they are constructed rather than in their accuracy’ (Silverman, 2001, p. 17) has produced a degree of reflexivity that can be counter-productive in its introspection (Dingwall, 1997). Rather than dismiss the interview accounts of participants as ephemeral, circumstantial constructions reflecting uppermost the relations of the interview context, I wish to dignify these teacher and student accounts as reflecting the ongoing truth- or sense-making that these agents hold to and act on. I aim to reclaim some of the ground lost in terms of accepting and honouring the explanatory value of interview accounts. An interview account might be refracted as a pencil viewed through a glass of water, but the representation reflects more the substance of the object than the nature of the lens.
Luttrell (2000, p. 504) expresses a similar reluctance to relinquish the realist’s grasp of facts through interview accounts, and seeks a compromise in her ‘good enough’ ethnography between what is portrayed as a mutually exclusive binary between realist and reflexive interpretations:
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On the one hand I saw these stories as factual accounts of the women’s experiences, views, and values ... On the other hand, I also understood that these stories represented what the women wanted me most to know and what they construed as being worth talking about (which is not to say that these stories were fictions, but that they were told with particular points in mind). I decided against taking an either-or position on these two forms of ethnography – realist and reflexive. While I believe there is an important distinction between these two forms, I don’t believe that researchers must choose to do one or the other. Part of the challenge of my research was finding a way to do both – to make realist claims … and to make reflexive interpretations of the ethnographic exchanges between me and the women I studied.
Reservations about the status of interview accounts do not render the tool useless, but warrant caution in its application. However, in the spirit of ontological richness and epistemological caution, the interview as a tool allows some access to how agents make sense of events and take knowledge from them. The framing of the research question in this study works to privilege agents’ accounts with explanatory face value, in that the production of culture and cultural difference lies in what the agents perceive to constitute and label as cultural attributes and behaviours, of their own or other’s social groups. The act of attributing some feature with cultural significance, that is, with being representative of one social group and not of others, constructs the boundary between cultures, at least in the mind of the interviewee. Thus, the reportage of such attribution is important in itself; the labelling is the phenomenon I am trying to capture.
For a critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996), the research interview is not a liability but rather an indispensable tool for a number of reasons. Firstly, the interview is valuable for its ability to democratically foreground the voice and interpretations of the research subject, with which to productively challenge the researcher’s formative interpretations and analytical reconstructions. Secondly, the interview is the only research access available to the subjective ontological realm’s truth claims regarding feelings, values and subjective states. The privileged access 161
of the subject to this truth means that the researcher is reliant on the subject’s account. This suggests validity checks and processes such as monitoring for inconsistencies, repeated interviews over time, and member checks of transcripts, all of which were carried out. Thirdly, the production of such ‘dialogic’ data constitutes an important validation process for preliminary analysis, so long as the power relation between researcher and researched does not distort the meanings of the researched. For the critical realist frame, the interview offers access to a level of social potentials that is not open to observation otherwise, but is no less real. One example of such access to the non-empirical would be the lecturer’s interview account reflecting on how he had carefully reworded a posting to assuage imagined cultural sensibilities on one occasion.
The dynamic of ‘impression management’ needs to be considered when interpreting interview data. This concept refers to the ‘dance of expectations’ (Dingwall, 1997, p. 56), that is, the imperative for participants in social exchanges (including research interviews) to demonstrate competence in the role in which they have been cast. In reference to the current study, this imperative worked on the lecturer and designer interviewed as pressure to display professionally competent and informed judgements in their accounts of pedagogical decisions. Of particular interest to the research will be what resources, knowledge, discourses and rationales they chose to draw from in order to display their professional competence. The content of their responses will be an important indicator not just of how they read their interlocutor’s purpose, but what discourses, regarding cultural difference in particular, they have at their disposal to bring to fulfilling that purpose.
Structured and unstructured interview methods operate within quite distinct epistemological traditions:
The former aims at capturing precise data of a codable nature in order to explain behavior within preestablished categories, whereas the latter is used in an attempt to understand the complex behavior of members of society without imposing any a priori categorization that may limit the field of inquiry. (Fontana & Frey, 1998, p. 56)
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For the purposes of this study, the semi-structured interviews with teachers and students fell somewhere between, structured in that they addressed planned topics of conversation (see Appendix B), and were initiated by the interviewer, with conversational prompts to encourage clarification or expansion. Each interview was conducted as purposeful exchange, with a beginning and end, rather than as an unstructured open-ended relationship. However, the exchange was unstructured insofar as allowing the interviewee scope to introduce topics they felt were pertinent, and space for both parties to pursue topics to their satisfaction. The interview questions and prompts were carefully monitored to allow the interviewee to choose their own wordings and so the prompts reflected the interviewee’s wordings, rather than impose the researcher’s discursive choices. Each interview was structured in terms of staging the questions purposefully to acknowledge the interviewee’s expertise and status (by starting with issues of curriculum content), with which to establish a respectful rapport, then to funnel questioning into more specific explorations of pedagogic design and conduct.
There is a growing practice of empathetic interviewing styles, where roles are blurred, mutual disclosure encouraged, and the interview viewed as a coconstruction between participants, in response to questions about moral responsibility and manipulation of research subjects in traditional structured interviewing techniques (Fontana & Frey, 1998, 2000). In contrast to this trend, the interviews for this study were conducted with a clearly delineated and visible researcher role. I considered this to be less manipulative, in that there was less confusion over the purposes of the exchange, and no entrapment of the interview subjects into confidences under the guise of closer, more intimate relations. The text achieved was still a negotiation between parties (Fontana & Frey, 1998, 2000), but the intent was to elicit/sample the subject’s own wordings, links and ideas, rather than to co-construct shared meanings. For this reason, I aimed to use frequent lowinference paraphrasing and sparing use of high-inference paraphrasing (Carspecken, 1996) with ‘deliberate naiveté’, which presumes an openness of mind ‘rather than having ready-made categories and schemes of interpretation’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 31).
In the research design, access to the dispersed international student body necessitated the use of email interviews, rather than face-to-face interviews. In the 163
above discussion about adaptive virtual ethnography, I outlined Hine’s (2000) argument that face-to-face methods may in fact be a distorted lens on identities and practices enacted online. There were obviously material constraints on the researcher’s ability to conduct face-to-face interviews with students spread across the globe, but Hine’s insight suggests that an email exchange is not a second-best or ‘good enough’ compromise, but rather a more valid vehicle for access to the online student’s accounts. The inevitable emergence of ‘virtual interviewing’ has been critiqued for its lack of non-verbal cues, its pale imitation of a research relationship, its ‘lean’ communicative potential (Mann & Stewart, 2000, p. 127) and the heightened risk of inviting fictional accounts (Fontana & Frey, 2000). On the other hand, maybe this defacing of the interpersonal may assist in lowering the research relationship’s distortion of any account given. Markham (1998) summarises the learning curve she underwent in achieving her aim of conducting synchronous online interviews in her two headings: ‘Writing takes longer than talking (p. 83)’ and ‘Online, you can’t see their faces (p. 71)’. For this study, asynchronous communication alleviated the time pressures Markham faced while typing in nonverbal cues to maintain a conversational style in online chat. The email exchanges also carried the advantage of perhaps being more manageable for a nonnative speaker of English, for whom the asynchronous turns could allow time to compose and edit their response if desired. These communicative technologies are recent arrivals in the social science tool kit. The choice of email exchange in place of face-to-face interview may fail some methodological tests, but on its own terms in this setting, offered a valuable adjunct tool that could be adapted productively to the task.
Perhaps of more concern in regard to conducting the student interviews, were crosscultural issues of understanding and sensitivity, whereby ‘there are different ways of saying things, and, indeed certain things should not be said at all’ (Fontana and Frey, 1998, p. 58). It was considered highly likely that the international students enrolled in the online MBA sampled would be speaking English as a second language, and living in very different cultural milieux from the Australian students enrolled. However, to move from that likelihood to some form of pre-emptive cultural censorship of the interview schedule is another matter that must articulate with the theorisations of culture at play. I have argued that former theorisations of 164
culture as stable and reproductive are under attack in current times of mobility and interconnectedness, this research site constituting a good example thereof. To operate on such prescriptive and in effect patronising past constructions of cultural difference is to deny these students their active choice to occupy these transnational positions. To engage in a research interview with these students, with pre-judged notions of what can and cannot be said according to my version of their culture, would be an act of colonial essentialism. I preferred to take the risk of asking the questions I wanted answered, being given evasive replies at the interviewee’s discretion if need be, and making sense of such events after the fact.
On the related matter of English language competence, the international students were considered likely, by admission procedures, to have adequate English language competency to participate in an email exchange. As mentioned above, by using asynchronous email, they were not under pressure to produce their responses on the spot. On the other hand, I needed to exercise prudence in how much time I could expect them to devote to the task. The exchanges thus risked being short compared to a face-to-face interview transcript. Though a compromise in this regard, they still allowed the student actors some voice in the interpretation and analysis of these educational events, and provided important validity checks of the interpretations I could make of their actions.
4.4.1 Stimulated recall A second interview with the teachers, reflecting on the conduct of the unit, used a stimulated recall method (Keith, 1988). This label suffers from overtones of behaviourism, but the notion of ‘stimulated’ alerts us to the fact that the reflection has been generated by the research process, and is not ‘naturally occurring’ data. Secondly, the notion of ‘recall’ also alerts us to the fact that it is a re-constitution and re-telling of mental processes, post fact, and therefore produces an account one more step removed from the lived moment. Keith describes the typical application:
Typically , the process involves mechanically recording … actual classroom activities in situ … Teachers are then asked to view ( or listen to) these recordings and to describe their thought processes at certain points during
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the class. That is, teachers are to ‘recall’ what they were thinking at the actual time of the taping by means of the cues or stimuli provided in the tape. (Keith, 1988, p. 3)
Stimulated recall interviews using video-taped lessons as the stimulus have been used in studies of teachers’ knowledge and decision-making (for example, Dunkin, Welch, Merritt, Phillips & Craven, 1998; McMeniman, Cumming, Wilson, Stevenson & Sim, 2000; Meade & McMeniman, 1992). The choice allows some access to the empirically invisible complexity of teachers’ decision-making in action and in context, and grounds accounts of pedagogy in concrete circumstances, thus avoiding generalised, de-contextualised accounts in the interest of impression management. Dunkin et al. (1998) used stimulated recall interviews with teachers after taping a series of lessons over periods of a week. These researchers prepared questions about particular observed incidents. In contrast, McMeniman et al. (2000) emphasised immediate viewing of a single lesson after its conduct, and purposefully asked the teacher to drive the reflection, stopping the tape at any moment they made a decision. Thus the techniques of stimulated recall have been adapted to fit the research question, prompting Keith (1988, p. 5) to suggest that ‘researchers ought not talk about the stimulated recall methodology, but rather a stimulated recall methodology’.
In this study, the stimulus was the mention of certain episodes wherein cultural difference arose within the instructional field, or as a matter of regulative trouble. The lecturer and designer were independently asked to reflect on the conduct of the unit in general, and any moments in the ‘discussion’ where they were particularly pleased or worried by the turn of events. The teacher and designer were each invited to articulate what sense they made of the events, how they read the actions of others, and how they formulated their own actions, in their own terms. The researcher also offered a selection of events as possible moments of successful or unsuccessful pedagogical interaction, and invited them to reflect on their assessments and interpretations of these events.
In terms of epistemological caution and ontological richness, the stimulated recall interview has all the drawbacks and issues of any interview account, but has the 166
advantage of being grounded in particular concrete and documented events. It is a method borne of technological means to capture events that insinuate a realism, that is, that the stimulus equates to the event. Keith’s review (1988) asks whether the video or audio version of events can equate with the teacher’s experience of the event as actor, or whether it in fact constitutes a new event for the teacher. She cautions that recall accounts not be treated as truth statements, and suggests that rather they are treated as elicitations or displays of teachers’ craft knowledge.
To promote authenticity in these stimulated recall accounts, the device of a teacher’s log may have been a helpful intermediary between the event and its recall. This would require the cooperation of the lecturer and designer, in keeping a running diary account of their assessment, description of, and reactions to, virtual classroom events as they unfold. As an equivalent, the initial research design hoped to operate weekly ‘check-in’ emails between the researcher and case study staff. Luttrell’s ‘good enough’ ethnography acknowledges that methodological choices will involve both gains and losses. The gain made by this device would be access to more authentic, time-situated accounts of how the course unfolded for participants, to anchor the stimulated recall more firmly to its event. The research subjects, however, would have to judge whether this would become an onerous imposition on their time, and for the researcher there is the consideration of the research process prompting an overly reflexive environment that could distort the conduct of the course. As some middle ground, weekly ‘check-in’ emails with the lecturer were initially pursued. However, the lecturer found that this took too much time to give the detailed response he had in mind. At his request, this became a taped phone interview mid-way, and the occasional copied email that kept me abreast with ‘behind the scenes’ developments, or his selection thereof.
In summary, as a tool to access the layer of agent meanings and motivations that is not visible to empirical methods, stimulated recall has its advantages. The stimulus in this study will in fact equate to the same one-dimensional textual experience that constituted the event, though the research process may cause the teacher to attend differently to, or to different details within, the text. However, this aspect of the study is not asking what happened as some ontological empirical truth, but rather is
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asking about subjective and normative-evaluative ontologies in terms of what sense has been made of and taken from the events.
Guides for the initial staff interviews, the stimulated recall interviews and student email exchanges are included in Appendix B, with the written research brief and proformas for informed consent. The interview schedules were used as guides not templates, indicative of topics to cover, rather than rigid process, so the interviews could proceed in an unstructured manner.
4.4.2 Analysis of interview scripts For this study the accounts derived from the variety of interview methods are used as adjunct resources to the online interaction data, to enrich the ontological reach of that data set. They allow the research to burrow ‘downward and inward’ (Eisenhart, 2001a, p. 22). To this end, links are made in the reconstructive analyses between events and participants accounts of such events. This is in contrast to a methodological design which treats the interview data as a separate corpus to its own regime of analysis. Following Bernstein, pedagogic discourse is understood to include professional talk about students, pedagogical settings, and pedagogical decision-making, thus the analytic concepts of instructional and regulative registers will equally apply to the texts produced in the interviews with staff, their emails, and the email interviews with students.
Notwithstanding this adjunct status, it must be acknowledged that the analysis of interview data commenced with its transcription. The foregone necessity to transcribe verbal data to render it manageable does not make this a transparent, nonproblematic process. Edwards (1993) outlines a variety of transcription choices that must be made to accommodate the research question and analytic focus, including the selection of orthographic system, a choice of spatial representation of time and participation in the text, and the representation of non-verbal events. Edwards suggests two desirable features to guide the selection of transcription conventions:
that the transcript preserve the information needed by the researcher in a manner which is true to the nature of the interaction itself … (and) that its
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conventions be practical with respect to the way in which the data are to be managed and analysed. (p. 4)
The former feature refers to the authenticity of the transcript’s representation. By ‘practical’ in the latter, Edwards is referring to the transcription’s design of representation, its readability, and its compatibility with other pertinent data sets, or computer applications. The same verbal exchange could thus be transcribed quite differently within different research projects.
This study transcribed interview data in order to access the social actor’s meanings, intentions and interpretations of the design and conduct of an online program. It also pursued interview data as a point of access to the actor’s subjective and normative-evaluative ontologies (Carspecken, 1996). For this reason, the transcription focussed on capturing the semantic and syntactic aspects of the complete interview. This selection is opposed to more detailed linguistic or ethnomethodological transcription choices that are concerned with, for example, interactive dynamics. In the interests of readability, standard English orthography will be used, and no effort will be made to render dialect or accent phonetically. Conventions were drawn from English literacy practices, such as ‘…’ to denote where a speaker tails off and fails to finish, and ‘-’ to denote an abrupt break in the projected utterance. A prosodic feature such as intonation, stress, pause or nonverbal gesture was indicated by embedded commentary text ‘only where it deviates from norms or is interactively significant for other reasons…’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 24). The transcript text used turn taking as the gross unit of analysis, and presented the interview time frame vertically which Edwards points out, is a textual display of equitable relationships. In the interests of authenticity, the transcript indicated where, given a lack of clarity, the gist has had to be reconstructed by including a gloss in parentheses. At the transcription stage, sentence fragments were recorded verbatim, with no attempt to reconstitute the sense.
Issues of transcription did not apply to the email exchange with students, whose participant-generated texts raised different issues surrounding the conditions of their construction. In the spirit of epistemological caution and ontological richness, these accounts are acknowledged to be partial and selective, but also are acknowledged to 169
be pragmatic, ‘good enough’ points of access to the discourse and meanings that the participants construct around these online educational environments. Throughout the thesis, any data text from email exchange or course interaction has been reproduced verbatim, with no standardisation of spelling or grammar.
To interrogate the interview accounts thus produced, a content analysis identified data slices pertinent to stages of the larger analytic project. For example, to illuminate the macrogenre reconstruction of the case study’s design and conduct (Chapter 5), initial interview accounts were interrogated in terms of:
How do staff refer to cultural difference as a consideration in their design of the unit?
What cultural categories do their accounts invoke?
Interviews conducted as stimulated recall, reflecting on incidents, were interrogated in terms of:
How do participants draw on cultural identities and differences to explain aspects of the conduct of the unit?
What attributes are associated with which cultural categories?
For staff interviews these analytic questions allowed the data to speak to the issue of how understandings and precepts of cultural difference informed their professional gaze, discourse and therefore, practices. The interviews, as an adjunct data set, are thus analysed semantically, that is, with reference to the meanings conveyed, in contrast to the more detailed grammatical analyses applied to selected online interaction data. As discussed above, the meanings produced are not ‘a transparent medium to “reality”’ (Silverman, 2003, p. 341), but are understood to be artefacts precipitated by the research process. However, in the spirit of a ‘good enough’ methodology, these meanings offer the best available empirical access to how participants understood cultural identities and differences to inform pedagogical decisions.
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4.5 Summary The linguistic, hermeneutic and textual turns have irrevocably changed the social sciences, with the risk that empirical efforts risk becoming paralysed by the impossibility of addressing the multitude of concerns and the impossibility of making any unqualified knowledge claim. As Hine (2000, p. 54) puts it, we are working within the ‘paradox of knowing about the social construction of knowledge’ while doing social research. This study has to deal with these complexities, the shifting sands of culture, as well as the holographic substance of virtual phenomena. However, the complexities of the new virtual field of social relations need to be understood as best we can, and it is an informed, reflexive social science, rather than a simplistic technicist determinism that will help us know ourselves in these emerging environments. Rather than being discouraged and defeated, a critical realist frame allows work to continue with compromised tools, and measured claims. To this end, each method above has been scrutinised not just for its strengths, but also its weaknesses and limitations. The empirical research project can still serve as a ‘reality check’ on theoretical intuitions and interpretations and the case study can still provide exemplars that elucidate complex processes.
This study with its adapted ethnography of ‘observation’ in the virtual classroom, semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall method, and email exchanges, has attempted to build an inevitably partial but purposefully focussed description of the online internationalised educational setting and how cultural difference can be produced therein. ‘Cultural background’ can no longer be understood as an independent variable covered by a choice of box to tick on a survey questionnaire. Given the ‘transitive’ (Outhwaite, 1987, p. 57), or subjectively constructed nature of agent understandings of culture, the issue here is not of representing or accessing some truth that corresponds to a material reality of what cultures are, but rather representing agents’ constructions of culture and cultural processes and how these inform their actions. Embracing a multi-layered ontology complicates the empirical project, but efforts to sample observable events, their potentials and the interpretations made by the actors, will achieve a level of insight not available to the tourist. All the caution expressed above amounts to ever present questions of
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validity of the data and thus any analysis. By making transparent the process of data collection and its analysis, the empirical effort is open to scrutiny, and the informed consent of the reader. The analytic procedures have been theorised as engaging with the data from online postings as both interaction and as text, using the theoretical synergy between Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device, and systemic functional linguistics. The discussion has also highlighted some ‘rubbing points’ where the ethnography could challenge theoretical presumptions, which in the end is the whole reason for doing empirical work.
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CHAPTER 5: A MACROGENRE OVERVIEW OF DESIGN AND CONDUCT 5.1 Introduction For this thesis, a critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996) was undertaken in a virtual case study site, being an MBA unit offered in online mode to an internationalised student body. This chapter offers the reader an ethnographic account of this case study, a semester long unit in the management of organisational behaviour offered by University A during 2003 (all identifying aspects/details have been suppressed to protect the institution’s, lecturers’ and students’ identities). In line with Carspecken (1996), the description reconstituted from observational data offers a ‘reconstructive analysis’ (p. 42) of what happened, in terms of what emerged as typical/normative in this setting and what proved disruptive or atypical. The reconstruction uses Christie’s (2002) concept of curriculum macrogenre, and Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device on which Christie draws, to make evident how the parts cohered to produce a whole educational experience. In order to make this account a meaningful orientation for the reader, this chapter will reconstruct the case study by moving from the broader sectoral context and institutional factors that framed the case study unit’s design, funnelling down to the more detailed account of what happened during the actual conduct of the case study unit, and how the actors represented the events in their retrospective interview accounts.
5.2 The sectoral context Chapter 1 offered some insight into developments within the higher educational sector in Australia in terms of a raw enthusiasm for technological solutions, and the drive for external sources of funding, in particular, through the export of educational products to international markets. Thus, amongst other recent agendas changing the face of the Western academy, the technological affordance of online education has emerged to offer a seductive solution to multiple problems. These agendas include the shrinking public purse, the associated reinvention of the academy under a more corporate entrepreneurial charter with more managerial
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governance, the convergence of information and media technologies facilitating new pedagogies and information systems, and the search for new markets for the educational ‘products’. Since the pro-commodification Jackson report, Australia has competed aggressively and successfully within its geographical region for the mobile international student. A second wave of innovation through the 1990s saw the proliferation of ‘off-shore’ campuses and partnering or ‘twinning’ arrangements with educational institutions in typically South-East Asian nations. Online education, being the virtual conduct of pedagogy through web-based communication, is the latest innovation being pursued particularly in the highly commodified postgraduate coursework market of business and information technology disciplines.
These intersecting agendas and their sectoral context were on display in the travelling ‘MBA Showcase’ – a collaborative marketing event staged in each capital city by Australian universities plus one from New Zealand. The event I attended in 2003 consisted of a series of static displays staffed by representatives from a range of universities and other organisations, plus a number of seminars - one from each of the major displayers. Marketing and/or academic staff were available at each booth to answer questions, and to highlight their products’ competitive features such as online or ‘flexible’ delivery, CD Rom supplementary material, modularised curriculum and multiple entry points during the year. Providers that were not currently offering online mode, typically reported that they were in the process of developing such offerings.
This effort to market Australian MBAs domestically is complemented by similar sectoral collaborations to market Australian MBAs in the international arena through the university sector’s entrepreneurial initiative, IDP Education Australia. IDP stages ‘education exhibitions and events in overseas markets and Australia’ (IDP Education Australia, 2003, p. 39), the majority of these held in Asian centres, and manages a network of recruiting agents. IDP also produces publications such as ‘D2D MBA’, being:
a comprehensive guide to MBA programs available to international students in Australia, listing more than 150 MBA programs across every Australian 174
university ... the publication promotes the added value of studying an MBA in Australia, including the quality of our institutions, facilities and teachers, and Australia’s unique offerings as a western but very multicultural country located in the Asia Pacific. (IDP Education Australia, 2004)
From this brief descriptor, the brand image of Australian educational products can be seen to proclaim both its multicultural sensibilities and its First World credentials.
5.3 The institutional context Within this field of collaborative competition, University A is an Australian university whose Business Faculty, like many others in Australia, has forged a number of off-shore partnerships with selected educational institutions in Asia and the Pacific. The observed unit (Unit A hereafter) was offered simultaneously to: a pool of ‘domestic’ students; a cohort of ‘international’ students enrolled through a private Malaysian institution; and a cohort of ‘international’ students enrolled through a Chinese university. The university’s category of ‘domestic’ student included all individuals who enrolled in the course independent of any partnering arrangement. This included many students who lived in close proximity to the university, but also other students located elsewhere in Australia, expatriates, and one enrolment from the US. The term ‘domestic’ student shall be similarly used hereafter to refer to Australian citizens, whether living locally or expatriate, with this privileged sense captured in the use of quotation marks. The term ‘Malaysia’ student will be used to refer to any student enrolled through the Malaysian partner, and similarly ‘China’. It is important to note that this refers to the students’ context of locality, and does not necessarily assume/denote some cultural heritage of the students, thus the usual slippage to adjectival ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Chinese’ has been resisted here to provoke a jarring reading. In regard to the partner institutions however, ‘Malaysian’ and ‘Chinese’ will be retained to recognise the national institutions and governance that frame business dealings across geo-political borders.
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Arrangements for course delivery to the China and Malaysia ‘international’ cohorts differed, being customised according to different contractual details negotiated between the partnering institutions. For the Chinese partner, the Australian institution’s lecturing staff routinely travelled to China in person to deliver concentrated face-to-face teaching sessions. This arrangement was complicated this particular semester by the outbreak of the SARS virus and the temporary curtailment of international travel. The lecturer did travel to China for one study period during the observed semester, and also conducted live video-linked lectures for this group of students. Under these arrangements, the China students were not required to participate in the online mode, though they were encouraged to observe. Thus this group of ‘international’ students were effectively invisible in this ethnographic study of the online interaction, and invisible to, or separate from, the domestic and Malaysia cohorts. They were not included in the ‘online’ class list.
In contrast, the partnering relationship between University A and the Malaysian private college was in its early days. The Malaysian college operated across a number of campuses and employed their own tutorial staff to assist in the delivery of the Australian university’s unit. These tutors did not participate in the online discussions, and were also in effect ‘invisible’ to the online ethnographic study. Unit A was the first time the Australian and Malaysian institutions had articulated in this fashion. This group of 37 students were a designated ‘pilot’ group trialling the online delivery interface prior to larger scale enrolments planned in future semesters. These students were included in the same online interaction as the ‘domestic’ cohort and the university staff expectations were that these students would receive no differential treatment.
Unit A was also the teaching team’s first semester using the particular commercial courseware platform. To support students in their use of this platform, the university offered a help desk facility, and the faculty offered a dedicated ‘helpdesk’ for MBA students. These support facilities could be contacted via telephone, facsimile or email. To lodge assignments over the internet, there was an additional step required, that of submitting the assignment to a software package used to monitor plagiarism. This step proved to be a source of confusion, anxiety, frustration and complaint for many of the students, as will be discussed later. 176
At the outset of the unit, there were 144 students listed in the online course database, including 37 enrolled through the Malaysian partner institution. By the time groups were allocated for the first assessment task, there were 92 active students, ‘active’, that is, in terms of having made postings to the shared discussion space. 83 students participated in these assessable first group discussions. For the second assessable group discussions, 90 students were allocated to groups, and 79 participated, 29 being students enrolled via the Malaysian partner.
Pre-requisites for admission to the MBA program included an undergraduate degree and work experience in a managerial role. Like all other Australian universities, MBA studies at University A attracted full fees, as opposed to the governmentsubsidised fees charged for undergraduate study. Unit A was one of ten core units offered in a 12 unit Master of Business Administration, all offered in online mode with no on-campus requirements. For many students, according to their introductory postings, it was one of their first MBA units undertaken; for some it was one of their last. The unit was formally staged over 13 weeks with a midsemester break of one week. However, interaction continued regardless, and the course site was ‘alive’ and busy over a period of 19 weeks in total.
5.3.1 The staff members The lecturer responsible for the design and conduct of this unit (hereafter referred to as LA) was a highly experienced, highly qualified senior member of faculty, with managerial experience in the business sector and universities. LA had recently completed postgraduate studies in online learning and had been instrumental in University A’s development of the online MBA. He expressed interest in building a consistent approach across the course’s units in regard to how they ‘train’ (IntLA1) the students in online interaction. LA described himself as ‘Australian’ when asked ‘what cultural group(s) do you identify with?’, and had pursued his education in Australian universities.
There was also an educational designer (hereafter referred to as DA) involved in the running of Unit A. She had recently taken on this job role of ‘educational
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facilitator’ (IntDA1), and had not been involved in the unit’s original design. She had a responsibility for its smooth operation and more generally, quality monitoring of the online materials and instructional mode across the MBA program, with some business/administrative functions in managing new cohorts of students. In this last capacity, she travelled to Malaysia during Unit A’s operation to visit the Malaysian partner institution and resolve issues of administrative articulation. She also operated the MBA Helpdesk with the assistance of other technical staff, responding to student queries about technological functionality for this and other MBA units.
DA had extensive experience as an instructional designer, having been involved in modes of distance learning in higher education in this capacity over 17 years, with experience in a number of Australian universities. She had thus witnessed the evolution of distance mode into ‘flexible delivery’ then into ‘online learning’, and how new parties and interests had been attracted to the online mode – ‘everybody climbed on line, on board’ (IntDA1) - often ‘reinventing the wheel all the time’ (IntDA1). She also had teaching qualifications and teaching experience in secondary and tertiary settings. Over the time frame of Unit A, DA’s job role was redesigned to incorporate more liaison with international partner institutions, and entrepreneurial development of other business prospects. DA described herself as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ when asked to describe her cultural identity.
5.4 Designing for interaction The unit’s design resourced the students with a variety of instructional sources and learning activities with which to interact. These included set readings, a bibliography of recommended readings, module guides, online interaction tools and discussion ‘zones’ and via these, the lecturer and the other students.
The set readings, being a textbook and selected articles reproduced on line or in the unit’s printed book of readings, were supported by written module guides which could be downloaded from the unit website. These guides, totalling 147 pages, provided an additional layer of ‘teacher talk’ or pedagogical discourse written down, knitting each reading into the unit’s macrogenre trajectory through a tightly structured instructional sequence. They also offered the student reflections,
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summaries, exemplifications, contrasts and/or critiques, with ‘Activities’ designed to engage the student with each module’s theories or readings. The activities were often crafted to refer the student to a particular reading, and typically asked the student to analyse their own work setting/performance using the concepts presented. The guide, in contrast to the set readings, used many imperatives (‘Describe an organisation of your choosing…’) and interrogatives (‘Why do you think this is so?’), which attempted to engage the readers and involve them in an imagined quasi-dialogue beyond its static textual form, in the heuristic tradition of distance learning packages.
Despite this detailed preparation, no reference was made to the module guides in the online interaction, beyond a student query about an article referenced therein, which LA dismissed: ‘I don’t consider it very important in terms of understanding the issues’ (F66). With its real (though virtual) interaction, rather than the imagined dialogue of the guides, the online interaction came to replace the module guides as pedagogic intermediary between the unit’s instructional materials and the student. Similarly, the strongly framed sequence of the guides, with its textual anaphoric referencing linking to what has gone before, was set aside when LA invited the students to choose their own path through the materials, in the emerging tradition of ‘flexible delivery’.
The original unit materials had been sourced from another university to kickstart this program. Although LA had not written them, he had updated them, and designed the assessment tasks and online pedagogic design around these instructional materials. LA was enthusiastic about the pedagogic value of online interaction and this was a prominent and overt aspect of his design, as proclaimed in his first announcement to the student body: ‘In this course I emphasise the value of interaction via online discussion. We all have much to learn from each other. … By sharing experiences and views we can enhance our own understanding’ (An1). An important caveat on this design for high levels of (peer) interaction was the purposeful withholding or rationing of his own visible interaction:
LA: I’ve come to the view that you also have to exercise a discipline with students, to limit your availability … I don’t let people communicate with me 179
individually, because, certainly not over anything to do with content. Ah, because I think the medium is too inefficient to do it that way. It could easily create a dependence and then suddenly you multiply that by 80 students who expect the one on one and you can’t serve them properly, and also you create, I think, an environment where they can feel that they are not part of the community, and I just say right from the start, I think I put an announcement early up, that , how do you want to communicate, you ask me a question, I’m going to throw it back onto the discussion board, and invite everybody’s comment, and then I’ll come in with my view. Because, for this sort of subject, there’s no right answers. There is, ‘did so and so’s theory say such and such’, well, yes or no, but, what’s the best way of doing something? Um, I try to really play down that, ‘Yep, I’ve got ideas, but let’s hear yours’, and then I’ll give mine, and then I usually come in with something that’s based on ‘Well, several of you have mentioned this sort of thing, and there’s some good points in that, ah what I would try to emphasize is this…’ but ah, trying to really get a sense of considered argument rather than learnt off correct answers. (IntLA1)
In this account of his design goals, LA offered a range of economic, epistemological and pedagogical reasons for his ‘hands off’ policy, that is, his designed reticence. Economically, he alluded to the number of students and elsewhere, the workload issue of how much time can be spent online, and how he works a judicious equation of being visible enough within time constraints: ‘We’re supposed to be online three hours through the week and that’s best done you know, not going more than two days, so that people just get a sense that you’re around’ (IntLA1).
Epistemologically, he justified withholding any definitive or authoritative answers as these would misrepresent the state of knowledge in the field. Pedagogically, he aimed to cultivate interactive discussion to order to demonstrate how knowledge could be contested. Thus, in summary, LA’s approach to his pedagogy and design of interaction drew from a regulative discourse informed by the strong constructivist themes found in the ‘how-to’ literature regarding online education reviewed in Chapter 2. 180
DA similarly expressed strong opinions about what constituted good quality pedagogical design in online mode, similarly highlighting peer interaction:
... they have to work really hard talking to students at a distance, being there for them when they need to talk to them in discussion groups, you know, setting up questions weekly in discussion groups, and things like that. (IntDA1)
However, she constructed an ideally more substantive and ‘hands on’ role for the lecturer in this interaction, in terms of engaging and scaffolding development from students’ raw responses:
… having the lecturer pose questions which the students, um, you know, answer to the best of their ability … and if the lecturer keeps an eye on that and then goes in, maybe, a couple of times and makes comments, guides and … and summarises and, gets, it’s really just to make them think and question what they’re doing. (IntDA1)
To design the course interaction, LA had a well-defined modus operandi and designed different online spaces to achieve different kinds of interaction, including monologic, teacher-moderated group discussion, dialogic Question/Answer format and small peer-group discussion. Following Tomlinson (1999), the term ‘zone’, with its common usage for both notions of designated time and space, will be used to refer to these spaces when in use.
The monologic zone was technologically structured to appear uppermost when students entered the unit’s web environment, with no ‘reply’ or interactive functionality, except by hyperlink to other ‘discussion’ zones. This ‘announcement’ feature is standard practice across such commercial platforms. The most recent posting would appear at the top of the cumulative list. LA would post a weekly ‘announcement’, and then other announcements as needed: ‘I plan to post an announcement every Monday and any other time I have something I think you should all know.’ The announcements were considered essential reading for 181
students, alerting students to new activity available elsewhere on the course site (such as newly opened zones, exemplars or grades), administrative arrangements, and approaching assessment milestones: ‘By now you should have …’. These announcements were notably devoted to topics regarding regulative discourse matters, that is, managing the ‘how’ of the course – the staging of the students’ engagement, briefing in the model of teacher/student roles, and assessment protocols. Any mention of the instructional discourse, that is the ‘what’ of course content, was minimal and introductory. In other words, teaching/learning wasn’t undertaken in this zone, but ‘classroom’/unit management was.
The teacher-moderated ‘discussion’ zones were differently designed and resourced with more interactive tools. LA would create a new ‘discussion’ zone with a title, for example ‘Module 1 & 2’, and a brief explanation of its intended purpose. By clicking on the zone title, students accessed an index of postings in this zone that could be sorted by author, subject, hierarchical interrelationship or date. Clicking again on the title of the posting brought up the text of that particular e-turn, with a ‘reply’ and other navigation buttons. By replying to a posting, the new e-turn would be threaded as subsidiary to the original posting. Participation in these zones was optional and non-assessable. The author of any posting was identified by default from the log on process. This metadata tagged any e-turn with the author’s name and time of posting. This default identity was purposefully switched off late in the course by LA in the final ‘Feedback’ zone, to allow the anonymous posting of unit evaluations. In Table 4, the eight ‘discussion’ zones set up over the life of Unit A are listed in the chronological order of their creation with the descriptor given by LA as to the purpose of that discussion. By these descriptions, Zones B, D, G, and H were designed to explore, accomplish and/or enrich the instructional discourse, that is, the ‘what’ of the course. One student termed this the ‘real’ work (E10). The descriptions themselves are purely worded in the regulative register, with course topics consistently referred to by their module sequence number, not by any reference to their curricular content, the only reference to the instructional register being the acronym ‘MOB’ which refers to the unit’s overarching topic, managing organisational behaviour.
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Table 4: Website zones and design descriptor Zone A
Title Student Introductions
Descriptor Each student is invited to post a brief introduction saying who they are, where they are from, what they do, etc. It will really help us all get full benefit from the course if we get to know each other.
B
Discussion of Module 1
Please post your views on any issue relating to Module 1. Note that I will kick off with some questions and contribute occasionally but it will be better if it is student driven.
C
General issues and helpful hints Discussion of Module 2
Please use this forum to raise general issues and to swap helpful hints.
E
Feedback
I would welcome any feedback regarding the course and the way it operates. If I can accommodate your requests, I will do so in order to better assist your learning. I have added an invitation (dated …) to complete a feedback questionnaire on the course. I have changed this forum so that you can make anonymous postings (for your constructive feedback).
F
Ask me
Please use this forum to ask me course-related questions. I will check the forum 4 days per week and respond to your queries. Please do not post questions for me in other forums in case I miss them. PLEASE NOTE: Technical problems as distinct from course-related questions should be directed to MBA Help.
G
Discussion of Module 3
Here’s a new forum for discussion of issues relating to Module 3. Feel free to post items and comments (or just to browse).
H
Discussion of Modules 4-6
Use this forum to share your insights on any aspects of MOB covered in Modules 4-6. Remember it’s optional but you can learn by discussing (and also by browsing the comments of others).
D
Please feel free to initiate discussion on any issues related to Module 2. I will pose some questions from time to time.
As can be seen from the table’s descriptor, Zone F was designed to accomplish a different, more dialogic form of interaction. LA undertook to answer students’ course-related questions promptly, in a question/answer format. While he was the one asking the initial facilitative questions of students in Zones B, D, G and H, Zone F was designed to be driven by students asking questions of him. Zone C was similarly designed to be driven by student questions, but designed to share responsibility for answers. The dialogic design of Zone F was reflected in the higher percentage of lecturer postings (28% of 278 postings), compared to the ‘instructional’ Zones B (12% of 117 postings), D (8% of 60), G (3% of 61) and H (13% of 31). In Zone E, ‘Feedback’, LA contributed 32% of the 25 postings, and in Zone C, ‘General Tips’, LA also contributed a relatively high percentage (23% of
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62 postings), revealing a distribution of LA’s explicit contributions that favoured regulative functions over instructional engagement. This pattern in the unit’s conduct coheres with his explicit intention quoted above of purposefully withholding to encourage peer interaction in the instructional discourse.
The final type of interaction designed in Unit A was the small peer-group discussions, in which the lecturer was absent by design. As part of the unit assessment tasks, students were asked to prepare brief case study narratives drawing on their own work situations, and to pose a number of discussion questions inviting the exploration of the case study using concepts and theories presented in the course materials. Students were allocated to groups of 3 to 6 members and each group assigned a separate ‘discussion’ zone. This process was repeated for a second case study task with differently allocated groupings. All students could access all groups’ zones. However, an explicit code was suggested, granting each group ‘insider’ rights to permit ‘outsider’ contributions or otherwise. Participation was necessary to be eligible for the 10% of marks allocated to these two discussion tasks. Students were asked to rate their peers according to a set of criteria and these peer-ratings were moderated and finalised by LA. These group discussions became the major sites of interaction where students engaged with, and interacted through, the instructional discourse of the unit.
In addition to the shared zones outlined above, there was also the option of personto-person email within the courseware. However, LA through his announcements and postings, made it clear that he would rather handle queries through the open forums than private email: ‘I am happy to take questions but feel that it is more appropriate if the whole class benefits from the answers. Thus it is best to use the ‘Ask LA’ forum for any issues relating to the course and keep direct email only for confidential matters which should be rare.’ (An17)
In the above discussion, the different templates for interaction designed in the case study website have been described. On the surface, the design attempted to separate regulative (the ‘how) and instructional (the ‘what’) matters or topics into different zones, rather than knit them together. However such separation is better understood as the regulative discourse foregrounding the instructional register in some zones 184
and making the regulative register less evident. Nevertheless the regulative discourse is still intimately involved in ordering the conduct of the pedagogic interaction. Thus LA’s absent/ muted involvement in the ‘on task’ instructional register in the Module Zones makes evident the lecturer’s strong regulative design of promoting peer interaction as productive pedagogy. The description now turns to how the lecturer took account of cultural differences in the design of the unit’s curriculum and pedagogy.
5.5 Designing for cultural sameness/difference When interviewed prior to the unit’s commencement, LA did not intend to adapt the curriculum, assessment or the online pedagogy in any way for the Malaysia cohort beyond acknowledging the additional support offered on site by the Malaysian institute. Where the Chinese partner had negotiated face-to-face teaching periods and some minor adjustments to assessment weightings for its cohort of students, the ‘international’ students enrolled through the Malaysian partner institution were by design and by contract to be treated in exactly the same way and in the same forums as the ‘domestic’ students. When probed on this decision, LA outlined a number of rationales to support this decision. Firstly, he expressed some scepticism about cultural learning style theory as warranting adaptation, or as a sound basis for informing pedagogic practice in internationalised programs given the Western branding of the qualification:
R: … the international student cohorts, are you predicting any difference in the way they’ll engage with the course? LA: Well, um, I’ve actually just read a paper about style differences between the East and West I’ve just finished a major paper on learning styles for myself um, and I’ve warned against stereotyping certainly on the basis of some sort of group affiliation, but I think there are certain differences in how people approach requirement for online discussion and the willingness to share about their experience and ah well, both reflect on their experience and contribute discussion to other people about what they think of the other person’s experience and just swapping ideas and so on. No doubt there are cultural differences there but I don’t know what they are, and so rather than
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classify one cohort, say the Chinese, as likely to be as willing to reveal or make comment as a typical Western student, but whether that means we shouldn’t encourage them to do that because ah, you know, the stats say that’s their cultural, ah , you know, preference versus encouraging in what is known to be a Western degree …
Secondly, in his opinion, the academic knowledge provided through this course was international in its scope, and not a highly localised version that needed adaptation in recognition of a new student group:
R: … Now going back to how you select from a large literature for the course, enrolling international students, has that affected the way you consider what you might and might not select? LA; Um, no, because I’ve always had the view that an MBA should be an international course. I refuse to set Australian texts, I feel they’re inappropriate. Um, and so, what typically then happens, you have an American text which is written for an international audience which the particular one I use is. And ah, it’s not just an American text with the label ‘international edition’ on it which some of them are. This one has made an attempt over … you know, it’s now in the tenth edition, it’s made an effort over the years to get ah broader in its examples. Typically, of course, the research, the formal research, is mainly almost exclusively Western based, um, but it’s not just American. Australia doesn’t get too many mentions, but I just figure that’s entirely appropriate. You know, it’s not a dominant research thing.
Thirdly, he felt that the non-Western student is in effect desiring and buying the unadulterated Western experience:
LA: … and I’m certainly conscious of not being, you know, imperialist in thinking here but the marketability of an MBA in Chinese, and they tell us that, is that they want a Western degree. I think in twenty years, China will be exporting MBAs in perhaps other frameworks, but at the moment, in a sense, I think we’ve got an obligation to ah reveal, to Eastern cultures for 186
whom their style of interacting, for example say questioning the lecturer, challenging ideas, taking the risk of losing face by expressing an idea um and have it incorrect, ah , they’re things that I think are cultural differences but, um, so, ah, that’s why for the Chinese cohort I’m not requiring that they participate in the online discussion. That will be handled from China in small groups in a way that’s ah going to be up to them to determine. But ah, any other international students in the main environment will be required to participate …
While prepared to customise the pedagogy for the Chinese students under their contractual arrangements, these rationales in effect produced a pedagogical design of ‘cultural saming’, that is, of offering non-differentiated experiences and expectations, for the cohort recently enrolled through the Malaysian partner institute.
In contrast, DA was keen to see some reflection of local contexts for the ‘international’ cohorts in the selection of curriculum materials. In other words, she envisioned a more de-centred, marketised pedagogic identity for students and lecturers, tailored to and contingent upon niche market specificities. To this end, the faculty had employed ‘a Chinese lady here, who acts as an interpreter and research for us’ (IntDA1), whose role it is to seek out appropriate Chinese case studies. DA hoped to extend this bilingual staff member’s role:
I’d like to see her perhaps do the same for Malaysian case studies, so people have got relevant case studies to look at, … I think we need to you know, have as much information as we can that is relevant to their area, their context, and that takes a bit of research on our part… that’s the sort of thing I’d like to encourage them to do. (IntDA1)
DA reported that few course coordinators in her faculty had taken up this offer, due to work pressures. In this design vision, DA constructed a different logic of ‘cultural differencing’ to achieve context-specificity in internationalised education, in contrast to LA’s ‘saming’ premises being firstly, that business was a
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transcendent, international field of knowledge, and secondly, of the MBA being desirable and valuable for its Western cultural capital .
However, an additional important aspect of the design of the small group discussion was the conscious intent of the lecturer to purposefully mix the Malaysia and ‘domestic’ students, in order to facilitate a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and issues, and to provoke some encounter with presumed cultural difference. Following Bernstein’s notion of the middle class’s ‘hidden subsidy’ (Bernstein, 1971, pp. 57-58) of the school curriculum, I will term this aspect of design ‘student subsidy’ of the curriculum, in that the lecturer has designed such interchange to vicariously provide or enrich aspects of the curriculum:
I do my best to actually construct cohorts, sub-cohorts, groups , for discussion that reflect some diversity across the obvious ones of gender, country of origin and so on, because I think there is learning value for people in being exposed to different ideas (IntLA1)
I was particularly interested in um how using the small groups, in particular having them culturally diverse, that might stimulate some discussion of exactly that. (IntLA2)
‘Student subsidy’ will hence be used to refer to this conscious aspect of the design whereby knowledge(s) brought by the students is/are to be made available to others and thus ‘subsidise’ the curriculum with additional resources that are perceived to add value.
Another significant feature of LA’s design of the small group discussion was his version of the business discipline’s pedagogical tradition of heuristic case studies. Rather than using classic case studies produced by high status academies, LA’s assessment tasks required students to produce their own case study narratives, drawing on real or hypothetical scenarios in their own particular work situations. As outlined above, these case studies were discussed in the small groups before each student submitted their case study and analysis for assessment. Thus each student’s work was intended to be enriched by the insights provided by group members, that 188
is, by mutual student subsidy. In addition, the array of case studies inevitably produced descriptions of workplaces in diverse settings and enriched the diversity aspect of the curriculum.
The assessment tasks that served to distil the instructional content and regulative purposes are presented in summary in Table 5.
Table 5: Unit A’s required assessment tasks Assessment
Task
Related to
Date Due
Online discussion (peer-
a) Modules 1, 2
a) end of Week 6
b) Modules 3,4,5
b) end of Week 11
Modules 1 & 2
Week 7
Modules 3,4,5
End of week 12
Self reflection reviewing own
Complete course
End of week 13
management behaviour across
content
No. 1 (10%)
assessed) in small groups prior to the submission of each case study task. 2 (20%)
Case Study 1 – narrative and analysis of problematic group behaviour in a workplace
3 (35%)
Case Study 2 – hypothetical case study re managing a change program in an organisation
4 (35%)
a number of dimensions
As a condition for successful completion of this unit, all personal assessment items had to be submitted through a plagiarism/cheating detection software package, as well as through the courseware, giving a heightened moral dimension to the regulative register at times. Similarly, guidelines regarding plagiarism and cheating were explicitly dealt with in the unit outline. This, and students’ ensuing frustrations with the software protocols, set the scene for later troubles produced through a hypersensitivity to charges of plagiarism.
Explicit in the course objectives was the aim of academically problematising and contesting frameworks, as well as selecting and applying relevant knowledges to
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practical situations. Thus the various sets of ideas in the instructional content were not presented as a coherent, cumulative process, with the sequence building a series of synthesising interdependencies, but rather as a heteroglossic conglomerate of competing ways of seeing/understanding from which to draw. In LA’s words, ‘I don’t have the correct answers as there are none, but I hope I can help you find your own’ (An3). This suggests that the ‘particulate’ activities or curriculum genre encapsulated in each module/Zone would be implicitly linked by the logicosemantic relation of extension (+). In terms of logogenesis, this produced an openended, expanding lexis in the instructional register, which offered multiple, competing wordings (for example, different typologies of leadership styles, competing definitions of ‘organisation’), and it was effectively left to the student to decide which of the offered wordings to pursue in their application thereof, and which to set aside. Similarly, the loose cohesion of extension (+) relations is suggested in LA’s weak framing of the sequence: ‘You are free to work through the study material in any order though most students find the scheduled order works for them. Please remember, however, that the separate modules of MOB are artificial categories which help analysis. Real managerial life, of course, involves multiple dimensions all at once’. This latter statement suggests that the final product was to be constituted in the sum of the parts, and there was no clear synthesising closure made in the instructional register at the end of the unit. The final assessment task demonstrates this regulative order clearly: the student was to select three aspects of their own managerial behaviour, and make recommendations regarding the improvement of his/her own management style with reference to theoretical frameworks selected from those offered in the course materials. Thus any synthesis across the particulate learning genre was individually tailored and selective.
5.6 Reflecting on the design From the description above, I have tried to demonstrate how the design of the course employed strategies of both cultural differencing and cultural saming in its design. It becomes evident that in terms of the regulative discourse, that is, how the learning was to be managed, LA’s design sought to treat all students similarly, without distinction or differentiation. However, also by design, he attempted to enrich the instructional discourse with the diverse cultural knowledges of the unit
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participants, and this was to be achieved by the regulative discourse’s orchestration of culturally mixed groups and peer interaction in the assessment. This design coheres with the construction of internationalised student bodies as vicarious assets reported in the literature review in Chapter 2, and echoed in the marketing discourse of the IDP’s MBA guide quoted above which constructs the Australian setting as value-added, being ‘Western but very multicultural’ (IDP, 2004). Issues of how the strategy of student subsidy played out to voice and produce knowledge of the cultural Other in the instructional discourse will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 6. Aspects of how the design of undifferentiated pedagogy nevertheless produced differencing in its conduct will be discussed in Chapter 7.
In terms of the pedagogic identities (PI) being offered through the design aspects of cultural saming and differencing, Bernstein’s typology of pedagogic orientations presented in Chapter 3, is revisited and extended here in Table 6 with exemplars drawn from this unit’s design, or hypothetical possibilities (in italics) where such orientations were not part of the design.
Table 6: Pedagogic identities invoked in the case study design Description PEDAGOGIC IDENTITY (PI) ORIENTATIONS Centred Retrospective Tight control over inputs, recaptures the past in the present
Prospective
Tight control over outputs, neoconservative reform
Decentred Therapeutic
premised on progressive theories of personal development and constructs multiple ‘presents’ through stable, integrated personal identities competitive and contingent as it responds to market values and market opportunities
Market
Hypothetical/data example Choice of bestseller US textbook, as orthodox MOB approach/canon. Assessment focussed on reproducing one endorsed or correct version of knowledge from curriculum Final assessment item in case study: reflecting and evaluating own managerial practices.
Group discussions in case study: students to make suggestions for each other’s work place scenarios.
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Through this redescription of the design, it can be argued that in some aspects of his design LA was not interested in producing graduates in a particular, centred mould, be it past or future oriented. His problematic approach to the body of knowledge, the design aspects of debate and contestation, and the assessment designed around students’ own workplace settings, encouraged students to pursue differentiated paths of immediate (that is, present tense) vocational relevance, and potentially take quite different understandings from the unit. However, his selection of similar curricular material regardless of the Chinese, Malaysia or domestic enrolments, and of the best-seller US textbook in its ‘nth’ edition, offered a universalised language for modern business management across the globe in the twenty-first century. Such dominant publications emerge as a default orthodoxy in their fields, annointing the selected content and silencing other pertinent literatures. The fact that the unit materials had been initially sourced from another university also suggests a converging, standardising or emerging canon in curricula across this intellectual field. In this aspect of his design, LA is offering a more centred pedagogic identity position. Finally, the design of the final introspective assessment task suggests an individualised ‘therapeutic’ orientation, as the curricular knowledge is turned inwards and applied to each student’s self.
As discussed in Chapter 4, pedagogic identity orientations projected by various aspects of curricular design can be contradictory and competing. This appears to have been the case here, which is not a problem in itself, but of interest in terms of how the different PI orientations may have invoked differently cultured identities. In this regard, the ‘cultural differencing’ design of student subsidy to resource the instructional discourse with insights into culturally diverse settings, by inviting students to take up locally embedded, cultured identities, potentially fractured the shared, non-differentiated student identity invoked by the ‘cultural saming’ design of undifferentiated pedagogy. How these potentials in the design played out, and how these carefully designed ‘zones’ became populated ‘places’ (Burbules & Callister, 2000b) occupied and shaped by their usage will be analysed in the conduct of the unit.
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5.7 Conducting the interaction In Table 7, the 2152 postings in the course website over the life of Unit A are broken down by their virtual location and by the calendar week to give a rudimentary overview or map of the interaction. The shaded areas highlight where particular zones are relatively active, so the chronological progress of the unit across its sequence of modules and assessment tasks is evident. Activity peaks in Weeks 4-6 and Weeks 9-11 were due to participation in the assessable peermoderated small group discussions. Student participation elsewhere was optional.
2
5
15
20
9
20
2
3
2
6
20
3
9
7
10
14
71
4
2
8
6
12
25
1
24
145
223
5
3
3
1
2
6
6
4
1
7
2
2
8
TOTALS
2
ASSESSMENT: Second Groups
61
ASSESSMENT: First groups
23
Zone H Module 4-6
1
Zone G Module 3
1
Zone F Ask LA
9
Zone E Feedback
83
Zone D Module 2
Zone B - Module 1
2
Zone C-General Issues & Hints
Zone A Introductions
pre
WEEK
Announcements
Table 7: Distribution of e-turns by week and zone
94 87 71
13
3
268
299
4
51
14
205
279
7
16
23
50
2
7
21
17
47
9
3
4
37
4
10
3
1
1
48
11
2
1
1
21
4
12
2
16
6
24
13
1
8
8
17
34
14
2
2
10
11
4
29
15
2
3
2
16
1
17
1
3
18
1
2
TOTALS
41
244
292
364
417
88
117
7 1
141
117
62
60
30
3
7 3
281
61
31
632
696
2152
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The description following will outline how the interaction in the whole class zones of the course (Zones A to H) unfolded across the activities to build a macrogenre structure. By plotting what was topical in the field of the instructional and regulative registers across the sequences of texts, and explicating the relationship built between the activities, the reconstruction can capture where the regulative register flares with student complaint and protest. The description will also flag where, when and how matters of cultural identity or difference arose in the interaction. This summary reconstruction was enabled by a number of detailed readings and a more detailed reconstructive description including many verbatim data bites from e-turns that were prepared as one encompassing analytical pass through the data set. This detailed narrative of the course’s conduct is included as Appendix F. Verbatim quotes from course material have been avoided to protect the identity of the case study institution, staff and students.
The macrogenre structure of the complete unit aimed to introduce students to the variety of interlinked topics that constituted the instructional discourse represented under the umbrella term of ‘Organisational Behaviour’. Through a range of learning experiences students were lead through an exploration of selected topics within this field, and within each of these, various conceptual frameworks, in order to build their competence and knowledge resources in regard to the management of their own and other’s organisational behaviour. The following reconstruction offers one reading of how the unit unfolded, describing each Zone in terms of what was topical and what was typical. From this can be seen whether the instructional register or regulative register were foregrounded and where the regulative register flared in response to some disruption to the unit’s design.
LA’s monologic announcements dealt almost exclusively with regulative matters such as: matters of assessment; scheduled milestones approaching; expectations, rules of engagement, and good practice in online learning such as the ethic of peer interaction; newly accessible resources; technical issues; administrative procedures; and general encouragement to participate. Thus the instructional register was effectively sublimated across this monologic zone which was designed to direct the ‘how’, rather than resource the ‘what’.
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As the unit unfolded, the topics of the announcements increasingly reflected LA’s management of a number of regulative flares or troubles that warranted corrective or ameliorative action – that is, where the conduct of the unit departed from its design. The announcements, being posted in the non-optional monologic zone, effectively attempted to produce an authoritative resolution, a formulation and closure of each topic. Thus they provided a valuable window into, and summary version of, the conduct and regulative contour of the unit. The regulative flares thus marked included matters of non-Anglo names and their treatment in the default settings of the courseware; administrative delays for the Malaysia students that made their participation in the first small group discussions problematic; various technological hitches, in particular regarding the submission of assignments using the anti-plagiarism software; efforts to reinforce communicative protocols being undermined, such as using the shared zones rather than private email for queries; and assessment concerns. Assessment issues eventually came to dominate much of the online interaction and this is reflected in the many announcements by LA devoted to assessment: clarifying tasks; explaining (and defending) marking/ moderation processes; explaining delays in grades; outlining processes for online submission; and drawing students’ attention to model assignments made available online. This last move was provoked through considerable pressure and discontent from students in Zone F, to the point that LA used an announcement to try and steer the whole unit’s interaction back to the instructional discourse, though this was only textually invoked indirectly through module numbers: ‘We have had plenty of comment and analysis of the marking and feedback process (in the ‘Ask LA’ discussion forum). I suggest we now re-focus discussion on the course material for Modules 4-6 in the new optional forum’ (An30). However, the first model assignment produced more intense interaction, scrutinising its qualities by some, and demanding models for further assignments by others. LA eventually made a model assignment available for the second such task, but his announcement regarding its availability also pre-empted the scrutiny given to the first: ‘Please treat it only as a guide and not as a model to be followed exactly ’ (An33). The strategies thus displayed by lecturer and students alike bear testimony to the coconstruction underway, and the considerable power of students’ involvement in deciding how the pedagogical zones were occupied and deployed.
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As the sequences of troubles accumulated, the instructional register re-emerged as a tool and register for LA’s reflection on the management of organisation behaviour within the regulative project of the unit itself. The following announcement (An23) is the most marked such case (instructional register is underlined):
Hi all, this course is all about behaviour in organisation and through our respective roles as students and lecturer, you and I are engaged in behaviour in an organisation the University A. It is interesting in this context to reflect on the behaviour exhibited in the discussion boards about [anti-plagiarism software]. Many students have experienced frustrations because of technical difficulties submitting their assignment via [software]. I have been impressed by the spirit of mutual support some of you have shown in helping other students. I have been less than impressed with the tone of some communications about the problems being experienced. We can all learn about improving our managerial competence by reflecting on how best to express our feelings and deal with problems we encounter in organisations. …
This announcement used the instructional discourse of ‘MOB’ reflexively to explicate the mounting troubles, and then to model a ‘MOB’ response. This reflexive intertwining of the instructional and the regulative happened only occasionally.
In regard to how matters of cultural difference arose, the announcements document a number of such moments in the conduct of the unit. In Week 4, LA used the announcement function to explain the delay in enrolment procedures for the Malaysia cohort, which had in turn caused delays in their participation in the first small group discussions. He asked for the ‘domestic’ students’ ‘support and assistance’. In this week, he also offered guidance in how to address people with Chinese names (An11). This announcement sought to promote positive and respectful relations within the internationalised student group and could be interpreted as a culminating regulative flare responding to a variety of troubles happening elsewhere in the interactions. Firstly there had been complaints from some Malaysia students about how the various technological default settings 196
mismanaged tripartite Chinese names. Secondly concerns and stress had been expressed by some Malaysia students over delays in their enrolment and online access, which was impacting on their ability to contribute to the assessable small group discussions. Thirdly, there had been a complaint from a ‘domestic’ student about the lack of participation in the assessable small group discussions, naming/blaming in particular students with non-Anglo names, ostensibly being ‘international’ students.
In Week 5, LA pragmatically announced a distinction between the ‘domestic’ and Malaysia cohorts in regard to the first small group discussion, granting a one week extension for the Malaysia students, in recognition of the administrative delays, and ‘pro-rating’ this discussion according to their performance in the second group discussions. Thus, despite his design of cultural sameness in the pedagogy, the delimited mutually exclusive categories of ‘Malaysian’ and ‘domestic’ students were now systematically produced, distinguished by different assessment regimes and schedules.
The administrative delays experienced for the Malaysia students, not just in initial enrolment procedures, but also when it came to receiving grades for their assessment tasks, were attributed to the time taken to physically courier enrolment forms and marked assignments for moderation between the Malaysian and Australian institutions. Thus the instantaneous, ‘timeless time’ of internet communication had to accommodate the ‘real’ time/space to allow artefacts to travel distances across the globe’s surface. This consistently meant a delay in the Malaysia students’ receipt of grades and feedback, a source of differencing about which some of them protested online. Similarly, timeless time and real time were at odds in Week 8, when LA was physically located in China, delivering the unit there in face-to-face mode. Prior to his departure, he had ‘pre-loaded’ his regular announcements, to appear later in his absence. The ‘wrinkle in time’ produced between this announcement’s preparation and its release a week later meant that its breezy tone (composed with reference to design) could not engage with the emotions that had built in the interim (that is in reference to the unit’s unfolding conduct), in particular, the widespread frustration with the assessment submission process. 197
As argued above, the set of monologic announcements offer a succinct and chronological indication of major regulative flares and their management evident in the conduct of the unit as it unfolded. The summary of Zones following will similarly flag the relationship between regulative and instructional registers in each zone, and give more detailed accounts of events referred to in the annoucements. The text of e-turns has been reproduced as it appeared, except for the underlining, which indicates lexical choices in the instructional register where relevant.
Zone A was devoted to self-introductions, modelled firstly by LA to include some personal and professional background. By his overt instruction in the technological aspects of producing postings, there was also a regulative purpose in checking functionality and competence in the online mode. Given the MBA program’s prerequisite of employment in a managerial position, the instructional register regarding management duties and organisational roles proliferated in the professional self-portraits, for example: ‘I am currently working as an independent training consultant delivering competency based training in the retail sector and service industry in areas such as frontline management, service management, and business administration’ (A12). This topic continued to the point that some late arrivals expressed how ‘daunting’ the display of expertise/experience was. Location as a topic was also prominent, in terms of where students were living, and where they had lived/worked, or hoped to in the future.
In the week before the unit had officially commenced, LA made a posting in this Zone announcing the participation of the Malaysia students (A22), which met with a positive response from a domestic student, welcoming ‘such a diverse group lining up for this course’ (A23). However, due to the administrative delays, it was not until Week 2 that the first Malaysia student posted a self-introduction, titled ‘Greeting from Malaysia’ (A106). This posting offered the first explicit expression of a culturally inscribed identity, and a briefing in how to approach three part Chinese names: ‘My name is [ABC] and I am a Malaysian Chinese living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Most of my friends call me [C] (It’s my surname/family name and it’s common in Malaysia to call a Chinese by surnames.)’ This selfintroduction is significant in a number of ways. Firstly, by offering a cultural 198
identity label, the student has highlighted how transparent the ‘default’ Western cultural identity of the ‘domestic’ students had been allowed to be thus far in the regulative register, with location often acting as its proxy expression. Secondly, when this student offered a lesson in cultural difference, he immediately relativised (Robertson, 1992) both himself as ‘Other’ and the default Westerner. Though his career history in banking, IT and accounting read very similarly to other students’ careers, he has chosen to immediately foreground the cultural difference that is encoded in his name and the social practices surrounding it.
This and subsequent e-turns produced a sub-thread with conflicting advice on the social practices around Chinese tripartite names. This was further complicated when one late self-introduction highlighted the mistreatment of Chinese names by the software metadata fields: ‘My name is [KLM], but in the [University A] discussions pages I have been listed with all sorts of names. Initially it was [KM]. After I requested for a correction, it became [KK]. In the [log on] page, I am greeting as [L]!’ (A136). This series constituted a regulative flare that departed from the established pattern of exchange to address the uncertainties and possible cultural offence produced, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
In response to the string of self-introductions from Malaysia students, LA, who had been relatively invisible for a while in this Zone, made a significant posting (A111) that formally welcomed the Malaysian students, and celebrated their participation as a first for University A, that ‘marks our “coming of age” as an international online provider.’ He highlighted the potential for, and expectation of, student subsidy of the curriculum: ‘It will be wonderful for students in this course to gain from interacting with managers operating in different countries and different cultures.’ Finally, he invited the Malaysian students to comment on ‘how the course appears from a Malaysian perspective.’ LA’s response to the string of Malaysia selfintroductions was marked by greeting them as a category not as individuals, by its overstated celebratory and respectful tenor (‘it will be wonderful…’), and by its reference to the Malaysia students as ‘managers’ while the domestic students presumably constituted the ‘students’.
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Zone B was initially designed as a zone for interactions around the first two modules of study, but due to the initial volume of activity, was re-designed to cater for just the first module of study. This dealt with definitions of ‘organisation’, a contrast between work in general and managerial work in particular, and then some foundational/classic theories of management. As a general summary of the instructional register developed through the relevant readings, Module 1 attempted to establish shared understandings of the key terms, ‘organisation’ and ‘management’, that were more informed, nuanced, complex and uncommonsensical than the understandings students brought with them. Through a historical recount of various paradigms in management, the emergence of the human relations paradigm and its derivatives was plotted, with its focus on social and psychological behaviours. This paradigm was elaborated in subsequent modules.
The regulative register developed in Zone B aimed ‘to get you thinking and sharing views’ (B1) about a proffered definition of ‘organisation’. The first response (posted 18 minutes later) took this definition to task in terms of whether it adequately catered for broader ‘Japanese and Asian’ conceptions (B2) referenced from a previous MBA subject. Other students joined in, initiating new aspects to consider in the definition, responding to each other’s postings and evaluating each other’s responses. Some students expressed uncertainty and needed reassurance about the regulative task and nature of the interaction: ‘This is new to me and seems to be the place to share what we think regarding certain issues irrespective of how strange it might seem to others???? Am I correct?’ LA’s contribution beyond the initial topic launch was usually a form of coaching in the regulative discourse, linked reflexively to the instructional: ‘You are demonstrating what I consider the key requirement of MBA level work, namely, critical thinking. This is what gets high marks in assessment as it is of most value in the managerial world’ (B9). Beyond such feedback from LA and the occasional instructional probe, the students managed and produced the instructional register themselves, policing what was permissible and relevant. Students also managed minor topical diversions to share problems and solutions regarding technological functions.
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Students’ postings typically raised cases that challenged the boundaries of the definition. In Week 2, a student whose Zone A self-introduction described herself as ‘originally from PNG’ (A96), made another posting that outlined the ‘wantok system’ of common goals and practices, and asked whether this constituted an organisation, despite its lack of formal coordination (B58). This was the first of many such ‘student subsidy’ postings by this particular student in the weeks that followed that problematised the claims and concepts presented in the instructional material by considering how they may or may not apply to Papua New Guinea settings she was familiar with. LA used this posting to claim knowledge of the wantok system and a parallel Chinese concept of the ‘guanxi’ system, and then to rule out their eligibility to be included under the definition of ‘organisation’ (B59). Thus the core object of study in the instructional register was produced as a culturally neutral construct.
LA attempted to wrap up the discussion with a posting titled ‘WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?’ (B74), in which he summarised both the instructional register, and the regulative. Firstly, he reasserted the need for inside/outside boundaries as stated in the original definition of organisations. This amounts to a logogenetic effort to fix the meaning for the key term ‘organisation’, and close off the proliferating alternatives suggested by students. Then, he reflected on ‘what this discussion can teach us about the study of MOB’, that is, the regulative outcome of the curriculum genre, being the unpacking of implicit theory in definitions, and critical analysis. LA relates these skills to both future assignments and managerial work. Rather than closing the topic, students continued to explore exceptions and points raised in LA’s latest e-turn. LA then started a new topic regarding the actual duties of managers, inviting students to respond in terms of a framework supplied in the set readings, ‘or simply come up with your own categories of behaviour’ (B80). This sub-thread ‘kick off’ was ignored for 5 days, until one student responded amidst a stream of activity on the initial topic. LA responded, encouraging this student to meld her thoughts with the suggested framework; ‘… if you are thinking analytically (which is what we are all aiming for) you will be able to identify the similarities and differences’ (B108). This same student in time responded with a more elaborated response. No other students picked up this second topic in Module 1.
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By Week 3, Zone B, being active and familiar, had been appropriated by students for the pressing regulative purpose of posting their case study narratives for the first assessable discussion, when they could not locate their designated small group zone. Another student used it to vent her frustration with the mechanisms for posting (B101): ‘I JUST WROTE ALL THAT FOR NOTHING!! IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY I CAN SEND THIS STUPID THING?’ LA intercepted with detailed advice (B103) on where to find and post to the small group ‘discussion’ zones. This was the final posting in Zone B. These flares of regulative trouble in a zone initially designed to foreground the instructional register were the start of crumbling boundaries between the carefully designed and designated zones.
Zone C, opened in Week 1 under the title of ‘General Issues & Hints’, was designed to filter regulative register troubles/distractions from other Zones where the instructional register was to be foregrounded. The distractions reported were typically matters of technological functionality that got in the way of accomplishing the ‘how’ of the course’s design, and instruction on navigating and employing the various tools offered in the courseware. Thus this problem-solving Zone was completely regulative register, with no mention of the unit’s instructional content beyond names of assignments and the unit. Rather, it is heavily worded with computing lexis, and a mounting chain of emotional terms (‘panicking’, ‘sorry’, ‘grief’, ‘stress’, ‘your own inadequacies’, ‘frustrating’) as students encountered confusion and difficulties with the assignment submission protocols. Interaction was driven by: LA informing students of problems occurring, and problems solved; technical staff advising on how best to go about posting; students reporting difficulties and adding their voice to other’s complaints; students offering solutions, and thanking others for assistance. One Malaysia student resorted to using this zone to post his first case study for assessable discussion as an attachment, because he had not been allocated to a small group. As a culmination in Week 6 of a sub-thread dealing with how to submit assignments electronically, a ‘domestic’ student vented his frustration with the anti-plagiarism software in a strongly worded complaint on behalf of the student group, invoking their work role status to add weight to their customer power:
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The stress and time pressures we all have to deal with are multiplied by dealing with sub-standard IT. [Software] has given me and many others inconsistent results and I think a statement that we MUST use [Software] is not fair on a group of professionals who deserve better. Add the 4 hours I spent to everyone elses time and I think some questions need to be asked with the Uni. on whether [Software] adds to or detracts from the credibility of the MBA course. (C40)
This posting drew nonplussed apologies from technical staff, and suggestions from students that they be surveyed to ascertain the problems encountered – another case of the instructional discourse of management practices being reflexively used on the regulative.
Zone D opened in Week 2, designed as a zone for students to explore Module 2’s content. This module was devoted to topics of work ‘groups’ and ‘teams’, the distinction between those two concepts, and to understanding aspects of leadership. The instructional register’s lexis developed in the readings for this module included such terms as ‘roles’, ‘norms’, ‘socialisation’, ‘groupthink’, ‘conformity’, ‘teambuilding’, ‘faultlines’, ‘influence’. Significantly, the first to post in this zone and to initiate a topic was a Malaysia student who posed two questions: whether leaders are born or made; and whether leadership is an art or a science. This foregrounding of the instructional discourse, in the absence of any explicit regulative directions from LA, that is, how to go about the interaction and to what purpose, relied on the sublimated but powerful regulative order encouraging peer interaction established in Zone B and elsewhere. Other students responded largely on the basis of personal anecdote and opinion, one quoting the Bible, but there was no explicit sampling of, or reference to, the instructional materials of the unit. LA entered the Zone, and reformulated the topic, inviting students ‘to share short anecdotes about the best and worst leadership you have experienced as a follower’ (D10). The sub-thread that ensued again drew on anecdote and narratives of personal experience, with no reference to the module materials. LA intervened only to encourage more participation. Again, it was a student that eventually took the initiative to shift the topic/instructional register to a close examination of the text book’s definitions of ‘group’ and ‘organisation’ (D27). Before this attracted any 203
responses, LA reformulated the question to distinguish between ‘group’ and ‘team’ as concepts. A student’s response introduced the term ‘synergy’ which LA picked up and foregrounded, inviting more elaboration of this concept. This sub-thread was woven back into the topic of the instructional register’s distinction between ‘team’ and ‘group’. One student suggested that the textbook’s treatment of group/team distinction did not take into account or exemplify ‘collectivist societies such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia’ (D41). There was no formal attempt at closure of this Zone, as in Zone B, but as largely student-driven interaction, it managed to fulfil/maintain its design of foregrounding instructional register through peer interaction more so than Zone B with its regulative troubles. LA’s presence though muted was still instrumental in steering the topics initiated by students.
Zone E, opened during Week 1, invited ‘feedback regarding the course and the way it operates’, that is, student input and critique of the unit’s design while in process with the added promise that ‘If I can accommodate your request, I will do so in order to better assist your learning.’ The feedback solicited and received reflected on both instructional and regulative matters in the unit’s design. The first activity in Zone E arose from a posting LA made during Week 2 in Zone A, welcoming the Malaysia students and inviting them to comment on ‘how the course appears from a Malaysian perspective’ (A111). Thirty-nine minutes later as logged by the university server, a Malaysia student made a posting titled ‘Management styles in Malaysia – the best of both world’ (E1) in Zone E. In this posting, the student contrasts Western and Asian management styles, then explains how in Malaysia, ‘there is a blend of both approaches’. He then observes the Western bias of management literature and expresses the hope that ‘[Unit A] from [Uni A] will offer a mix of both views so as to present a more holistic approach to management.’ This posting and LA’s response (E2) to it in instructional terms of challenging the construction of a cultural binary, and in regulative terms of ‘an opportunity to share our different perspectives’ will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. In Week 3, there was a sub-thread of postings by students and LA around the topic of nonparticipation of some students in the small group discussions and its impact on the active students’ potential grades, and more generally clarifying the rules of engagement regarding who can participate in which groups. In Week 4, a student
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posted positive feedback (E10) following her first experience of such group discussion, thanking LA ‘for designing the course with this in mind’.
In Week 14 Zone E was redesigned to allow anonymous postings by students of their course evaluations, using a questionnaire devised by LA. Thus students’ final evaluations posted anonymously here could be read by all participants. LA also invited questionnaires via mail or email, so the 12 questionnaires ultimately visible in this Zone were not necessarily the total of such activity. The anonymous setting suppressed the production of author names in the e-turns’ metadata tagging. However, students still had the option of identifying themselves in their text or resetting the metadata, which 3 students chose to do when submitting their completed questionnaire. In summary, activity in this Zone was sporadic, with much student comment on ‘the way [the unit] operates’ happening elsewhere, in particular, in Zones C and F. Thus LA’s design to contain feedback within this Zone did not eventuate. However, towards the end of the unit, the structured questionnaire refocussed and reasserted this design and this Zone hosted the final activity in the unit.
Zone F, entitled ‘Ask LA’, was the busiest zone apart from the assessable small group discussions, with 281 postings over 15 weeks which captured much of the interactive trouble and design/conduct tensions across the unit. LA scoped this Zone as a ‘forum to ask me course-related questions’, aiming to distinguish questions in need of a prompt operational (regulative register) response from the students’ more reflective comments/queries in other Zones that foregrounded the instructional register. This dialogic zone seemed similar in purpose to Zone E (inviting ‘feedback’) and Zone C (for ‘general issues’, interpreted as technological problems) in being zones for students to raise topics. However Zone F quickly distinguished itself in its immediate use by students to query or check assessment protocols. For example, a Malaysia student asked about referencing styles (F3), and a ‘domestic’ student asked whether it is necessary to participate in groups other than the one allocated (F2). These were the first of a significant series of detailed and persistent queries pertaining to the accomplishment of assessment genres, many initiated by the Malaysia students. This sub-thread and its parallel for the second individual assignment will be considered in more detail in Chapter 7. LA, true to his word, 205
was highly active giving definitive answers to each question in turn (in contrast to his avoidance of definitive answers in the Zones foregrounding the instructional register), while other students often offered advice as well. Given the focus on assessment issues, the dialogue topics chronologically reflected the assessment schedule, dealing typically with what was happening in regard to assessment at the time. This was brought into relief in Week 8 when a Malaysia student (F113, F114, F126) asked for clarification of the second individual assignment, to which LA responded: ‘I appreciate that you want to start soon. However, I’d prefer to follow the logical path of getting the new discussion groups up and running on Monday and then clarifying the assignment task later next week …’ (F127). Students continued to apply similar pressure for input, clarifications and models before each assignment as discussed further in Chapter 7.
The instructional register rarely surfaced in Zone F, and then only as peripheral (for example, demonstrating referencing conventions with a quote from the textbook in F8), or misplaced, (for example, in assessment items lodged here by a Malaysia student using his onsite tutor’s log on details as a last resort, given the delay in gaining his own access). It also arose in occasional requests for clarification of assignment tasks. In one such posting, a student attempted to clarify the (logicosemantic) relations between the instructional discourses of the various modules: ‘Some of us in Group X are having difficulty in narrowing down the dimensions to just two as we have come to the conclusion that most of the OB dimensions are intrinsically linked. Guess we’re just big picture people. For example group/team dynamics has implications for organisational culture, and through organisational culture leadership, reward and recognition, and organisational change.’ He sought guidance on how to narrow the focus to the two dimensions stipulated in the assignment task. Late in the course, a Malaysia student asked for clarification of the distinction between the instructional register concepts of ‘corporate culture’ and ‘organisational culture’ (F232). LA responded with some explanation, then ‘challenge(d)’ the student to take this issue to ‘the relevant discussion forum’ (F238) – thus redirecting this foray into the instructional register to a more appropriate zone.
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In Zone F, Malaysia students reported: administrative delays requesting consideration of such in their assessment (F16); problems with access to various online zones; and the associated mounting stress evident in the lexical chains dealing with emotions (‘relieved’, ‘anxiety’, ‘confused’, ‘worrying’ ‘unfortunate’). Both domestic and Malaysia students asked detailed questions about word counts in assignments, referencing conventions and how to go about the peer evaluation of small group discussion. This Zone was also used to request extensions, one ‘domestic’ student requesting a few days extension over a weekend on behalf of all students (F42). Technological issues were also repeatedly raised, leaking as such from their dedicated zone in Zone C, despite LA’s attempt to exclude such topics in his initial descriptor (‘NOTE: Technical problems as distinct from course-related questions should be directed to [Helpdesk]’). Other ‘domestic’ and Malaysia students often contributed solutions, and LA made suggestions to divert such queries to the helpdesk (F61). The confusion surrounding how to submit the first assignment through both the courseware and the anti-plagiarism software also arose as a topic in this Zone (F55 etc). One emerging characteristic of the sequence of postings in this Zone is the pattern of students ‘adding their voice’ to complaints/troubles reported by other students, for example, ‘I feel much better that other students are failing to be able to submit to [anti-plagiarism software]. I am experiencing the same problems as (X) and (Y)’ (F82). Such postings seemed to serve to amplify or dignify an issue, making it more prominent and more urgent.
By Week 6, e-turns reporting trouble or disruption had become the dominant topic of interaction in this Zone. This pooling of troubles, frustrations and worries built to a cumulative head in Week 7 around the submission of the first assignment. A ‘domestic’ student posted a strongly worded critique of the course’s assessment load and submission process, drawing on the student group’s ‘professional’ status, claiming ‘the education system is a totla (sic) stuff up … [software] is stupid. Why can’t we just post our assignments?...’ (F88). LA, at this stage located in China, responded with an explanation why the anti-plagiarism software was considered necessary ‘to maintain the integrity of on online MBA…’ so students would not ‘plagiarise from the Internet and other sources …’ (F89) and suggested her comments regarding the course could be pursued as feedback in Zone E.
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A similar pattern of troubles, queries and complaints ensued surrounding the second cycle of case study, group discussion and individual assignment, in regard to referencing, group allocations, submission via the anti-plagiarism software, task clarification, unstable functionality, and accessing zones. In addition, students were eager to receive their grades and feedback from the previous assignment but reported difficulties with the courseware tool for grades. Their pressure and queries mounted to expressions of a shared grievance regarding the delay, prompting explanations and apologies from LA (F149). Once the grades were uploaded and accessible, the topic shifted to challenging the computation of a class average within the courseware tool. LA (F157) dismissed the reported average, ‘I don’t know how the system came up with this figure so ignore it’, then went on to explain ‘by the way, we marked to the stated assessment criteria not to a distribution – 90% of the class passed the assignment, many with Credit or Distinction but only one with a High Distinction’. From this information flowed yet another stream of queries as to how the marks were converted to grades (F162) to which LA responded with the breakdown given on the feedback sheet with each assignment. Added to this were a cumulative series of complaints (F169, F175, F176, F178) from a number of local students that the mostly positive feedback they received did not help them improve in the next assessment task. The last such e-turn invoked the students’ power as paying customers: ‘I think it is important to remember that we are all completing this course to ‘learn’ – if we already knew what we were doing – we would not be paying our fees to the university for learning and “support”?...’ (F178). This receives a detailed response from LA (F179) in which he reproduces the descriptions for gradings against each criterion with which he supplied his markers. From this stemmed further scrutiny and challenge by students, ‘it was unclear how many (scholarly references) would be appropriate and in what exact areas etc.’ (F180). Another student ventured to support LA at the risk of offending the protesting students: ‘Please ladies, don’t bite my head off ...’ (F182). This e-turn received an assertive response from one of its addressees, amongst other postings calling for access to good models, in particular the one ‘HD (high distinction)’ assignment, to help elucidate LA’s criteria (F184, F186). One ‘domestic’ student who received a ‘Distinction’ made his assignment available as an attachment, for which he was thanked by other ‘domestic’ and Malaysia students. Shortly after this, the ‘HD’ student also made hers available with a copy of the feedback, and another 208
‘D’ student made his available. These three model assignments were greeted with a celebratory posting (F198) by one of the students who initiated the whole subthread re constructive feedback, thanking all contributors. This is followed by a playful posting (F199) by a Malaysia student using the instructional register choices of ‘self-fulfilment’, and ‘expectancy theory’ to congratulate the ‘HD’ student. A later posting expressed thanks ‘on behalf of the silent majority’ (F221).
Meanwhile, a Malaysia student asked ‘When will we Malaysians know of our assessments? Is a local examiner involved in the markings?’ (F158), a query which was restated by other Malaysian students over the following days (F166, F171, F225) in increasingly plaintive tones. LA responded with an apology for the delay produced as ‘Examiners have to first send the marked papers to me for moderation … I am expecting them in the next few days’ (F173). This turn of events is explored in more detail in Chapter 7.
Eventually, after further delays, they received their grades and feedback, which triggered another series of detailed queries regarding how the grades for each criterion were assembled/ weighted to produce the overall grade. ‘Domestic’ and Malaysia students engaged with this, then embarked on a de-construction of the model ‘HD’ assignment, to see whether it fulfilled the criteria, in particular in regard to word count (F230), and format (F213). LA attempted to stem this nitpicking: ‘It is very important in using another’s work as a model to make sure that you don’t try to apply it as a formula …’ (F214). Other postings from Malaysia students revealed that they were not aware that their participation in the first small group discussion had not been assessed given their delayed enrolment. LA continued to respond, solving problems where possible.
As another development from LA’s later provision of a model ‘HD’ assignment for the second assignment, a student expressed concern ‘about the case of plagiarism here in my case’ (F231). She described how her second assignment-in-progress built on similar grounds, and her fears of being charged of plagiarism, feeding perhaps on the hypersensitivity built around plagiarism in the unit’s design and rules of conduct. LA responded with detailed reassurances, closing ‘Above all, obey the rules without letting them obsess and worry you’ (F236). Another student 209
requested a model assignment for the third assignment task, suggesting that a ‘Pass’ model would be helpful as well (F238). LA promised to make an example available, ‘on the understanding that it is not a “model” but only an example’ (F242), thus attempting to avert the pattern of scrutiny which had followed the previous models. This suggestion was reiterated a number of times. Another student expressed concern about charges of plagiarism being applied to similar work. He extended this argument into a case against access to model assignments:
I do not wish to hinder anyones learning or to disadvantage anyone, but the current practice of posting example assessments leaves a disturbingly elevated level of risk when it comes to plagerism and ultimately discourages independent learning of assignment writing techniques in favour of following previously determined and explored techniques. After all the purpose of the MBA is to facilitate an expansion of our current learning rather than learning by repetition. (F254)
This desire for, and controversy surrounding, model assignments will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7 in regard to genre troubles. LA’s response (F255) allayed the student’s fears of plagiarism, and agreed with such concerns in principle. More queries were made regarding referencing ideas from non-published sources. Students continued to report problems submitting their assignments, pushed for results, and asked for a breakdown of the grades for the second assignment.
Zone G, opened in Week 5, was designed as a zone for interactions around Module 3’s content, devoted to human resource management, in particular theories of motivation (as content and as process), conflict and its productive negotiation. In the module guide, some links were made to theories presented in Module 1, thus Module 3 offered some elaboration (=) of these theories, with the added extension (+) of alternative theorisations/typologies of motivation in the workplace. Technical lexis in the potential instructional register offered in the set readings and module guide included ‘self-concept’, ‘expectancy’, ‘equity’, ‘goal setting’, ‘needs’, ‘hygiene factors’, ‘career anchors’, ‘performance appraisal’, ‘conflict perspectives’, and ‘cultural diversity’. LA made a paper on motivation available online and invited 210
students (G1) to comment in terms of their experiences ‘but make sure you also comment on which conceptual model of motivation is relevant to those experiences’. The first response from a Malaysia student offered a ‘cultured’ perspective on the topic of motivation that started a sub-thread of such accounts, which worked to enhance (x) the instructional register, by circumscribing the legitimacy of the theories, disputing their relevance/explanatory power in particular circumstances of place/time. Such subsidy of the instructional discourse with cultural insights from students’ experiences is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. Over an extended chain of postings in which LA did not participate, students stayed on task, that is, foregrounding the instructional register as per the zone’s design, moving between theories of motivation presented in the materials and their own workplace anecdotes, and initiating shifts in topic. LA re-entered this zone 3 weeks after his initial posting, to comment on the ‘constructive discussion about motivation’ (G58), then shifted the topic to the module’s second major topic – conflict. He offered an elaboration of his conceptualisation of conflict, then invited the students to contribute. Only one student did so, but the preceding chain re motivation continued for a while.
Zone H, opened in Week 11, was the last zone to be created, and was designed for interaction around the instructional content of Modules 4, 5 and 6. Module 4 was devoted to the concept of organisational culture and its manipulation (‘meaning’, ‘symbols’, ‘values’, ‘beliefs’, ‘rituals’, ‘ceremonies’, ‘subcultures’, ‘cultural change’), and power and politics in workplaces (‘power to’ versus ‘power over’, typologies of power/authority). Module 5 explored the topics of control and decision making as technical problems and as aspects of workplace relations. The instructional register offered included terms such as ‘control’, ‘resistance’, ‘consent’, ‘control devices’, types of contol, ‘commitment’. Module 6 was concerned with organisational change with a futures perspective. ‘Managing change’, ‘resistance’, ‘change strategies’, ‘scenario development’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘organisation development’ were some of the instructional register lexis made available in the readings.
As outlined in the discussion of the Announcement Zone and Zone F above, interaction within the course by this late stage had become dominated by trouble 211
over disputed assessment protocols and technical problems, to the point where LA used an announcement (An30) to redirect effort from these regulative concerns, back to the instructional register as designed to happen in this zone. The 31 postings in Zone H involved only 10 students, where 70 had participated in Zone A. LA was more visibly active in this Zone than in the other ‘module’/instructional register zones, starting the topic of ethical/unethical politics in organisations, subsequently introducing two new topics, and overtly endorsing then developing a point made by a student. This increased presence reflected his effort to re-capture some ground for the ‘core business’ of the instructional register amongst the proliferating student complaints and protests elsewhere: ‘I was trying to shut off the ah, the complaints. That’s where I had a problem with that, and I was trying to find a way of saying “let’s move on”’ (IntLA2). One student attempted to appropriate/subvert this Zone with a purposefully wordy and obscure e-turn (H12) satirising assessment criteria which rewarded ‘an obscure and obtuse answer’. His attempt to spark trouble in this zone failed as there was no response to his e-turn, rather, a pointed refusal to engage with it from LA and the other students, thus protecting the foregrounding of the instructional register.
5.8 Summarising the macrogenre trajectory From the preceding descriptions of the interplay between regulative and instructional registers across and between zones, it is possible to elicit the macrogenre structure of the unit, locate the ‘regulative flares’ of interactive trouble that necessitated explicit regulative effort in situ, and select textual events of particular relevance to the research problem regarding the production of cultural difference for closer analysis.
In terms of the instructional discourse, the modules and their instructional topics were typically related logico-semantically by relations of extension (+), such that the unit’s contents added up to a sum of the parts, and did not aim to deliver any synergetic function thereof, hierarchically related, such as an overarching theorisation of managing organisational behaviour. Rather the student was given a collection of specialised registers as resources from which to select when making informed sense of managerial practice. In Bernstein’s terms (2000, p.162), this
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collected and related the theories in a ‘horizontal knowledge structure’, being a ‘set of languages not translatable, since they make different and often opposing assumptions, with each language having its own criteria for legitimate texts, what counts as evidence and what counts as legitimate questions or a legitimate problematic.’ Such a structure is distinct from a hierarchical knowledge structure whereby general principles underpin and integrate the progressive expansion of knowledge. The regulative design typically encouraged students to exemplify concepts offered, so the various ‘on task’ zones produced and pooled elaborations (=) of the instructional discourse. The topic of managing cultural diversity was included in the collection, thus cultural difference was produced as an object of study in the instructional discourse. Through the device of student subsidy, however, various theorisations and concepts presented elsewhere in the instructional register were also enhanced (x) by postings that circumscribed and problematised universalist claims in their application to different cultural settings. These matters are analysed in greater detail in Chapter 6.
In terms of the regulative discourse, the design was informed by a number of procedural frames – generally how to perform online learning, how to perform postgraduate learning, how to perform Western university learning, and more specifically, how to acquire the skills and professional ‘gaze’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 164) of the organisational manager in the selective and critical interpretation of relevant theory. Each of these frames helped to shape the model of ideal teacher, learner and their relations, and inform how learning should proceed. However, in its conduct, it can be seen that the unit was also forcibly shaped by the frames and models of students which for them, legitimated their demands for certain services, information, and processes.
The online mode and its courseware facilitated the design of purposefully separating of instructional and regulative topics, with different zones designed to foreground one or the other. Though not always successful, LA persisted in his efforts to filter regulative issues such as assessment details and technological problems from the ‘real work’ being done in the instructional register Zones. As explained in the development of macrogenre principles above, this separation applies only to the surface linguistic instantiation of register, not to the 213
underpinnings of the regulative discourse which continued its work projecting the instructional discourse in pedagogical settings
Despite the design of ‘cultural saming’ through undifferentiated curriculum and pedagogy for the combined ‘domestic’ and Malaysia cohorts, a series of administrative delays and complications arising from their situated localities, and the space/time distance between these, systematically distinguished the two cohorts as different categories marked by staggered assessment schedules/protocols, and special considerations. Meanwhile, LA’s design of ‘cultural differencing’ by student subsidy, sought to acknowledge and garner vicarious insights regarding cultural traits for the instructional discourse. Students’ contributions to the instructional discourse in this vein will be considered in Chapter 6 in terms of who invoked what culture on whose behalf to what end.
LA’s policy of withholding his own potential input in the instructional register in the interests of peer interaction, did not apply to the zones devoted to regulative register, where LA was prominent and busy addressing the numerous problems and queries that arose. These ameliorative actions provoked by student actions throughout the conduct of the unit, have been theorised as ‘regulative flares’, in that they stimulated explicit treatment, drawing the regulative discourse to the textual surface of interactions for scrutiny and dispute. Of particular interest to the research question to be pursued in more detail in Chapter 7 are the regulative flares surrounding: •
Social practices surrounding names and their treatment in the default settings of the courseware;
•
Genre enquiries and model assignments;
•
The intrusion of local time/place in the virtual cultural relations.
In regard to the pedagogic identities projected across the trajectory of this design, the students’ conduct took up contradictory orientations at different times. Completing students ultimately complied with the various assessment tasks that oriented them firstly outwards, to their own and other’s particular work settings, and secondly inwards to their managerial self. They engaged with the convergent body
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of management literature emanating from US sources, with its prospective orientation to a universalised discourse and practice. However, their frequent resistances and complaints about various treatment showed how such positioning by the pedagogic design, and the articulations offered through such pedagogic identities rubbed uncomfortably against other aspects of their expectations and aspirations.
5.9 Accounts of the conduct As an adjunct to the analysis of the online interaction above, this section briefly outlines how actors’ stimulated recall accounts of the conduct of the unit referred to impinging considerations of cultural identities and cultural difference, with particular reference to how the design of student subsidy played out.
When interviewed after the completion of the case study unit, DA’s account of the conduct of the unit (IntDA2) stressed the unsustainable administrative load for support staff when asked to create the purposefully mixed small groups to serve the ‘student subsidy’ design; ‘… we did a lot of the choosing actually, male or female, was trying to work out you know different countries, different sexes, different ages …’ From her visit to the Malaysian partner institution during the case study unit, she also gave a differentiated account of the Malaysia cohort’s technological skills: ‘They’re not as technically advanced as our sort of normal Aussie students, and we haven’t really understood that.’ She reported learning about other aspects of the Malaysia cohort and that ‘I didn’t really understand the group’, for example, ‘they’ve actually got students from China coming from mainland China to Kuala Lumpur to study.’ Her visit had also revealed a difference in work conditions for the tutorial staff involved in the unit – those in Malaysia not being paid for their marking duties, unlike the sessional staff employed by the Australian university. In addition, she reported that staff in the Malaysian institution were ‘sort of crying out for face to face visits … “please, these students want face to face!”’, which was not possible under the contractual conditions struck in the partnership deal, ‘yet there is for the Chinese, because they give us more money’. She also had the opportunity to visit the Chinese cohort, and sit in on a videoconference link. She expressed disappointment that outside of the videoconference contact with Australian
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lecturers, both staff and students at the Chinese institution spoke Mandarin, ‘and I thought well what a pity.’ Thus her account of the conduct of the unit, and considerations for its redesign for future cohorts, was heavily inflected on one hand with a heightened sense of the cultural differences encountered, where they had not been predicted in the design. On the other hand, such concerns were necessarily subordinated to, or mediated by, the business of contractual conditions, administrative staff loads, time limits and quality control.
In LA’s account of the conduct of the unit (IntLA2), he reflected on the trouble concerning assessment protocols, and his strategies to avoid similar complaints in the future without losing what he had hoped to achieve in the original design, for example in the mixed small groups for student subsidy purposes. By his account, he did not intend to adjust future curriculum selection to reflect the Malaysia cohort’s local contexts:
… this is a philosophy of mine, trying to be culturally accommodating doesn’t mean becoming an expert in a particular culture, and then, kowtowing to that! … I don’t want to know specialist knowledge of the Malaysian situation that enables me to cater for that cohort because I think what about the diversity within the Australian, the so-called domestic cohort?
He was more immediately concerned about working with, and moderating across, different markers, which he considered ‘a problem we’ve got with those international partnerships’. He related this aspect to the more general matter of the size of the total class group, and the number of parties involved: ‘… a lot of things are now out of my control … The Malaysian thing would not be a problem if there was some, you know, if they were all directly linked with me.’ Thus in general, his account of the conduct of the unit played down any effect of cultural differences per se, and constructed the administrative layers between partner institutions as more of an issue.
He did however take the matter of mis-namings in the online environment very seriously: ‘… it just infuriates me’. He described how he had pursued the issue 216
with top management as ‘quite a political act within our system’. Again, he expressed disappointment that it was beyond his control: ‘If it had been under my control, anything I could have done, I would have spent days correcting the system that same week, because I just think that is valuable ...’ In this sense, cultural identities, differences and the associated sensibilities were considered vital attributes that impacted on LA’s conduct in this unit, and would inform future such encounters.
The seven email interviews gave some access to students’ accounts of the conduct of the unit. Though not necessarily a drawcard in itself, the international exchange of ideas was considered by all the students interviewed to be valuable, ‘adding value to learning outcomes’, giving ‘different insights’, prompting them to ‘think from a different point of view to our own culture’, and of particular relevance to current times: ‘especially within MOB where globalisation is becoming the norm’. A number of ‘domestic’ students particularly valued the interaction with Asian students, given Australia’s business aspirations: ‘I think many Australian business people,including myself, benefit from greater Australian/Asian interaction and understanding. Ultimately, the horizon of my work environment may expand through such interaction & understanding’ (A10).
The sentiment was reciprocated by both the Malaysia and Papua New Guinea student interviewed. The Malaysia student considered the interface with peers from China and Australia a benefit of the online mode that balanced its lack of face-toface teaching. The student from Papua New Guinea described a more active agenda of using the online interaction to purposefully enhance (x) the instructional discourse:
Yes, I constantly brought up cultural differences issues in all my discussions throughout the general group discussions as I felt the need to express issues from all perspectivies, that is from the Melanesian culture where I come from … and the modern Westernised cultures which I am also part of. I had to clarify on the lot of issues as I saw that a lot of people in the western society have very limited understanding of other cultures … I wanted to
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make people/my class mates understand organisational behaviours from other perspectives rather than just what they are used to. (A7)
Both students felt that the curriculum was ‘overly’ (A3) or ‘very Western-based ’ (A7). Where the Papuan student took the strategy of overtly problematising universalist claims in the curricular material, the Malaysia student understood the curricular selection to reflect more the absence of relevant Asian research at this time: ‘… I hope this situation would change in the near future. Until then, we would still be dependent on Western materials’. He intended to ‘filter and use all the good practices only… we are not being pressurised but reminded time and again not to ape the West or adopt wholesale’ (A3). He went on to describe himself as a ‘banana man’ in regard to his Western education, which ‘has got me in trouble sometimes …’ He suggested that even participating so openly in the email interview is indicative of this hybridised identity: ‘The fact that I am writing to you so much is already a product of Western influence! It will take sometime to get Asian people to open up and participate’ (A3).
Both domestic students and the Malaysia student interviewed reported a heightened awareness of international readers when composing their postings. One domestic student reported pointedly choosing not to adjust her wording, as she thought it ‘quite unfair to us, and could not see how those students (some of the Malaysia cohort) were allowed to do this course with such poor English’. This same student was similarly wary of any differential treatment that the international student may have received through their local institution. This is discussed further in Chapter 7. The Malaysia student reported choosing less culturally specific terms in his case narratives to make them more accessible to the ‘domestic’ student reader, that is, a strategy of mitigating difference in the interests of furthering the context of situation.
To summarise, these accounts gave some access to culturally inflected undercurrents at play, as the students and staff negotiated both their local settings and the online resources/ spaces/ relations, with a heightened, relativised awareness of both difference and possibilities, being the expanding ‘horizons’ (A10) opening up. 218
5.10 Conclusion The reconstructive analysis of the case study unit above has provided the first level account of the conduct of pedagogical interaction across each virtual zone afforded by the design of courseware tools, to give the reader a map of what happened, where and when in the virtual interactions’ time/space. It has also offered a summary of accounts of the unit’s conduct offered by some of the actors, highlighting how they understood cultural differences to have impinged on, or arisen from, the interaction.
The debates surrounding the ‘crisis of representation’ in ethnography (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1998; Clifford, 1988; Delamont, Coffey & Atkinson, 2000) alert us to the interpretative act and the difficulty in asserting any ‘authenticity’ in such retellings. Like any account, this chapter’s account has had to be selective in its treatment and, by following the chronology logged by the university’s server on each posting, has constructed a linear sense of events in each zone, which may produce a fiction of sorts in how this course ‘happened’ for its various participants. My processes of careful logging, detailed reading and scrutiny of each posting may in themselves be a distortion of the more haphazard and opportunistic processes such as skimming, dipping in and browsing that constituted students’ experiences of the same interaction. The teacher also may have used very different reading strategies, and taken different readings of the same texts. The textual device of recounting events according to calendar weeks also imposes arbitrary boundaries, where in actual fact, the threads flowed fluidly across these notional time boundaries. However, in contrast to more ephemeral chat rooms or face-to-face tutorials, the interactions recounted above could be fixed and did accumulate in a textual form, existing as a record of this shared event for a period of 19 weeks. This form could be searched, revisited, and sorted according to author, date, subject and threading.
This reconstruction has drawn on the textual data of the postings and dialogic data in the form of interviews with the lecturer and instructional designer involved in this unit. There were however other parties whose accounts were not collected, and who may have offered different versions of the events. In particular, the
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tutors/markers employed by the Malaysia partner institution were not accessed by the research design, their presence becoming known only as the unit unfolded. This is not to say that had all possible data sources been available, it would have been possible to build a coherent, indisputable and singular account of the definitive ‘truth’ of what happened. It is more likely that it would have produced fractured, discontinuous and competing accounts of what happened, and of what the events signified. In the spirit of ‘good enough’ methodology (Luttrell, 2000), it needs to be acknowledged that this account is partial and purposeful, but based on a substantial evidentiary basis from what was possible within the constraints of time and resources.
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CHAPTER 6: CULTURAL DIFFERENCING AS CURRICULAR ASSET In most situations, what matters politically is who deploys nationality or transnationality, authenticity or hybridity, against whom, with what relative power and ability to sustain a hegemony. … How are people fashioning networks, complex worlds, that both presupposed and exceed cultures and nations? (Clifford, 1997, p. 10)
6. 1 Introduction As described in Chapter 5, explorations of cultural difference were actively sought as a desirable asset to the curriculum, particularly in the unit’s design of small group allocations. The pedagogical design promoted and invited vicarious ‘student subsidy’ of the curriculum through the sharing of personal experiences and cultural insights to exemplify (=), enrich (+) or problematise (x) theorisations offered in the curricular material. This was made evident in the invocation of cultural categories in the field of the instructional register, and the relational differences produced in the categories’ attributes. Previous chapters have situated the interactions within this case study in the greater social context of de-anchored boundaries, heightened awareness, and escalating encounters with difference in conditions of globalisation, and within the body of social theory that recognises how discursive representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ underpin contingent, relational identity processes. In this vein, this chapter is concerned with how such knowledge of the cultural Other and the reflected Self was produced and authorised in the pedagogic discourse of the case study unit, and what kinds of boundaries such differencing was constructing where in the global ethnoscape. More simply, this chapter asks ‘who invoked what cultural categories on whose behalf to what end?’ Wodak considers such ‘discursive construction of “us” and “them” as the basic fundaments of discourses of identity and difference’ (2002, p. 73) and outlines a methodological strategy to excavate ‘discourses of sameness and difference’ using five ‘simple, but not at all randomly selected questions’ (p. 72), as follows:
1. How are persons named and referred to linguistically? 2. What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them?
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3. By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to justify and legitimise the exclusion, discrimination, suppression and exploitation of others? 4. From what perspective or point of view are these labels, attributions and arguments expressed? 5. Are the respective utterances articulated overtly? Are they intensified or are they mitigated? (Wodak, 2002, pp. 72-73)
In this chapter, Wodak’s questions will be adapted and operationalised through Bernsteinian theory and systemic functional linguistics to broadly inform this chapter’s particular enquiry as follows:
1. How are categories of persons named and referred to linguistically, by whom? 2. What traits, characteristics, qualities, and actions are attributed to the different categories? 3. Are there different schema for cultural categories competing in dialogue? 4. By means of what authority do text creators legitimise their categorisation? 5. How does the textual grammar shape or mitigate the claims re the strength of categories and their authority?
This chapter focuses on data episodes in which such cultural identities and difference emerged in the field of the instructional register (Christie, 2002). These texts are treated as knowledge propositions constructing cultural categories and their differences. Chapter 7 in turn will address how cultural difference was produced in the regulative register. The chapter is presented in seven sections. In a departure from the usual textual sequencing of research theses, this first section makes a theoretical detour to sharpen the analytical tools to deal more particularly with what the ethnography has revealed, ‘zooming in and out’ from theory to data for mutual enrichment. Following the example of Pedro (1981), this iterative process of recruiting more
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precise tools as the analysis proceeds, allows a deeper and more probing engagement with data selections. In this section Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing are revisited and interpreted through grammatical indices of SFL to describe the cultural categories produced. The concepts of voices, message (Bernstein, 2000) and modes of legitimation (Maton, 2000) are then developed to produce a typology of knowledge propositions into which selected data slices are sorted. The next four sections report the data analysis under each of these types, then additional data from interview accounts are used to elaborate on the delicate politics of cultural representation in the student subsidised curriculum. The final concluding section draws out practitioner implications from the analysis findings.
6.1.1 Boundaries, categories and their maintenance Bernstein’s classic concepts of classification, framing and insulation (1971), introduced in Chapter 3, offer a conceptual vocabulary to deal with how categories, such as those used to construct cultural difference, are produced and the boundaries between them are maintained or negotiated, particularly in pedagogic activity: ‘Classification refers to what, framing is concerned with how meanings are to be put together, the forms by which they are to be made public and the nature of the social relationships that go with it’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 12). The dimension of classification refers not to the content within knowledge categories, but rather to the nature of the relation between categories. Thus, strong classification (C+) designates strict separation of categories, with resilient boundaries resisting linkage or overlap; weak classification (C-) designates more permeable boundaries with categories capable of being integrated, overlapped and interrelated. The degree of ‘insulation’ measures the gap between categories. Framing refers to the degree to which roles within the categories of knowledge are restricted or controlled. Strong framing (F+) constitutes a strict division of labour between teachers and students or other constituent roles in the maintenance of the knowledge category. Weak framing (F-) means roles are less defined, more interchangeable and open to negotiation. Bernstein stresses that in weak framing, ‘the acquirer has more apparent control’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 13, original emphasis).
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Roles are framed by influences both external and internal to the pedagogic setting. Thus the externally strong framing of roles in this case study unit, with highly qualified staff who specialise in the area of study selected to teach students who were similarly selected carefully on the basis of their educational qualifications and work experience, could co-exist with weak framing of roles within. LA’s abrogation and avoidance of ‘guru’ status (InLA2), his facilitation of student subsidy of the instructional discourse, and the peer assessment of online group discussion, gives the ‘apparent’ impression that students share in and contribute to the instructional expertise. The interlocking concepts of classification/framing/insulation help display how categories and their boundaries require ongoing maintenance, and how any achieved insulation ‘creates not only order but also the potential of change in that order’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 26) because the relations of symbolic control that promote the ‘thinkable’ equally have to work to suppress and disallow the ‘unthinkable’.
The virtual classroom in the contractually internationalised university viewed through this theoretical lens is an interesting conundrum of competing classification and framing efforts. The market reach of the online mode weakens the external framing, allowing new students with varied, less predictable backgrounds to participate. In the case study unit, the fact that no curricular changes were instituted in recognition of the new constituency suggests that the course intentionally retained its previous strength of classification as ‘a Western degree’ albeit with universalist aspirations. However the weak internal framing, whereby students were encouraged to contribute to the instructional discourse, also aimed to capture the vicarious asset of student subsidy to deliver insights into cultural differences. The next section investigates how the students were differently positioned to offer such student subsidy through the ‘voicing’ of the pedagogy.
6.1.2 Voices and messages in pedagogy In Chapter 3, Bernstein’s distinction between voices and messages enabled by pedagogic discourse was introduced, the former being the categories of identity positions offered from which to interact, and the latter as the actual outcome of the interaction, which may or may not produce the meanings legitimated by the
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‘voicing’ of the pedagogic design. The distinction, congruent with the tension between ‘design’ and ‘conduct’ in the research problem, allows for negotiation, troubling and challenging of the initial system of categories proffered from which to participate.
In this case study, the internal framing in the group discussions was purposefully weak, with all members expected to contribute and negotiate the meanings produced. This created ample opportunity for messages to produce both legitimated and de-legitimated meanings. The device of ‘student subsidy’ offered the students a cultured ‘voice’ from which to speak knowledgably about the contexts with which they are familiar, as expressed in LA’s posting,: ‘It will be wonderful for students in this course to gain from interaction with managers operating in different countries and different cultures’ (A111). The students are thus considered legitimately resourced to produce instructional knowledge about cultural contexts on two grounds: firstly, lived experience as a member of the specific culture; or secondly, personal experience working with members of another country/culture. The first ‘insider’ voice I shall refer to as a ‘speaking as’ voice. The second raw ethnographic ‘outsider’ voice, I shall refer to as a ‘speaking of’ voice. Both voices are reliant on an implicit claim to authenticity and authority through personal lived experience.
Employing a classification and framing analysis to the ‘epistemic’ and ‘social’ relations embedded in pedagogic discourse, Maton (2000, p. 86) offers a further analytical distinction between two co-existing modes of legitimation of knowledge propositions: the knowledge mode, premised on ‘procedures specialized to a discrete object of study’; and the knower mode, premised on ‘personal characteristics of the subject or author’. The knowledge mode knows and represents the object of study through specialised procedures and expert discourse, but is potentially available to anyone willing to undergo induction into such specialised practices. In contrast, the knower mode is legitimated by reference to ‘what one is or was’, the subject being a member of the legitimised category. This latter category clearly relates to the ‘speaking as’ voice outlined above, but I would argue also applies to the ‘speaking of’ position, as the legitimacy resides within the knower through their accrued experiences and thus superior insights.
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Maton’s knowledge mode can be exemplified in the treatment of cultural difference as a topic in the case study unit’s textbook. The book devotes three and a half pages to outlining Hofstede’s framework for typifying the work values of different cultures, which are mapped unproblematically onto nations. This framework is premised on the specialised procedures of large sample surveys and offers a conceptual vocabulary of five dimensions on which cultures typically differ. The textbook also outlines a follow up study, the GLOBE (the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness) research program, which reproduced and built on Hofstede’s framework, again legitimised through the specialised procedure of large sample survey techniques. As Maton (2000, p. 86) points out, the two modes of legitimation are not opposed, but ‘are always and everywhere co-existing and articulating within languages of legitimation’. Thus the fact that the curricular materials offer ‘knowledge mode’ accounts, while the pedagogic design invites supplementary ‘knower mode’ accounts need not be surprising. Can it however be problematic when the accounts differ in their claims?
By asking what kinds of cultural categories are imagined and invoked in the conduct’s fulfilment of the student subsidy design, it is possible to capture cultural categories in the making and how these may be shifting or challenged in times of accelerating globalisation. Does the internationalised curriculum/pedagogy emerge as a vehicle of cultural reproduction, reproducing and legitimating ‘fixed’ retrospective identity positions or does it offer moments of openness, whereby new ‘yet to be thought’ expressions and forms of local/global identity can be expressed and valorised? Moore and Muller (1999) are critical of ‘voice discourse’ which they equate with standpoint epistemology and its ‘celebration of difference and diversity’ (p. 190). They suggest that such epistemologies married to socially progressive pedagogies are counterproductive and self-defeating, reliant as they are on their distinction from the hegemonic dominant position. Rather than condemn this mode of legitimation in principle, I am more interested in exploring what kind of knowledge these ‘voicings’ bring to the pedagogical table. Arnot and Reay (2004) offer a searching analysis of what pedagogic voice research can offer, in that it ‘allows new and important insights into the dynamics of classroom communication - the interface between regulative and instructional discourses and the methodologies of framing’ (p. 1), that is, ‘the social relations of knowledge 226
production’ (p. 10). Similarly, Diaz (2001, p. 88) unpacks how voice precedes and constrains the students’ contributions:
The subject is produced by the setting of differences, oppositions, and locations, displacements and substitutions through which meanings are also produced. From this point of view, intrinsic to Bernstein’s argument is the point that it is not the subject that produces meanings … but meanings that produce subjects.
Thus the design of student subsidy can be understood as enabling certain meanings, identities and frames as legitimate, casting the students in cultured roles from which to speak. The analysis explores how such cultural differencing in the pedagogic ‘voicing’ played out. First however, the next section is necessary to translate the ideas of classification and framing into linguistic indices in order to engage with the textual data.
6.1.3 Producing cultural categories in the instructional register The analysis is concerned with which voices offer what propositions about whose culture; on what grounds they legitimate their knowledge; and how strongly classified and framed the constructions of cultural categories are in the message. Building on Christie’s linguistic translation of pedagogic discourse as realised, and made empirically /textually available, in the intertwining of instructional and regulative registers (Christie, 2002), it is argued that there are some direct, simple grammatical indices of the relative strength of classification and framing in the register choices of these knowledge propositions. These are explored through the use of modality and mood choices in the instructional register extracts pertaining to cultural identities and cultural differences. Modality, the grammatical index pertaining to classification, refers to grammatical choices that realise degrees of certainty, ‘the area of meaning that lies between yes and no - the intermediate ground between positive and negative polarity’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 618). In this sense, modality includes expressions of usuality and probability in propositions offering information (‘modalisation’), and
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expressions of inclination and obligation in proposals proffering goods and services (‘modulation’). This analysis is particularly interested in the former, that is, modalisation in knowledge propositions. Modality can be expressed through numerous grammatical resources within a clause including modal adjuncts (perhaps, usually), modal finites (could, might) and phrases (in my opinion), lexicial choices (suggest) and through grammatical metaphor across clause complexes (It is suggested that ….). Expressions of modality can be described in terms of: their type (modalisation/modulation); their orientation (subjective/objective sources of conviction, done explicitly/implicitly); their value (median to an outer value of high or low); and their polarity (positive/negative). Any expression of modality, regardless of how extreme its value, entertains a degree of uncertainty:
If I add a high value probability, of whatever orientation, ... this means that I am admitting an element of doubt - which I may then try to conceal by objectifying the expression of certainty. ... most of the objectifying metaphors express a 'high' value probability or obligation (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 624)
This linguistic ability to scope and scale degrees of certainty will be used as a textual gauge of classification strength and degrees of insulation between the cultural categories proffered in the student subsidy knowledge propositions regarding cultural groups and their attributes. The following sequence exemplifies a range of simple modalisation in hypothetical statements regarding the cultural category of ‘Australian’, arranged on a gradient from a very strong classification (C++) at positive and negative poles, to a very weak classification (C--) at the median: C++ C++ C+ C-
Australians drink beer. Australians always drink beer. Australians usually drink beer. Australians sometimes drink beer.
C-CC+ C++ C++
Australians might or might not drink beer. Australians occasionally drink beer. Australians seldom drink beer. Australians never drink beer. Australians don’t drink beer.
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Across this range, the defining attribute becomes increasingly fuzzy and the boundary around the category of ‘Australian’ less determinate to the point of being dissipated or equivocal. The C+ generalisation would be considered the typical, default expression of cultural categories, patterned but not prescriptive, unlike the bald C++ statement which amounts to an inflexible stereotype.
Modality is not the only linguistic index of classification and insulation between categories:
Any reader recognizes … a familiar, widespread and stable form of ‘othering’. The people to be othered are homogenized into a collective ‘they,’ which is distilled even further into an iconic ‘he’ (the standardized adult male specimen). This abstracted ‘he’/’they’ is the subject of verbs in a timeless present tense, which characterizes anything ‘he’ is or does not as a particular historical event but as an instance of a pregiven custom or trait. (Pratt, quoted in Fine, 1998, p. 138)
Thus, the analysis will also flag additional means of semantically producing degrees of classification as they arise in the data.
In simple terms, Mood, the grammatical index pertaining to framing, refers to choices in the grammatical structuring of messages that can constitute meaning as a statement (declarative), a question (interrogative), a command (imperative), or varieties thereof. These choices will shape and be shaped by the tenor of any textual interaction, that is, the social relations constructed and performed in the exchange. Tenor takes its colour from the social distance, affective relations, formality and power relations enacted between participants.
Detailed mood analysis interrogates the ‘MOOD’ element of the clause, being its subject and finite verb ( ‘It is …’), as would be picked up or tested in an agnate question tag ( ‘… isn’t it?’). For the purposes of this analysis however, it suffices to distinguish between the typical and non-typical grammatical structures used to perform the ‘speech functions’ of making a statement and asking a question. Eggins 229
(1994, p. 153) in her summary of Mood patterns suggests the typical Mood for statements (propositions) is a declarative (Australians drink beer), while the nontypical Mood is the tagged declarative (Australians drink beer, don’t they?). Similarly, the typical Mood choice for questions is interrogative (Do Australians drink beer?), while the non-typical is the modulated declarative (I don’t know if Australians drink beer). Both of the non-typical choices mitigate the interpersonal impact of the intended speech function.
The following sentences exemplify a range of such mood choices around the hypothetical proposition concerning the cultural category of ‘Australian’, and offer an interpretation of how these differently frame the social relations of the knowledge involved. The framing is graded from very strong (F++), where roles enacted are markedly differentiated, to weak (F-), where the relation is framed as one between peers. This typology will be tested against the semantic intent of the texts.
Imperative
Never drink wine with
F++
Australians!
Highest power move – knowledgable speaker is in position to tell others what to do.
Declarative
Australians drink beer.
F+
In control of this knowledge.
Tagged
Australians drink beer, don’t
F-
Seeking reassurance – other party can
declarative
they?
Interrogative
Do Australians drink beer?
equally contribute to knowledge. F-
Doesn’t know, but can legitimately ask and initiate the topic.
Marked
I don’t know if Australians
interrogative
drink beer.
F+
Not in control of this knowledge – defers to other person’s control of knowledge. Ruling self out of knowing.
Silence*
….
F++
Lowest power move – not entitled to contribute.
* See Pedro (1981) re silenced students. Silence in online mode is more problematic as it does not necessarily denote presence and is not unequivocally available for analysis, but has been included here as a possible response.
Working initially within these textual dimensions, strong classification in the pedagogic message will be interpreted as the absence of any mitigation or high value modality in propositions about cultural groups and their attributes. Strong framing in the pedagogic messages will be interpreted as the mood choice of
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imperatives or declaratives that ‘tell it how it is’, indicating undisputed control of the knowledge, and marked interrogatives that defer to the other’s superior knowledge, indicating the other’s control of the knowledge. Similarly, weak classification in the message will be interpreted as compromising degrees of probability or usuality expressed through median value modality choices, and weak framing in the messages as appeals through interrogatives or tagged declaratives for others to contribute, confirm and help legitimate propositions.
6.1.4 Data selection and sorting The data presented below were selected from the 696 e-turns in the second assessable small group discussion task which typically involved 4-5 students per group. Students were required to prepare a brief case study outlining a workplace issue that required change management lead by them as the hypothetical Chief Executive Officer. They were to include a set of questions that engaged with the instructional materials provided in the unit, to provoke discussion within their group over a set period. As these questions were required as part of the task, analysis of their mood has not been included here. Given the delays in enrolment procedures for the Malaysia students, the first such group allocations did not mix domestic and international students. For the second group allocations however, LA did purposefully mix domestic and international students within groups, to achieve his design of ‘student subsidy’. Thus the pedagogical strategy ‘voiced’ the interaction so that students were differently positioned to speak as informants/representatives of their cultural experience.
In contrast to the shared discussion in the open zones, A-H, in which topics pertaining to the regulative register dominated, the assessable group discussions were overwhelmingly conducted in the instructional register, with only brief diversions into the regulative register. The selections for this chapter are postings where the field, that is, the subject matter, included mention of cultural, national, or ethnic groups and their attributes. In the discourse of management, ‘culture’ is also widely used to refer to a specific workplace’s norms and style – such references were eliminated from the selections unless implicated with the ethnic or national sense of ‘culture’. Given that one of the instructional modules assessed through this
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exercise had dealt with the management of cultural diversity in the workplace, some of the case studies presented by students raised such issues as their core problematic. In other case studies, the topic of cultural differences/attributes emerged as an additional consideration in the discussion.
Relevant passages were initially identified in a detailed reading of the second group discussion corpus, then sorted according to what sorts of knowledge claim were being made: •
Knower mode A – speaking as a member of the group thus described with insider knowledge. For example: Ah the classic Australian Tall Poppy Syndrome!
•
Knower mode B – speaking of the group described, as an outsider with relevant experience. For example: Based on my knowledge on migrant Chinese where poverty is a problem, money talks very loudly.
•
Knowledge mode A – speaking of a group or cultural difference as the object of specialised study through recourse to models, research, concepts or referenced texts. For example: Whilst Asian organisational culture requires different leadership styles to western, the issues outlined in [text book reference] suggest some argument for a common basis of good leadership attributes across all cultures.
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Knowledge mode B – speaking of the received idea of generic, non-specific cultural difference between groups as an established fact, which could potentially be either a problem, or an asset in the case study. For example: As a CEO, you must adapt the style to different national cultures, because culture affects leadership style be way of the follower, CEO can’t choose their styles at will.
The last category (Knowledge B) emerged from the data, where ‘cultural difference’ was mentioned without any specific attributes or experience being attached to the groups involved, but rather as a fact of life, often with the associated concept of ‘culture shock’. Some e-turns contained aspects of more than one such coding. Such elements were analysed together to gain some sense of how the
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knowledge moves worked together. Some claims were difficult to categorise given no grounds for legitimation were evident in the text. For example, the claim that ‘Russia has a very family oriented approach to work’ (2L26) includes no reference to whether the writer has personal experience of this attribute, or whether this knowledge has been condensed from other sources. Such ‘disembodied’ propositions were categorised as Knowledge mode B, on the assumption that they emanate from a ‘cultural difference as a fact of life’ discourse. Such claims may have emanated from Knowledge A sources, but without the explicit reference, they are not calling in such ‘expert’ legitimation for their claim.
The passages were then analysed to characterise mood and modality choices, and elicit any patterning of classification and framing thus achieved within and across the modes, and how these in turn achieved the semantic and relational intent. Exemplars were selected to present and to explore how the grammatical choices shaped the classification and framing of knowledge claims. In addition, attention is paid to aberrant cases from which issued the ‘yet to be voiced’, producing categories and boundaries in the unit’s conduct that did not cohere with the ‘cultured’ voicing design.
6.2 Knower Mode A: speaking as one of ‘us’ Across the set of second group discussions, there were 48 postings that made Knower A mode propositions, informing other students about a cultural group of which the writer is a member. This membership supplied the grounds for legitimation of the proposition. These propositions characterised cultures of Asia (3), Australia (14), China/Chinese diaspora (5), Malaysia (15) and Papua New Guinea (12), one making claims regarding both Asia and China, thus counted twice in this breakdown. The Papua New Guinea claims were made by the one student for whom cultural difference between a PNG enterprise and its international management was the core problematic in her case study. She had made a similar sustained effort to raise issues of cultural difference with reference to PNG in the open zones as well, as discussed in Chapter 5.
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The classification evident in these propositions through the grammatical device of modalisation was typically of moderate (C+) strength, expressed through wordings such as ‘generally’, ‘many’, ‘tend to’, ‘the general perception’ , ‘is common’, ‘pretty much’, ‘rarely’, ‘likely’. Other propositions produced a stronger sense of classification (C++), firstly by marking this high degree by wordings such as ‘very obvious’, ‘especially’, ‘invariably’, ‘really’, ‘very accustomed’, ‘never’; or by the absence of any modalisation in the proposition, for example ‘those who are older or more experienced will not be willing to accept the opinions of the younger or lessexperienced…’. The Knower A accounts of PNG were typically couched with very high value modality suggesting a high degree of insulation in her categorisation, for example, ‘The ‘wantok’ system does play a greater role … and influences most of these cultures and related behaviours in nearly every organisation in PNG in various perspective’ (2L20). Some Knower A claims were legitimated by explicit reference to the author’s local situated context as grounds for their opinion, though this was more the case for the students in Malaysia: ‘Here in Malaysia …’, ‘In our country (Malaysia) …’. These grammatical patterns suggest that the interpretation of culture as homogeneous located national identities was widely operative, as speculated and promoted by the design of student subsidy. Many students occupied the cultured ‘voices’ offered in the design and played the legitimated interactional game of constructing strongly classified cultural types in their messages.
Through such propositions, attributes were associated with the various cultural categories with high degrees of probability/usuality. The Asian culture was portrayed as respectful of elders, traditional, religious and superstitious. The Australian culture was portrayed as ‘friendly and easy going’, motivated by material success, resistant to change, used to job security, susceptible to the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, with highly regulated industrial relations. Business in China was portrayed as state dominated with reduced competitiveness while Chinese people were portrayed as secretive and competitive. People in Malaysia were similarly portrayed as secretive and competitive, passive ‘timid’ workers, and highly regulated in the workplace. Papua New Guinea culture was portrayed as strongly determined by traditional ‘wantok’ relations of collective reciprocity and clan allegiance, non-competitive, with risks of violence and corruption, but also capable of providing skilled workers in enterprises of international standard. 234
One trend confined to the Knower A postings regarding Malaysia and China, was frequent mention of reform efforts instigated by their governments in response to global economic flows, and shifting parameters for workplace practices. For example, a Chinese student reported: ‘… the encouragement of the monetary income of [Chinese financial institution] has already been in the reform accelerate’ (2G3), and a Malaysia student reported: ‘The insurance industry is tightly regulated in Malaysia …. Innovation is therefore slow and this is a course for concern, as competitors from Singapore, which are far ahead in this area, will be entering the scene in 2005’ (2G16). Such accounts also typically described characteristic resistance to such change: ‘In the Malaysian context, even with this ‘open door’ avenue, it has been observed that not many employees make use of it’ (2M21). This patterning acknowledged tensions between change and changelessness which could be read as an argument for the resilience of cultural attributes in the face of change, thus implying strong classification.
It is telling to note where the heuristic oppositions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ were drawn, that is, who was constructed in opposition to which ‘Other’. The generalised accounts of Asia drew a binary opposition between East and West. Similarly, national accounts of Malaysia and China were often compared to, or contrasted from, accounts of Australia, though some postings distinguished between all three or more settings. In contrast, the account of PNG consistently opposed the indigenous tradition of wantok culture to a dis-located notion of ‘internationalist’ culture, represented by the global corporation. Accounts of Australia were typically produced to describe an Australian practice that might inform the case study of an international student, thus in opposition to China, or Malaysia.
The discussion now turns to aberrant cases, that is, Knower A propositions/messages that did not fall into the general patterns described above.
Firstly with reference to the archetypal portrayals of cultural groups, there were messages that introduced challenges to such static homogeneous categories of national culture, but with statements equally assertive in their expression of modality. The earlier classifications of categories were challenged in two ways – 235
by diversity within, and by change over time. For example, a ‘domestic’ student outlined his case study problem of managing ‘great’ cultural difference and ‘nonconformity’ within an Australian business:
The Company being (X) has developed over the last 40 years from one distribution depot out Melbourne to now aspiring to having over 50 distribution depots throughout Australia. The company (X) has a work force of 1500 people with a mixture of cultures from different nationalities and a blend of blue collar and white collar workers. ... Within the organisation there is a great demographic and geographical exchange of cultures. ...The business (X) which covers Australia has noticed the non-conformity thought cultural attitudes as to how the business needs to focus in harmony instead as individual distribution depots. (2J5)
The relative absence of modality gave this account of mixture a strong matter-offactness. Thus this student’s Knower A claim asserted that Australia is a mixture, in opposition to other presumably more homogeneous nationality categories. Another ‘domestic’ student reinforced this portrayal of ‘Australia as mixture’, building the account with high value modalisations (‘much’, ‘ really’, ‘I am sure’, ‘even’, ‘often’):
I think we tend to forget how vast and disparate Australia really is and organizations like yours, so widely spread, are really a collection of regional cultures in much the same way as Europe is but without the barriers of language and government. … Within each depot I am sure you have sub-cultures based upon ethnic background, the locality where workers have their homes, what weekend activities they enjoy and even what footy club is supported! Then there is often the yawning chasm between the workers in the office and those who work in the yard (2J35)
In a similar vein, a Malaysia student moved from a Knowledge B culturaldifference-as-fact-of-life proposition to a Knower A statement that cultural difference was the Malaysian way of life with no modalisation:
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For my opinion, different culture background team (on-premise & retail) are very hard to cooperate, as different background will easier caused misunderstanding.... . In our country (Malaysia) that consist of different culture background were realize the important of tolerance as if we not tolerance between different races, our country will collapse. (2N27)
This student produced the Knower A statement to back up and legitimate his Knowledge B prediction. Another such posting (2K39) by a Malaysia student will be considered later in the discussion of Knowledge A claims.
In yet another group, a domestic student made a statement about the changing nature of ‘Australian culture’:
Does the root of the problem lie with a changing australian culture? The people of the 40's and 50's who were motivated by a desire to help ... those in need are getting old. the current climate is one of litigation and putting up large fences and locking the doors. People do not interact as they used to. The reasons are multifactorial; you could blame a breakdown of family, distractions such as electronic media in all its forms, fear of litigation and just a general apathy. (2L79)
The statement worked as a strong classification with its relative absence of modality, apart from ‘general’, but the category constructed worked in opposition to the Australian culture of the ‘40’s and 50’s’, so the boundary drawn is a diachronic one between ‘us then’ and ‘us now’. Another domestic student moved to agree, but interestingly where the first student built an account of cultural shift in attributes, the second student’s account worked to weaken the classification (‘diminishing’, ‘no longer’, ‘increasingly individualistic’, ‘still there… not as overtly or as strongly’):
Changes in the Australian culture has had a definate impact but they are not just limited to the factors you outlined. Quite simply people now have a greater range of leisure activities, families have seen parental roles develop to an extent where emphasis is placed on balancing work and family. 237
Workaholics as a group are diminishing in size because of these factors. There has also been a shift in attitude to 'what do I get from this' rather than 'what can I contribute'. Take the example of the American WWII recruiting slogan "ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country'. This slogan will no longer work in todays Australian environment because we are becoming increasingly individualistic. The nAffiliation is still there in the Australian culture, although not as overtly or as strongly as the 40's and 50's. (2L81)
This set of aberrant messages worked to problematise generalisations that conveyed fixed homogeneous notions of national attributes by introducing fracture lines and dynamism, qualities that orthodox ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm, 1983) suppress.
Secondly, in reference to the oppositions produced and in contrast to national cultures as the base unit, one Malaysia student’s case study drew a comment from a second Malaysia student that constructed a strongly classified boundary of difference (‘especially so’, ‘quite’, ‘tend to’, ‘generally’) between West Malaysians and East Malaysians:
In the merger and integration exercise, I would not be surprised if cultural differences become a problem in your organisation. This is especially so if staff from West Malaysia mixed with those in East Malaysia. Although both are Malaysians, attitudes are quite different. For instance, the general perception of West Malaysians is that they tend to have a superiority complex and self-centred, whereas their East Malaysian counterpart are generally good natured and friendly. As such, efforts to prepare staff for any impending change should take this point into consideration to prevent disputes and cultural shocks from arising. (2B8)
The Malaysia student of the original case study replied, offering a markedly weaker classification of the categories (‘slight’, ‘not … major’, ‘just as’), disputing the attributes assigned, and suggesting that the opposition may better be explained as Malaysian versus Singaporean, or regional versus capitalist urban. His closing 238
expressed solidarity, rather than difference, again working to weaken the earlier classification:
I agree that there may be a slight cultural difference between East Malaysians and West Malaysians. However in the current situation it may not be a major issue. .. To slight track a bit, this is the first time that I am aware that East Malaysians perceive West Malaysians as self centred and with superiority complex. I thought this perception is the general Malaysian's perception of Singaporeans. However what you have stated may perhaps be the result drawn from interaction with West Malaysians in the big cities like Kuala Lumpur and working in big corporations. The rat race with resulting educational opportunities and material success must have caught up with most West Malaysians in big cities with resulting change in attitudes. I believe that if East Malaysians have the opportunities to reach out to the smaller towns in West Malaysia like Ipoh, Penang and Johor Bahru they will still find that many West Malaysians are just as friendly and easy going. Have a nice day fellow Malaysian. (2B7attach)
This exchange is informative in a number of ways. Firstly it shows how contingent and arbitrary the selection of an ‘Other’ is, yet how constitutive any such distinction is in shoring up a positive identity for ‘us’. The attribute of ‘friendly and easy going’ echoed exactly the attributes claimed in a Knower A mode proposition of Australian culture, undermining the distinctiveness of both claims. Secondly, both e-turns fractured the homogeneous national category that had been allowed to flourish elsewhere in the student subsidy accounts. They fractured the category with diachronic and synchronic differencing, with allusions to ‘big corporations’ and ‘education’ shifting lifestyle preferences, suggesting influences beyond the national arena. Thirdly, where Malaysian politics officially allocates its citizens to one of a number of ethnic/religious categories, it is telling that these were not the categories produced in these accounts, rather it was geographical and lifestyle distinctions that were made. Finally, both contributors were speaking from a Knower A position, so they had equal claim to legitimacy and the exchange was between peers similarly positioned within the design’s cultured voicing.
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In a parallel move, a domestic student made a Knower A move that disputed another student’s Knower A depiction of the tall poppy syndrome as highly likely in Australia, by reducing its likelihood to a very weak classification (‘as much room’):
There is as much room for elitism and there is for the tall poppy syndrome. (2H26)
This set of aberrant Knower A messages had broken ranks with the legitimated game of predictable national cultures, to produce equally assertive ‘yet to be voiced’ accounts that unsettled conventional categories, introducing complexity, dissent and uncertainty. It is important to note that these episodes of problematisation emerged in dialogue between members of the same voice, suggesting that one can produce a simpler, more essentialised ‘self’ or autoethnographic account for consumption by Others/ ‘them’, than one can for ‘us’. It should be noted that this complete reading of the second group postings was itself an aberration and misrepresentation of the participants’ experience. Though all postings were accessible, students were not expected to read the complete set, as they were only required to participate in their own small group. Thus the patterning, complexity and multivocality of representations described above was probably only minimally experienced by the students. Rather group members’ accounts often served as the sole representative of their voice membership, so much of the diversity, fracturing and problematisation produced as a curricular asset was in effect lost.
In terms of framing, that is, the social relations of the Knower A knowledge propositions, the very dominant pattern was the use of declaratives (F+) to make statements. The social relations of such ‘cultured’ knowledge was frequently reinforced with some meta-textual comment (for example ‘To answer your doubts’, ‘For your information’, ‘You are right’, ‘Hope this helps’) that positioned the writer as legitimated knower. In a more elaborate such case, a domestic student adopted a teacherly tone (F++) to instruct the cultural other about what was meant by ‘the tall poppy syndrome’:
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Re the ‘tall-poppy syndrome’, I don’t know whether this is a term used in Malaysia, and I probably should have explained it better in my narrative. It is a common expression in Australia and refers to the fact that … (2H44)
One domestic student used an interrogative (suggesting F-), ‘Does the root of the problem lie with a changing australian culture?’ (2L79), but proceeded to use it more as a rhetorical device, answering his own question. However, another domestic student responded at length on the issue (2L81 as above) as a peer with common membership in the particular voice category. Another departure from the typical declarative choice, was the exclamative, ‘Ah the classic Australian Tall Poppy Syndrome!’ (2L41), which Eggins (1994, p. 177) suggests is ‘a blend of interrogative and declarative patterns’. In its context and with the high value modalisation (‘classic’), this utterance framed the writer strongly as one who definitively knows. Similarly, a Malaysian student finished an extended Knower A proposition in declarative mood, with an opinion offered as a tagged declarative, ‘Rather negative, isn’t it?’(2M21). This asked not for confirmation of the information given, but for engagement with his opinion thereof, and thus did not change the strong framing of his declarative proposition. Another exception to the pattern of declaratives, was the posting by the student making Knower A propositions about PNG. She used an imperative (F++), softened somewhat by the polite ‘please’, to forcefully instruct her group members: ‘Please do not forget their survival needs that I have addressed in my other responses to this case….’ (2L54). Beyond these few exceptions, the strong framing evident in the high usage of declaratives with which to deliver Knower A propositions suggests that the internationalised student group felt comfortable occupying the cultured voices allocated to them via the pedagogic design of student subsidy and making the claims they did, thus largely legitimating and reproducing the categories of national cultures offered in the voicing.
In the data, there arose perhaps a stronger endorsement of the cultured voicing evident through the use of marked interrogatives (F+), that is, declaratives carrying the meaning of not knowing. These emerged when the activity called for
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students to make suggestions and comments on each other’s work. They were thus not just to learn from each others’ cases, but also to contribute to their development. Through the different ‘voicings’ based on cultural affiliations, this meant students were constantly working across notional boundaries between voices by asking questions and making suggestions on each others’ cases. The relativisation, that is, the heightened awareness of difference, produced by the ‘student subsidy’ design, made this boundary crossing risky for the students, who frequently mitigated their offers of advice with pre-emptive disclaimers, respectfully protesting their lack of relevant knowledge, and possible inappropriateness of advice, for example: ‘Please understand that our cultures are very different and my suggestions may not be appropriate in your world’ (2K46). Such a move of deference to the legitimated knower was common where students offered suggestions or asked for more information when working across voice category boundaries, but was not used in exchanges within categories.
These presage statements worked in two ways. Firstly, as a textual device, they modalised any subsequent knowledge proposition, weakening its claim by preemptively suggesting it may be culturally biased or distorted, for example, ‘my views may be biased towards the Malaysian environment’ (2G5). Secondly, the deference shown to the addressee produced a stronger framing in the social relations of knowledge, between the addressee’s position as knower-about-such-matters, and the writer’s self-effacement as possible knower. They amounted to requests for Knower A knowledge, overriding the Knowledge A mode of knowledge offered in the textbook’s treatment of cultural differences.
As a final exploration of Knower A framing, an aberrant case that challenged the dominant pattern described above is illuminating. A Malaysia student posted a case study that made no reference to its cultural context, just describing issues as located in a particular enterprise. Though this was typical of ‘domestic’ students for whom the cultural setting of ‘Australia’ read as a presumed default context, the majority of case studies by international students had offered some orienting cultural/ national/ geographic context, in the spirit of autoethnography. Thus this particular message could be regarded as choosing not to engage with the cultured voice offered. A domestic student then proceeded to ask a question with an interrogative (F-), ‘How 242
do you think the Asian cultural orientations for values and beliefs effect the working environment?’ (2I11). This question presumed that ‘Asian cultural orientations’ did apply to the case, thus the ‘domestic’ student was ‘in the know’ and was helping the Malaysia student explicate this aspect. This domestic student replicated this move in reply to another international student’s posting: ‘Just one question: how much importance is placed on tradition and Islamic/Confucius values in your company?’ (2I10). The first Malaysia student gave a minimal reply: ‘In reply to your question, such traditional values are deemed to be important.’ (2I17), while the other student replied at length (2I16). In the former case, this student was claiming a parallel default setting – so self evident that it should not need expansion, whereas in the latter case, the student amicably provided detailed autoethnographic Knower A knowledge. These exchanges could be interpreted as producing a weaker framing for the domestic student who took the initiative to raise such topics, but on the other hand, stronger framing of the international students who are forced to take up the ‘cultured’ voice. However, framing refers to the relation, not to individual positionings, so these exchanges may be better interpreted as producing stronger framing, as the domestic student is still reliant on, and legitimating Knower A knowledge.
It is significant that the ‘domestic’ student in good faith felt the need to draw out cultural dimensions, and by doing so, to ‘Other’ the international students, before she could respond to the specifics of their case studies. In short, she was invoking culture on their behalf. This ‘culture first’ modus operandi, I suggest, has been produced by the design of student subsidy that had amplified and reified the dimension of cultural difference, to the point that cultural considerations had become a precursor to, and determinant of relations, not the afterthought or impinging factor the text book account suggested. Similarly, the outcome of heightened respect and relativisation was perhaps counter-productive in a unit of study that offered theories that were purportedly international/universal in their applicability. The degree to which cultural difference emerged as a lens with which to view relations was captured in the same ‘domestic’ student’s effusive comment:
I am truly captivated with the cultural question not only because it is so relevant to my own situation but as we have seen, can also be applied to our 243
Malaysian team members when trying to comprehend the issues they face in their workforce. (2I25)
This suggests that some were seen to be more ‘cultured’ than others, and that their differencing would by default reinforce the privileging normalisation of the ‘domestic’ students’ context and practices.
6.3 Knower Mode B: speaking of ‘them’ As described above, there was a propensity to deny knowledge of the cultural Other with respectful deference shown when making any suggestions that crossed into such territory. This patterning made the Knower B propositions, that is, statements ‘speaking of’ another cultural group based on personal experience, interesting in themselves. Though anecdotes of working in ‘indigenous’ settings had cropped up in the open zones, there were only three such propositions drawing on first or second hand experience in the second group discussions: a) one regarding migrant Chinese; b) one regarding the variety of cultures represented and managed in an international enterprise; and c) one regarding PNG culture, as follows.
a) Based on my knowledge on migrant Chinese where poverty is a problem, money talks very loudly. The motivation to earn a lot of money is very high so that they can help their family living in improvished regions of China. This is what Maslow meant by basic physical and security needs driving one's behaviour. For this reason, we can all see why this migrant Chinese are so successful. (2L30)
b) However, nothing can prepare an African for the Danish winters or an unfortunate racial remark, and nothing can stop a Japanese gentlemen from bowing, or an Arab from having trouble dealing with the openness of his female colleagues. The majority have been stationed all over the world, usually in third world countries where their salary allows them certain luxuries, for example maids, drivers and gardeners that can no longer be afforded. It’s a culture shock. (2I14)
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c) I have also heard that in PNG payback murders are accepted… I hear that bribes are a natural part of PNG business (correct me if I'm wrong). (2L60)
In terms of classification, the first two of these postings displayed high value modality, and thus strong (C+) classification of cultural attributes: (very, we can all see, so, nothing can …), with the unmodalised (C++) assertion in habitual present tense of ‘culture shock’. Similarly, they both use declaratives (F+) throughout which reinforce their experience as legitimate grounds from which to speak/know of such matters. The third Knower B claim differs, in that it chooses to project the claims through the verbal processes of ‘I have …heard’ and ‘I hear that…’. This choice makes the experiential legitimacy of the claim reside in the domestic student’s act of hearing, and produces the claims about the Other as once removed verbiage, that might or might not be true in fact. Thus the device of projection effectively problematised the claims, while the claims themselves could be worded with absent or high modality (C++): (are, natural). The student then defers to the Knower A knowledge of the student from PNG (‘correct me…’), with an imperative (F++) which alludes to her higher status in these knowledge relations. This Knower B claim is an instance of ‘boundary crossing’, of offering knowledge about the cultural setting of another student’s case study. However, unlike the marked interrogatives that denied knowledge described above, this student had ventured to contribute some additional insight, while being careful not to challenge the authority of the Knower A knower. These textual tactics gives some insight into the delicate politics of claiming to know the Other in their presence.
6.4 Knowledge Mode A: expert knowledge As described earlier, the curricular materials presented Hofstede’s framework as an expert resource for knowing the Other, through his typology of national cultures’ work values over a series of dimensions and similar work. Concepts from this framework (such as ‘power distance’) and other aspects of the MBA curriculum made their way into the instructional register of 14 postings in the second group discussions. For example:
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This means that as influential as organizational culture is in shaping employee behaviour, national culture is even more influential. [textbook reference]. (2A13)
Others struggle with cultural dimensions especially when their national culture differs notably to the local culture, for example, a male manager from a high power distance (Pakistan, Mexican) has trouble coping with staff of a low power distance culture. (2I4)
In such postings, students used the analytical concepts, often with the imprimatur of scholarly references, to frame and legitimate their comments and case suggestions. With this recourse to expert knowledge, the majority of the Knowledge A claims displayed high modalisations (C+), (given…, surely, considerable , heavily), and the suggestions made on such bases were often also high in modulation (should, must, need to), in comparison to the more hesitant, tentative suggestions introduced by the marked interrogatives discussed above with reference to Knower A claims. For example, the following Knowledge A claim moves with conviction from its application of a theory to the PNG setting to a strong suggestion as to what should be done in the case study situation:
It seems to me that McClelland's need for affiliation is high in the wantok culture. It has a high-context culture where communication is used to first establish trust and relationship. A person's official status and reputation carry considerable weight in communication. Therefore orders, directness and explicitness shld be avoided in order to achieve org harmony. (2L30)
The majority of such Knowledge A claims were presented in declarative mood (F+), though two used interrogatives (F-) to probe contextual specifics, for example:
Do any of the employee involvement programs mentioned in Chapter 7 of the text have relevance to your situation and culture? What employee incentives will work? (2K12)
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This general patterning suggests that knowledge mode resources could provide a strong sense of authority with which to know the Other, and enabled students to ‘boundary cross’ more confidently. On a closer look, there is often an implicit synthesis made between an analytical concept or theory in Knowledge A mode, and its application to a particular setting through Knower A or Knower B mode propositions. For example, the following claim inserts a Knower A mode characterising Australian culture as ‘friendly and easy going’, into a Knowledge A claim about culture as an explanatory variable:
Various researches indicate that national culture has a greater impact on employees than does their organisation’s culture. Australian employees at a Smith facility in Brisbane, therefore, will be influenced more by the local friendly & easy going culture. (2A13)
Thus the generic theory/framework was reliant on more haphazard experiential knowledges in the instructional register for its animation and elaboration.
As an aberrant case in this Knowledge A category, the following posting by a Malaysia student used Knower A knowledge to critique the Knowledge A representation of Malaysia and seriously mitigate the Knowledge A claim, pulling it back to merely ‘prototypical’, a ‘signpost’ of ‘limited’ value:
Thanks for your comments esp on the cultural elements which are almost spot-on. To state that my case study is heavily bound in national culture would be to stretch Gert Hofstede's model of organizational culture theory a bit too far. I consider Hofstede's model as a prototypical model but paradigms have shifted and times have changed. It would benefit more if we could study the individual particularities of the case as distinguished from the other rather than rely on generalized ideas and models as guidelines. Better still to refer to generalized models as signpost, and only as signpost, to give us an overall picture but only to that limited extent. To generalize the situation on national culture is to make attribution errors or stereotyping. A country as racially diverse as Malaysia with different languages and
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religions co-existing will only produce diverse cultures and also organizational cultures. (2K39)
In contrast to the strong classification offered in the Hofstede model, at least in its interpretation, this student is arguing for a highly problematised, weak classification of the category, ‘Malaysia’, being constituted more by its complex diversity than any erroneous stereotypic characterisation. This emergent ‘yet to be voiced’ order in this message presents a serious critique of much of the other activity, whereby students had cooperated with the national/cultural voicings and offered their representations of homogeneous national/cultural categories. Like the aberrant cases of Knower A mode propositions described above, this message potentially undoes much of the instructional work purportedly achieved through the device of student subsidy. The particular challenge of this posting lies in its charge of redundancy levelled at the Knowledge A knowledge: ‘but paradigms have shifted and times have changed’. This student offers what could be considered a report from the front. When Tomlinson (1999) explores the unevenness of globalisation’s effects, he concludes that the 'more acute experience' (p. 137) of globalisation’s forces are felt where life is less cushioned and more exposed to shifting flows. This student’s posting seems similarly alert to forces of change and fracture lines under pressure, which are glossed over in the more institutionalised, academy-endorsed Knowledge A knowledge. The student is suggesting that the ground has shifted and categories need to shift too.
6.5 Knowledge Mode B: cultural difference as a fact of life In the second group discussions, 20 e-turns drew on a generic discourse of cultural difference as a fact of life (Knowledge B), without recourse to expert, specialist knowledge (Knowledge A), or experiential modes of legitimation (Knower A, Knower B). Such a discourse had been validated by the curricular material’s treatment of culture as an objective given, usually interpreted as located and national, and thus as a contextual variable to be taken into account when devising management strategies. As a Knowledge B example, the following posting did not specify any particular cultural group, but rather made a general statement regarding managing cultural diversity as an organisational asset:
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The company seek out diverse national culture because of the alternative strengths those staff bring to the workplace… (2A14)
In contrast, other Knowledge B statements presented cultural difference in the workplace as a potential problem:
I accept that culture is an important consideration as it can work for U or agst U. If U keep insisting on managing 100% based on your local culture, my thinking is that it is going to be difficult meeting the diverse needs of your international guests. (2L70)
Such generic Knowledge B claims were not producing specific cultural categories, but rather were describing the presumed gap between. The modality used in these propositions has been interpreted as referring more specifically to the degrees of insulation invoked between notional cultural oppositions. An analysis of the modality suggested there are two types of claim. Firstly, the ‘factness’ of cultural difference (C++) was marked by the absence of modalisation, cultural difference being an independent variable, while the actors therein are marked by high modulation or obligation ( must, can’t choose), for example:
As a CEO, you must adapt the style to different national cultures, because culture affects leadership style be way of the follower, CEO can’t choose their styles at will. CEO is constrained by the cultural conditions that their followers have come to expect. (2A14)
Such claims produced the presumption of necessarily strong insulation between national cultures, and the need for translation strategies. Secondly, there were modalised claims arguing the importance of considerations of cultural difference:
The company seek out diverse national culture because of the alternative strengths those staff bring to the workplace. Yet these diverse behavior and strengths are likely to diminish in strong cultures as people attempt to fit in. Strong [organisational] cultures can be liabilities when they effectively 249
eliminate the unique strengths that people of different backgrounds bring to the company. So it is more important for the company has a good communication with the staff and trains the staff recognizes different culture each other and respect each other. 2A14
The modalisation (likely, attempt to, can, effectively) in this second type made the insulation weaker and more contingent, something to be strategically maximised or minimised.
In terms of framing, the majority of Knowledge B propositions were typically made through declaratives (F+), telling the facts or putting forth an argument in a didactic fashion. One student used imperatives (F++) to exhort another student to take up certain strategies, showing a strength of conviction:
Use examples such as the Mc Donald's multi-domestic approach … Allow them to fully experience the wantok culture, perhaps assign them to a group of employee's during their stay so that they have the first hand exposure necessary to create a full understanding of the cultural excentricities. (2L25)
One aberrant case emerged that used interrogatives to argue for a strategic weakening of insulation, in the face of another student’s continued insistence of strongly insulated cultural difference between the culture of PNG and the international corporation that had taken over the PNG based enterprise:
How abt trying to see the perspective from an international angle. U mentioned somewhere that the wantok culture is slow in moving. Now if your hotel's customers are from the various countries, wld such guests accept the way services are being performed in a laid back manner? (2L63)
Using interrogatives (F-) to purposefully change the frame of reference, this message tipped on its head much of the established understandings about the relative claims of cultural difference as residing in the location of the enterprise. This international student had provocatively argued the case for weakening the 250
insulation, and for the enterprise to accommodate and adapt to the variety of international guests. There is still the presumption of cultural difference as an inevitable fact but for this student, it was a malleable difference that can be mitigated, a variable that can be exploited commercially.
6.6 The politics of representations in internationalised curriculum The design for student subsidy of the curriculum in matters of cultural particularities predisposed the interaction to foreground and voice cultural categories at the expense of possible others (for example, gender categories, profession or industry affiliations). The design effectively produced this preoccupation with cultural difference in the conduct. This section summarises the analysis thus far and links it to other data sources in the open interaction and interviews, and to the theoretical framework.
To summarise the analysis across the four modes of knowledge, the cultured voicing of the student subsidy design promoted and legitimated Knower A ‘speaking as’ mode propositions in particular, and students confidently made such claims using typically strong classification and strong framing. This evident ‘comfort zone’ was however matched by the emerging ‘discomfort zone’, evident in the proliferation of marked interrogatives claiming lack of relevant knowledge of the Other when students attempted to cross a notional boundary to make suggestions on each other’s case studies. Similarly, Knower B ‘speaking of’ mode propositions, were rare in this second group discussion, where they had been more common in the early open zone discussions. This may indicate a growing circumspection, self-consciousness and uncertainty, when it came to knowing and engaging with the Other. Such problematisation should not be read as a curricular weakness, being evidence perhaps of a growing awareness of the ‘otherness of others’ (Beck, 2000, p. 100) and a loss of the certainty of former essentialised notions. In contrast, Knowledge A modes of expert knowledge produced strongly classified and framed propositions, thus the curricular content had resourced the students to make confident claims and suggestions on such theoretical bases. Knowledge B claims that constructed generic cultural difference as a fact, or a
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variable to be proactively managed, were common. Students typically expressed these confidently with strong classification and framing, given the legitimation and ‘common sense’ of cultural difference in the voicing design.
This patterning suggests that the majority of student messages articulated with the metaculture that makes homogeneous national cultures thinkable. ‘Culture’ in the body of typical messages was constructed as an objective, knowable factor embedded in locality. Such knowledge, it was implied, could validly inform management practice. There was an expectation that the Other could reasonably be located and known, and this knowledge could be applied across business contexts. By naturalising the attributes associated with a cultural category as timeless and fixed, any history of colonisation or invasion, of change or complexity, could be erased or de-politicised. Interactions could proceed in the polite tenor of mutual respect and deference. Strong classification constructed the categories as mutually exclusive, making invisible any relational histories, current interdependencies, penetrations and ‘polythetic … resemblances’ (Appadurai, 1990, p. 20). The maintenance of such a metaculture in the face of globalisation, such as the online qualification in which they are participating and their many accounts of industries penetrated and shaped by global influences, suggests ‘a certain kind of wilful nostalgia’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 31) sustaining and reasserting imagined national communities in the face of change. Such were the meanings promoted by the design.
Whether or not these legitimated meanings reflected student’s lived realities is another matter, as explained by Bernstein (1990, p. 198): ‘… as we have argued that pedagogic discourse creates imaginary subjects, we should not overestimate the fit between pedagogic discourse and any practice external to it.’ An international student, in his email interview, elaborates on this point of separation between the curriculum and the more complex lived ‘process of becoming’ (Hall, 1996b, p. 4) in global flows. This student reports selectively ‘filtering’ the Western-biased instructional discourse as a way to negotiate some goodness of fit between the knowledge he has access to and his local setting:
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…I must agree that having a Western education has somewhat changed my way of thinking. Sometimes, I am being called "banana man" (meaning yellow on the outside, but white in the inside) by my fellow Malaysians. This may not be a bad thing all together if we do not use all the theories what we learn wholesale. We need to filter and use all the good practices only. (A3)
There was no such ‘banana’ or hybridised position offered to the students under this metaculture of mutually exclusive cultures (plural). By slotting into the voices allocated to them, and playing to the expectations of this design, the students have produced meanings for consumption within the specific interactional nodes and practices of this pedagogic setting. Had the groupings or voices been allocated in different ways, different meanings and identities may have been realised: ‘the subject is contingent on the pedagogic relation, while the consequence of the pedagogic relation is contingent on the response of the subject to that relation’ (Diaz, 2001, p. 95).
The analysis also explored aberrant cases that disrupted these patterns and metaculture. Some messages gave different accounts of cultural categories, with notions of dynamism, fracturing and diversity within, or impinging external contingencies. Such accounts shifted boundaries, or lessened the degree of insulation between categories. It was noted that such challenges came from within the same voice position where dialogue was possible. Other messages adopted different framings, changing the social relations of knowledge, challenging the design’s privileging of Knower A mode. As Bernstein notes, where the message raises the ‘yet to be voiced’, this changes the voicing and the insulation between its categories. However such efforts to unsettle voicing categories were sprinkled across the corpus, of which most students only sampled their own group’s postings. Thus the potential for a cumulative challenge to the instructional register’s metaculture of homogeneous national/cultural categories would not have been evident for the students.
In Chapter 3, Bernstein’s typology of local identity types was presented in juxtaposition to his typology of pedagogic identity orientations to conceptualise their potential articulation in pedagogical processes. In Table 8 below, the local 253
identity types are revisited and interpreted with reference to expressions of cultural identity invoked in the case study texts. These empirical expressions by individuals speak to the temporal orientations and the collective narratives they chose to articulate with in these representations, and within these discursive circumstances.
Table 8: Cultural identities invoked in the case study IDENTITY TYPES
Description
Data Example (hypothetical example)
Retrospective (Centred)
Past oriented, centred around nationalism, religion or other stabilised collective identity
Student from PNG argues that any business in PNG must take account of traditional ‘wantok’ cultural practices.
Elitist
Past oriented, centred around high cultural/aesthetic taste
Study of national literature or musical forms.
Therapeutic
Present oriented, concerned with internal processes of sense making in search of a coherent self
Student argues against managing with regard to cultural differences on the grounds that ‘we are all human, and it is up to the individuals involved.’
Instrumental
Present oriented, driven by external local market circumstances
Student argues that it is the business clients’ needs that should guide practice, not just the cultural traditions of the workers.
Future oriented around the sense of becoming a future collective
Student argues, ‘If we are to be global managers ….’
De-centred
Prospective (Re-centred)
Fundamentalist
Using this frame, it is suggested that the ‘comfort zone’ produced by the majority of Knower A claims expressed centred, retrospective fundamentalist identities (with ‘fundamentalist’ here meaning ‘essentialising’ without its current connotations of extremism), being respectful of past narratives, not disrupting this metaculture and its static, naturalised categories. The emerging ‘discomfort’ zone was produced when the de-centred market pedagogic identity required in the second discussion part of the small group task unsettled the retrospective cultural identities invoked earlier by the same task. Similarly, the aberrant messages could be understood to have been expressing more decentred, or prospective orientations, against the grain of the ‘comfort zone’s’ metaculture.
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The discussion will now return to the aberrant message (2K39) in which a Malaysia student offered Knower A knowledge to critique the Knowledge A knowledge offered in the curriculum, on the grounds that ‘paradigms have shifted and times have changed’. This student’s action should also be seen in association with an early complaint by another Malaysia student about the lack of representation of Asian/Malaysian businesses and references in the curricular material. As recounted in Chapter 5, this Malaysia student made a posting in the open ‘Feedback’ forum (Zone E) suggesting that Malaysian business experiences ‘a blend’ of Western and Eastern approaches, with foreign multinationals operating beside local businesses. The student closes with the following complaint:
I noticed that the bulk of the research and management literature are written by Western writers, including our recommendation text by (author). I hope (Unit A) from (University A) will offer a mix of both views so as to present a more holistic approach to management. (E1)
In other words, the student could not see his/her context reflected or represented in the selected instructional materials, and was asking for Knowledge A mode materials with which to learn more about his/her own setting. In his reply, LA refused to buy into the binary construction of East/West, and posited a notably weak classification of such cultural categories (share, challenge) which would support his construction of the curriculum as ‘international’ in flavour:
Thank you for your thoughts. You make a very good point about the need for this course to take a holistic approach. I am very conscious of not promoting a particular style of management and do not want to be seen as endorsing "Western" over "Asian" managerial practices. In fact, I would like to challenge the idea of there being two entirely separate approaches. Surely, there are many Western managers who share the values and practices you characterise as "Asian" (and vice versa). (By 'challenge', of course, I mean 'open up for discussion and critical analysis'). This course with its diverse student complement offers us all an opportunity to share our different perspectives and thereby improve our understanding of management in organisations. I encourage everyone to share in a spirit of mutual respect 255
but also to be open to questions and constructive suggestions from those who have views different from our own whether for cultural or other reasons. (E2)
Given the purposeful absence of LA in the instructional register, in particular, the group discussions, this was the only overt treatment the students are given of his more provocative version of cultural differencing mixed with cultural saming. However, the rest of his posting slips back into more conventional Knowledge B notions of cultural differences that sustained his design of student subsidy.
In his stimulated recall reflection on this incident, LA described carefully wording the title of his reply. He was concerned that it could further offend by privileging the West, and described his response as respectful, but not apologetic:
One significant cultural thing is the latest posting I made on 'Asian versus 'Western' …. A sensitive issue raised by a Malaysian student. I saw it as touching on cultural bias. I noticed I originally had the word 'Western' first in the subject line and altered it to put 'Asian' first. I wanted to assure the student about lack of bias but to not surrender my authority to 'challenge' (note how I later added an explanation of the word - again my new awareness of cultural issues). I also used the posting to remind all students to respect diversity. (ChLA1)
Again, the politics of the internationalised curriculum was depicted as fragile and a delicate matter of handling potential offence, misunderstandings and imagined sensibilities in the textual environment.
While the curriculum was offered as an international resource, the student was asking for materials that reflected his/her own particularities. Robertson (1992, p. 100) suggests that such tension between the universal and the particular is characteristic of current times:
… we are … witnesses to - and participants in - a massive, twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and 256
the particularism of universalism .. the simultaneity of particularism and universalism ..
To add insult to perceived injury, the Knower A critique of the Hofstede framework in the second group discussion (2K39) implied that what little reflection there was of the Asia/Malaysia context in the curricular materials in terms of Knowledge A resources, was of questionable value to the Malaysia students, or the ‘domestic’ students for that matter. This placed more reliance on students to resource this aspect of the instructional register via student subsidy. However, by their distribution across different groups, the Malaysia students were mostly placed in a position of being the representative ‘voice’ of that knowledge, and not its beneficiary. Thus the authority of obsolete Knowledge A knowledge would not have been significantly questioned, and its logic of frozen and essentialised typologies of the Other would have continued to be reproduced ‘as being always the same, unchanging, uniform, and radically peculiar object’ (Said, 1978, p. 98). The value of ‘hot’ Knower A reports ‘from the front’ of social changes was lost when the relative status of this one aberrant voice was weighed against the textbook’s institutional authority. LA’s own authoritative voice was purposefully absent in the entire corpus of second group discussions, in the ‘apparent’ weak framing of the group discussion. Thus there was no authoritative moderator to dignify the critique, or pursue its challenge.
Would the ‘domestic’ Australian student have similarly felt that his/her particularities had not been adaequately addressed? There was no similar protest or challenge from a ‘domestic’ student, asking for materials addressing the Australian context specifically. More subtly, the ‘domestic’ students’ case studies typically did not include the autoethnographic orientation, outlining the contextual setting and impinging cultural dimensions, as did many of the Malaysia students’. As outlined in Chapter 5, LA’s choice of the textbook was decided by its ‘international’ scope, and he reportedly ‘refused’ Australian equivalents because of their provincial bias. That the ‘domestic’ students did not complain suggests that they could read a reflection/representation of themselves in the materials and were presumably comfortable with the ‘default’ settings of the course material selections, equating
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Australian settings with the ‘mainly almost exclusively Western based’ (InLA1) research.
6.7 Conclusion Theoretically, this analysis has developed a language of description using SFL indices to elucidate the classification and framing of knowledge propositions about cultural groups. The data also prompted an elaboration of Maton’s typology of modes of legitimation for knowledge propositions. More practically, the analysis offers an account of the cultural politics of an internationalised curriculum attempting to garner student subsidy of the instructional discourse.
The intention of the design was to promote cultural differencing as a curricular asset. This was largely achieved as the majority of students adopted the voice assigned to them and complied with the projected script. However the analysis has revealed the delicate politics involved in the less predictable interaction between the pedagogy’s voices and messages, and the strains this placed on the commonsensical metaculture. Where previous policy, research literature and marketing discourse reviewed in Chapters 1 and 2 highlight and celebrate the value of internationalised education in its potential for student subsidy, this study has offered a detailed analysis of how this actually worked in practice in one site. More importantly this study showed how the design worked to position students and predispose the interaction to produce certain nostalgic types of cultural expression somewhat at odds with their shared investments in global flows of knowledge and cultural resources.
It was also argued that pedagogic discourse is ultimately an imaginary discourse, and the heuristic constructions of cultural identities and attributes produced under this culturally ‘voiced’ design may have had limited bearing on any lived process. Nonetheless, it seemed to be a missed opportunity to provoke reflection, dialogue and understanding of the ‘paradigm shifts’ (to paraphrase the student’s critique) that have made their shared virtual classroom and global business markets possible. Globalisation theory suggests that cultural categories, their associated attributes and
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constitutive differences will continue to play a revitalised role in how lives and business are conducted but will do so under new, more liquid and volatile conditions. It is therefore suggested that a student subsidy pedagogy could fruitfully be designed around a more processual and relational metaculture to provoke students through more problematic voicing, and extend their ‘comfort zones’. The curriculum materials that provide Knowledge A representations of cultural categories could similarly resource students with more problematised and glocal versions of localities and identities, that better reflect the students’ networked lifeworlds.
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CHAPTER 7: CULTURAL DIFFERENCING AS PEDAGOGICAL PROBLEM …this is one way of understanding the notion of a global culture: the sense of heaps, congeries and aggregates of cultural particularities juxtaposed together on the same field, the same bounded space, in which the fact that they are different and do not fit together, or want to fit together, becomes noticeable and a source of practical problems. (Featherstone, 1995, p. 123-124) The description of the case study unit presented in Chapter 5 showed how the instructional and regulative registers were interwoven as the macrogenre structure unfolded, with one or the other being foregrounded in particular online ‘spaces’ and at various times across the unit’s sequence of interactions. Chapter 6 then dealt specifically with how cultural difference was produced as a vicarious curricular asset in the instructional register, through the pedagogic design of ‘student subsidy’ and its cultured voicing. In contrast, this chapter will deal specifically with how cultural difference was produced in the regulative register as a number of pedagogical problems, despite the lecturer’s explicit aim to avoid such differencing in his pedagogical design.
As outlined in Chapter 4, the regulative register in an ideal curriculum macrogenre could be expected to be prominent at the beginning of macro and micro learning cycles, in order to establish common understandings regarding what activities are to be undertaken and what assessment will apply (Christie, 2000, 2002). Then the regulative register would ideally be gradually sublimated and the instructional register would come to the foreground as learning gets underway. Had this been the case in the observed unit, its conduct would have reflected LA’s ‘cultural saming’ design with no distinctions being produced between groups of students, and the planned activities would have proceeded smoothly. However, as the unit’s interactions played out, there emerged a variety of ‘troubles’ forcing regulative issues back to the foreground of interactions. These troubles took the form of pedagogical problems demanding ameliorative, reactive work from the lecturer. As described in Chapter 5, such regulative ‘flares’ in the conduct typically surrounded
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issues of technological functionality and assessment. This chapter will focus on the particular interactive troubles that produced distinctions or differential treatment between groups of students arising from, or ascribed to, cultural identities. These were: •
the trouble surrounding naming practices;
•
enquiries attempting to excavate implicit understandings of requisite genre in assessment tasks; and
•
the Malaysia students’ complaints regarding the delay in the return of their marked assignments.
To analyse each of these regulative flares, the analytic tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device has informed the selection of data and will again be used to make sense of what happened, why and how. As with Chapter 6, the analysis of each problem will recruit more detailed theoretical resources as prompted by the issues foregrounded by the data. The text purposefully zooms between data and pertinent additional theoretical treatment to drill down into issues the ethnography has thrown up.
For this chapter, the conceptualisation of the globalised zone of interaction as a field of struggles amidst cultural surpluses, proliferating uncertainty and postmodernity’s alternatives (Featherstone, 1995), as developed in Chapter 3, helps frame the ‘hermeneutic problems’ (Bauman, 1990) that emerged over cultured identities in this case study site of virtual interaction across national boundaries. The analysis illuminates how default settings and assumptions can be culturally skewed, and how students disadvantageously positioned by such presumptuous defaults in internationalised education are prepared to assert their right to interact on their own different terms in the virtual global field. In other words, the analysis shows how some students chose not to articulate with the identity positions offered to them by the undifferentiated ‘cultural saming’ regulative discourse.
7.1 First Problem: The trouble with names During the conduct of the unit, it became evident that names were doing a lot of identity and pedagogical work in the online interactions and considerable overt 261
interactive trouble arose over social practices surrounding names. In particular the default field settings in the online courseware did not suit the tripartite Chinese names and their associated conventions, though any traditional scripts for such practices were at the same time being eroded by the proliferation of alternative hybridised practices. The following analysis has selected slices of the online texts and participants’ interview accounts of what choices participants had when it came to naming themselves and others, with their reasons/design behind the choices they made. It demonstrates how naming practices were instrumental in building the respective tenors sought in competing models of teacher/student relationships, and how ethnocentric default settings in the courseware served to produce and exacerbate cultural difference as a pedagogical problem.
Naming as a particular practice that is culturally inflected has not received attention in the literature reviewed earlier in this thesis, with regard to globalisation, cultural identity or pedagogy for international students. However, the data force this recognition and further theorisation with which to illuminate the cultural dynamics surrounding names ‘observed’ in the conduct of the case study unit. Drawing on sociolinguistic theory, this section considers naming as a set of linguistic choices that typically resource the realisation of tenor in texts. It will then consider how the online mode pushed naming into a prominent position in the discourse as a rudimentary cohesive device, and also as one of the few semiotic carriers/indices of identity available in this textual mode. By asking what cultural points of reference or orientations were used to inform naming choice for self and for others in the interaction, the analysis lays out the complexity of cultural flows and the identity projects underway within the virtual time/space of the online internationalised classroom.
Writing about names produces ethical difficulties. In order to protect confidentiality, Chinese heritage names have been replaced here with letters to replicate the form of address and the ordering of names in a three part Chinese name. I have not attempted many pseudonyms for the Chinese heritage names given my own lack of familiarity with their forms and how they might encode gender, age etc. Anglo-heritage names have been replaced with pseudonyms here to protect participant identities. These pseudonyms however do attempt to replicate any 262
diminutive forms and gender-marking that was encoded in the original as this becomes pertinent to the analysis.
7.1.1 A naming complaint By the beginning of Week 4, a student had lodged the following complaint in an email to the lecturer:
Dear Mr [Smith] … In Malaysia, it is common to call people (especially the Chinese community) by the surname. For instance, my colleagues and friends call me "[A]". But as far as the [University A] website is concerned, I am called "[A]", "[B]" and in the discussion group "[A C]". Hope they don't call me "Harry Potter" next! (just a joke, Sir). In summary, I prefer to be called "[A]" but I would like to be listed in the discussion group as "[A B C]"… Thank you very much Sir. May you have a great day ahead. [ABC] (From Malaysia)
This student’s complaint foregrounded hermeneutical problems concerning naming, preferences and circumstances of naming within the unit’s online interaction. The circumstance of being ‘In Malaysia’ was prominent as textual theme in the message’s body, and reiterated at the bottom for emphasis. This circumstance was distinguished from other circumstances – ‘as far as the university website is concerned’, ‘in the discussion group’. He was effectively asking that the circumstances should be considered congruent, as he is ‘In Malaysia’ and these were practices/preferences that should apply equally and legitimately in the virtual internationalised university. Through this text this student tactfully asserted himself, his cultural identity, and his circumstances, in opposition to the default settings and biases encoded in the host university’s systems. This complaint resonates with Nakamura’s (2002) study of constraining cultural frames in internet forms, as reviewed in Chapter 2. His community’s traditional naming practices were to be considered as relevant and legitimate in this globalised virtual space as any hegemonic Anglo script. He intended to participate on his terms, with all due
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respect to the lecturer. This student felt no obligation to merge with the institutional scenery or adjust to its default scripts, as a paying customer of an internationalised education system, who has engaged with the global product locally.
Names and terms of address offer optional linguistic resources with which to realise the interpersonal metafunction of communication and fine tune the tenor in any register. There are however no universals governing naming practices or terms of address across language communities (Braun, 1988). Thus, how other traditions may encode gender, ethnic identity, status, relationship or age in their naming/address conventions (McConnell-Ginet, 2003) often remains opaque and semiotically unavailable to outsiders. The fact that names and naming came to matter so early and so much in this globalising setting may not then be surprising, especially when we consider what work names were doing in this semiotised mode.
7.1.2 Invoking vocatives for mode As introduced in Chapter 4, the Systemic Functional Linguistics concept of ‘mode’ refers to the textual means of communication, and how the nature of the conduit shapes the linguistic choices made. The discussion below outlines how names were crucial in this online mode to establish firstly who was talking to whom, and secondly to put a ‘face’ to the posting. Who is talking to whom? As outlined in Chapter 5, the unit’s online interaction was carried out in the one dimensional mode of electronic print enabled by a commercial courseware platform. The interface offered no control over font or visual aspects of its display beyond the use of all uppercase letters, (conventionally equated with yelling, as one participant was reminded) or other email textual conventions such as emoticons, though these were rarely used in the case study. Attachments of documents using other software were possible, but again only rarely used by the participants. The design and discourse of such online design and pedagogy draws heavily on a metaphorical equivalence between oral communication and online practices favouring constructivist notions of learning through high levels of peer ‘discussion’ (Doherty, 2004). This mode of interaction however differs from oral discussion in a
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number of important ways, which impact directly on what work names had to do in this mode.
Firstly any textual contribution was framed, positioned and mediated by the software’s production of names. The courseware automatically produced a metadata header on any e-turn. This header logged the time as clocked by the university’s server; identified the contributor by name as entered in the student information systems of the university; and indexed the posting by its title, hanging it from its precursor in a relation of hierarchical dependency (hypotaxis) if constructed as a reply to a topic, or parallel independency (parataxis) if constructed as a fresh topic. The data base of postings could also be sorted chronologically, and by name of author. Any listing of postings in this mode displayed its title, date/time and name of author fields. The automated naming of the contributor was possible as participants had to log on with designated usernames and passwords which articulated with and interrogated the student management information systems. This ‘seamless’ functionality is one of the attractions of the standardised range of commercial courseware platforms currently available. The data for such information originated in the students’ enrolment form – which at the time offered the data fields of ‘title’, ‘family/surname’, ‘given/other names’, and ‘preferred name’ for self-naming. These categories displayed and encoded as default the Anglo cultural practices for selecting and sequencing names, and did not at this stage accommodate different cultural practices – for example where family/surname also serves as preferred name, as for the student quoted above.
The technological function of naming the contributor was switched on as a default, but could be manually turned off by the site administrator in an ‘anonymous’ option, which this lecturer activated when soliciting course evaluations. Otherwise, the name produced in the header served to identify who was ‘speaking’ using the format, [Family name, First given name], and the indexing of the e-turns served to identify to whom they were ‘speaking’. In this way the header’s naming gave a ‘face’ (Dunkling, 1977) to the e-turn. Unfortunately, in the case of the Malaysian student quoted above, the header name thus produced had inappropriately construed the data fields, sampling and sequencing the name items by the Anglo tradition when producing a header naming. 265
To complicate matters, the student portal, through which students log on to access their various courseware sites, also produced an automatic greeting, but this one was more informal than the posting header, set to greet students by their preferred name, which is presumed to be interchangeable with their personal name. This explains the multiple naming formats the student reported in the above complaint.
Secondly, electronic mail should be understood as a hybrid mode (Moran & Hawisher, 1998) drawing on both spoken and written conventions, while being neither one nor the other. Thus contributors usually used an opening and closing in their postings as conventionally employed in letters. The opening would name the person/people to whom they are addressing their e-turn (for example, ‘Hello [William] and fellow studiers’), and the closing would name themselves (for example, ‘Cheers [Gayle]’). This naming was potentially less constrained than the official tenor of the technologically-produced header name, and could better reflect the function of negotiating relationships and identity in the context of situation. Thus any re-naming of self or others in the body of the e-turn was potentially a more active expression/design of the text’s tenor.
Unfortunately, the bureaucratic format the header produced, with family name before the first given name, and separated by a comma, was not evident or distinguished from other naming choices by some Malaysia students. These students continued to address their Anglo-named colleagues in the body of their postings using such a sequence: ‘Hi my friend, dear [Smith, Joanne]’, or construed the first name thus presented as the personal name ‘Hi, [Thompson], your case is very good; I like your case very much!’. As mis-namings became more evident to all parties, some students started being self-conscious about naming others, and preemptively apologising if they hadn’t produced the correct name: ‘Hi [Chen] (I hope I’ve got your name in the right order).’ It is significant that despite the risk of possible offence, they still felt the need to include a naming in the text of their posting, to indicate to whom they were replying in this mode.
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Names for putting a face to the voice In this electronic ‘context of situation’, namings were prominent and any name came to carry what it could of the interpersonal meanings that would have been carried by face, accent, dress, tone and gesture, had the interaction been face-toface. Identities were thus being constructed, expressed and read within the limited textual means available. Names became one of the few clues as to the cultural identity of who was ‘talking’, and to whom one was ‘talking’: ‘From your name, it is highly likely that you are a Malaysian student. That being the case….’ Other identity clues observed in the texts included overt expressions of identity (‘I am a Malaysian Chinese living in Kuala Lumpur’), the field of texts narrating Other cultural settings (‘I am originally from Papua New Guinea’), and the surface flaws that mark usage of English as a second language (‘Resources does .. and people is….’). Reading difference from such symbolic markers, names in particular, could lead to presumptuous assumptions of difference/sameness. Any of these aspects could indicate diversity within the domestic students as much as it might distinguish an international student. Similarly, many of the international students enrolled through the Malaysian partner institution were business managers living and working in transnational businesses using English daily, so their English language competence and workplace narratives would not necessarily mark them as culturally different.
In line with this study’s theorisation of culture as processual, relational and forged in contact, it would also be overly simplistic to describe any cultural naming conventions as static, fixed, and mutually discrete. Tan (2004) identifies waves of both ‘Englishisation’ and ‘Mandarinisation’ in naming conventions in Singapore over time. The former, associated with the adoption of English-based given names in formal namings, and the omission of Chinese given names, is considered a homogenising force as the Chinese ethnic community in Singapore adapt to colonial histories and global pressures. The latter, considered a reactionary, heterogenising force, reflects the effort to reinvigorate and re-centre the Chinese identity by promoting Mandarin language and naming practices, omitting English-based names, and employing pinyin conventions for romanised orthography. Tan suggests that
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Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia would share similar processes over time, given their common history as British colonies.
Thus, names themselves were also problematic indicators from which to read cultural identities. Amongst the names of the students, I could recognise familiar Anglo family and personal names, three part Chinese heritage names, and then the multi-part Arabic names of presumably Muslim Malaysia students. However, it became evident as students shared their experiences, that Anglo names were also being used by international students in this context of situation, while their formal meta-data naming reflected a Chinese heritage naming (‘My name is X Y, if u feel hard to remember my name, u can call me James’). Thus the Western name becomes a contingent identity used strategically to reduce difference and symbolic distance and thereby facilitate the situation’s interpersonal demands. In other words, the actor could choose a different virtual face or voice to expedite situational relations in the online interactions. In addition competing accounts were given regarding how to treat Chinese names indicating perhaps a growing, fractal diversity within such cultural scripts.
These accommodations, compounded with the technology’s treatment of name fields, produced spiralling uncertainties and difficulties in the conduct of the unit, as reported by the lecturer:
I made it my business to get to know the names. Even though (laughs) everything was conspiring against me. I couldn’t get a proper set of names. Anywhere. I wanted the list. Where’s the list of their actual names? So at the least I can interpret, the ones, wherever I print a list out, and they had a different name on their email account as from the name that we called them within the [courseware] system. Um, and then, to even complicate things further, the people, we were dealing with through colleges in Malaysia, they are now sending me results and marking, and mixing up. No, what they’re doing, and the students are doing it themselves. Some of them, Chinese names are using the Western format of putting their family name last, and it’s just very confusing … (IntLA2)
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7.1.3 Invoking vocatives for pedagogical tenor As well as contributing to (mis)understandings regarding who was interacting, any choice of names was doing important work by linguistically realising the desired tenor of the regulative register, that is, how teacher and student roles were interacting. Any naming choice encodes and negotiates the three interpersonal dimensions of power, social distance and affect/attitude (Poynton, 1989). The relationship thus constructed through a naming choice can either reflect the existing relational status or promote how the interlocutors’ relationship might desirably be construed. Peers in dialogue typically reciprocate with congruent forms. In contrast, the choices available to the superior in an unequal relationship are less constrained and more ambivalent than those available to the inferior, and ‘the superior party may manifest that superiority in part by acting as if social distance was minimal’ (Poynton, 1989, p. 63). Status markers are becoming less prevalent given the surface ‘democratization’ of institutional discourse (Fairclough, 1995). In the US, Britain and Australia, first name address seems to have become the prevalent form, while honorifics are rarely used, including in academic settings (Dickey, 1997), in contrast to many other language communities. Thus how the powerful name themselves and address others can be both strategic and deceptive in regard to their status in interactions. In a pedagogical relationship, such a ‘democratized’ tenor for the teacher/student relationship equates to weak framing with its ‘apparent’ parity of control (Bernstein, 2000).
In this regard, LA set the tone for his desired weakly framed tenor by modelling how the relation was to proceed in his initial e-turn. The first direction students were given to get the course interaction underway was to introduce themselves: ‘saying who they are, where they are from, what they do etc. …’. To this end, the lecturer posted the first such self-introduction, with the header naming him as ‘[Smith, William]’ beside his title ‘Introducing [Bill]’. He opened the body of the text (no greeting) with ‘My name is [Bill Smith] and I’m Professor of … at [Uni A]’, and closing ‘Cheers, [Bill]’. This final self-naming chose not to include any of his official titles (‘Dr.’, ‘Professor’) which would have highlighted his status and authority (Poynton, 1989), though reference had been made to this status in the text. Titles were not included in any meta-data namings. Rather he chose the diminutive
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and more familiar form, the equivalent of ‘Bill’, not ‘William’. In Australian English, Anglo names can be truncated or augmented in conventional ways to produce diminutive or familiarised forms that purposefully reduce social distance. These changes can be patterned, for example by adding ‘y’ to the first syllable, or more idiosyncratic, as in ‘Betty’ for ‘Elizabeth’. Personal names in English are also typically gender-marked, though this is not morphemically evident (as Italian ‘-a’ or ‘-o’ suffixes would be). Rather it is an arbitrary cultural system, ‘largely learnt item by item’ (Zwicky, 1974, p. 788). Thus those ‘in the know’ can relate the diminutive ‘Bill’ to its full or ‘real’ form, ‘William’, and will read/understand that it refers informally to a male.
The tenor constructed through this self-naming choice, by LA’s account, was an important and conscious aspect of his pedagogical design, and contributed to the model of teacher/student relationship informing his pedagogy:
… and this is part of accessibility, you sound very informal, ah, very ah relaxed rather than, you know, ‘Here’s directions!” boss of the course. … some people prefer the professor to be much more learned than I deliberately work to play that down. I ah, insist, don’t have to insist hard, but I always sign myself [Bill]. I ah, you know, encourage people to call me [Bill] and so on. (IntLA1)
In Australian English, diminutives are typically used more often for women regardless of age or status (Poynton, 1989). Thus, the choice made by the high status male lecturer in this case study to consistently name himself by a diminutive form, should be considered more marked than it would be for a female lecturer in an Australian context.
Using the device of naming choices, LA thus purposefully constructed the relationship between himself and his students on a more equal footing, or at least with the semblance of parity, masking the power and status of his role and downplaying his instructional authority. It is significant that in the first days of this unit, he also purposefully requested that his meta-data naming in the university’s information systems be reset to match this informal-by-design self-naming: 270
… if you go back and see the first postings, I was “[William]”. The system had me listed as “[William]”, and ah I contacted them, because I, some years ago, got the system to change me to “[Bill]” even though they may link this to [current information software] and I’m on the system as “[William]”. But I just said to the people, “Look, I’ve been teaching as “[Bill]” for a long time and ah, I think it’s just confusing to people who don’t know the difference… (Int LA2)
By this account he is carefully working to accommodate the cultural Other to whom the range of Anglo naming practices may not be familiar, while asserting his preference for the informal form. In his interview accounts, he reported that some Malaysian students were ‘uncomfortable’ (Int LA2) with this informality. The Malaysia student’s complaint above, with its use of respectful use of titles of address, ‘Mr.’ and ‘Sir’, also suggests that some were unconvinced by, or unaware of, this nuance in Anglo naming choices.
Following LA’s model self-introduction, many Australian students proceeded to post self-introductions, which frequently opened with a similar greeting and their self-naming: ‘Hi everyone. I’m [FG]. The self-naming in the closings often chose truncated informal versions of the formal header name. However, some of the students chose to address the lecturer with his full first name, ‘[William]’, rather than reflect the informal version back, thus re-constructing the imbalance in relative status.
The enrolments through the Malaysian partnership were delayed because of administrative hiccups, so the international students did not appear in this zone until it was well established (the first being 106th in a total of 143 introductions in Zone A). However, it is significant that the first student from Malaysia to post a selfintroduction felt obliged to include an autoethnographic briefing on the social practices regarding three part Chinese heritage names, thus relativising the default assumptions that had operated up until that time: ‘My name is [HIJ] and I am a Malaysian Chinese living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Most of my friends call me [H] (it’s my surname/family name and it’s common in Malaysia to call a Chinese by 271
surnames)…Cheers [H].’ The next student to post complicated this briefing by offering a different account: ‘My name is [LMN] but people usually address me as [M]. … best regards, [M]’ inadvertently producing uncertainty rather than elucidating how to go about naming. The third Malaysia student to introduce himself used an Anglicised first name with a three part Chinese name in the family name position: ‘My name is [Ian JKL] … Cheers [Ian]’. The complexity continued to grow as each Malaysia student offered a permutation of how naming resources applied in each of their individual cases. Interestingly, none of the Malaysia students addressed the lecturer by his full first name form, ‘[William]’, suggesting perhaps that the choice of ‘[Bill]’ did not carry the intended meaning of offering a more informal relationship. One student addressed his self introduction with ‘Hello Mr Bill Smith and all coursemate’, another with ‘Hello Professor Bill’, mixing the formal and informal forms of address. Tan (2004) similarly notes the lack of distinction between formal and informal forms in the English-based names adopted in his corpus of Singaporean university graduates.
Soon after these introductions, the lecturer posted an announcement for all students, explaining that:
in Chinese format my name would be ‘x…y…’ and you would call me ‘x…’. If you are unsure, I’d suggest you ask your fellow students how they prefer to be addressed.
He thus offered the authentic ‘traditional’ script, but also alerted students to the uncertainties arising in the variety of accounts and hybridised practices offered by the international students. Thus even this ‘traditional’ format becomes a presumptuous or dubious assumption in these conditions.
At the same time, in consideration of who the fellow students were, another Malaysia student reported avoiding culturally appropriate namings in his case study narrative, ‘translating’ the varied and nuanced practices of his local racialised setting to accommodate the international reader:
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Researcher: (you wrote)"I think when you communicate, you are much more aware that what you will be saying may not make sense to some international students." Could you give me some examples of how this aspect affected your choice of wording/content when you made a posting? Student: The first thing that came to my mind was terminology. For example, for names, we have Indian, Chinese and Malay people. So when I write my case narrative, I try not to use Chinese, Indian and Malay names. Also, when we address a Malay gentleman, we use En. (short form for Encik, translated as mister) while we would use Mr. if the gentleman is Chinese or Indian. So if you write your case narrative with En. Ahmad for example, your reader would be wondering what is En. and even Ahmad which is the name of the gentleman. (A3)
To facilitate relations and understanding in the small group discussions, this student was thus prepared to disembed his work scenario narrative from its local context, and render it in a translated form the ‘domestic’ students could understand. In a way, this choice withheld the production of cultural difference in the instructional discourse that the student subsidy design had intended.
These moments of trouble over naming produced larger effects. Following the opening student complaint, the lecturer alerted his university management to the inappropriate treatment of Other names embedded in the technological and information system defaults and the risk of cultural offence that might jeopardise the university’s efforts to build its ‘future as an international provider’. This was thus considered a small matter with large symbolic ramifications, given the policy of pursuing international enrolments and contracts. The faculty have since altered their enrolment form, doing away with the ‘preferred name’ field, now asking for ‘formal name for official documents’ to allow students to represent themselves according to the sequencing of their choice.
Meanwhile, in a small group discussion, an Australian student opened interaction with a self-introduction that presumed no defaults, and offered the suggestion that group members ‘call me [Max]’. He then asked how his group members wanted to be addressed, but received no explicit response, with other members relying on the 273
header naming to identify their contributions. When questioned about this in an email interview, this student confessed feeling at a loss:
… the second group experience provides a good illustration of the 'con' issues with online cross-cultural communication. I am not sure if asking for direction was somehow offensive. I was particularly confused by the different forms of address and in the end tried to avoid using any name at all. (A10)
This was a small symbolic effort, with confusion and uncertainty as the outcome.
7.1.4 What’s in a name? The micro-analysis above has outlined the finely textured work naming choices accomplished in online pedagogic interactions. It has also described the incommensurability of such nuances across linguistic and cultural communities, and the growing complication of hybridised and contingent practices adopted to expedite relations in a global field, and to articulate with the resources on hand. In its detail, this trouble surrounding names exemplifies Featherstone’s (1995, p. 5) observation: ‘the problems we encounter in everyday practice because culture fails to provide us with a single taken-for-granted recipe for action introduce difficulties, mistakes and complexity’. Given the prominence of naming in this electronic mode, mis-namings produced by default settings mattered enough for some students to protest about the treatment of their identities, and assert their right to culturally appropriate naming. Significantly, they invoked their local cultural practices, and insisted on their own terms. Featherstone makes the additional point that: ‘We should not consider cultures in isolation, but endeavour to locate them in the relational matrix of their significant others’ (1995, p. 112). Thus the symbolic micro-act of insisting on ‘my’ own terms should not just be understood as about ‘me’ but more pointedly about the relation between ‘me’ and ‘you’ in these interactions, producing and asserting the difference understood to lie between.
In this seemingly small issue of naming choices, the ethnography thus captured and demonstrated the growing uncertainty and hermeneutical problems in the
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interaction amidst competing global alternatives: ‘Taken-for-granted tacit knowledge about what to do, how to respond to particular groups of people and what judgement of taste to make, now becomes more problematic’ (Featherstone, 1995, p.5). As argued in Chapter 4, communication in such situations cannot be presumed or understood to be nested within a shared context of culture, but rather needs to be understood as forming a temporary connection between spaces and places, an intersection of cultural trajectories which ‘makes us aware of new levels of diversity’ (Featherstone, 1995, pp. 13). Some students have come to this virtual moment with a retrospective orientation, still firmly anchored in traditional scripts. Others have come with de-centred orientations, happy to adapt to the present tense moment and adjust how they name themselves, to further their interests in this shared enterprise. Still others are more prospective, and intend to be fully included in their future community of choice, as the third regulative problem below will demonstrate. There will be no singular script for ‘how to name’ as multiple modernities pass through this and similar network nodes. Though no ‘domestic’ students offered to re-name themselves to lubricate the interaction, they were nevertheless affected by the proliferation of possibilities, and the relativisation of their own heretofore unexamined or default scripts. The ground had shifted under them.
The discussion now turns to the second ‘pedagogical problem’ producing cultural differencing in the regulative discourse, the issue of assumed knowledge of requisite genre in assessment tasks.
7.2 Second Problem: Genre queries As described in Chapter 5, there was much interactive trouble in the regulative register around the topic of assessment. In particular there was widespread protest in Zone F in Weeks 9 and 10 following the students’ receipt of their first individual assignment grades. Many students were unhappy with their grade or the lack of detailed feedback with which to improve their subsequent grades. As this regulative flare played out, the one ‘High Distinction’ student and others agreed to post their assignments as models for discussion. With this precedent, students successfully
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pushed for model assignments to be made available for the following two individual assignments, then proceeded to dissect and contest each of these models.
This section will firstly summarise a string of e-turns in Zone F by Malaysia students and LA’s responses. The selected postings dealt with unpacking and querying assessment requirements, firstly prior to submission dates, and then in response to offered models, grades and criteria. Using Bernstein’s distinction between the rules of recognition and rules of realisation, and meshing Bhaktin’s with Martin’s theorisation of genre as the semiotic realisation of context of culture, this section demonstrates that some Malaysia students were differently resourced to produce the requisite genre, and needed, indeed demanded, additional support to decode the tacit rules of realisation, which LA endeavoured to provide but only to a limited degree.
7.2.1 Excavating rules The first individual assessment task required the students to develop a workplace narrative outlining problematic organisational behaviour, then a ‘formal report… (with scholarly references…)’ analysing such behaviour using conceptual frameworks from the curricular materials. Prior to submitting individual assignments, the students had posted and discussed their narratives in small group forums, thus they had seen other student-generated examples of the narrative task and some versions of analysis. The second individual task, requiring a fictional change management scenario and its analysis, was similarly structured to follow group discussion but was more heavily weighted. The third individual task was a reflection on and analysis of the student’s own management and leadership style. For each task, the instructions for students stipulated a word limit, broke the task down further and outlined five criteria for assessment, each allocated 20% in the final grade. The final criterion in each task addressed ‘quality of report presentation’.
Zone F saw 23 e-turns by Malaysia students enquiring about assessment protocols and tasks. There were 16 queries of a similar nature from the body of domestic students, but the disproportionate majority were from the Malaysia students who
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constituted approximately one third of total enrolments across the life of the unit. Eturns before submission dates typically requested details such as: •
bibliographic referencing styles and conventions: ‘Can you tell us what style of referencing (Uni A) or your goodself want us to use?. Is it Harvard referencing, APA, etc?’ (F3);
•
what was to be included in the word count: ‘Will the referencing mentioned throughout the essay be included in the … word limit?’ ( F11);
•
what textual formatting was required: ‘Can you tell us the kind of formatting we need to follow to write our report? I mean in terms of line spacing, headers & footers, page numbers (on the top right hand corner of the page) etc.’ (F24);
•
and how to complete and include the required cover sheet: ‘Can someone please tell me how these should be filled?’ (F68).
As a group, these queries seemed to be confined to superficial technicalities, seeking the definitive correct answer. Some times LA responded with such a definitive answer: ‘Yes, the word count includes the 400 word (approx) narrative’ (F39). At other times he offered a more flexible suggestion: ‘The precise format is up to the individual student. The requirement is that your report is professionally presented with appropriate use of headings and sub-headings to give it structure’ (F25), or supplied a model paper: ‘I have added two of my papers to the (website)… They can also serve as models on how to format your assignments (though an equally professional format is acceptable)’ (An12). This oscillation between firm rules and more flexible guidelines to inform personal judgement may have helped produce the frustration evident later when the students contested models against the espoused ‘rules’.
Less typical queries from Malaysia students sought to unpack the question and structure the writing task more clearly:
Is it possible for you to clarify in more specifics regarding case study 2? I’ve a few problems trying to understand what I’m supposed to touch on …
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[outlines a possible structure] Am I on the right path if I follow the above understanding? (F113).
There were such queries for additional unpacking before each assessment task, to the point that for the third task, one Malaysia student simply asked: ‘Please provide guidance how to prepare the above report’ (F241).
In the wake of receiving grades for their first assignment, there was a call lead by ‘domestic’ students for more constructive feedback which grew to become a request for models of good assignments to ‘learn from’ and to inform their next efforts. As recounted in Chapter 5, LA approached the one student who received a High Distinction grade, who agreed to have the assignment uploaded as a model. The HD exemplar was widely applauded, but then subjected to detailed scrutiny by some Malaysia students against the rules that had been excavated in the preceding enquiries, for example:
Pertaining to the sample HD’s case, the word count was 3,944 words inclusive of the Case Narrative ... and 3, 486 words if excluding the CN. If the word count for the sample HD case was also 3,000 words, then it has exceeded the limit by 31% and 16% respectively. I am just wondering if there is a margin allowed before the student is being penalised for exceeding the 3,000 word limit. I would appreciate your clarification on this matter. Cheers … (F230)
Significantly, the electronic mode of this pedagogy offered word processing tools such as ‘word counts’, ‘table of contents’ and an array of formatting options. These affordances in turn made such concerns and complaints possible.
Malaysia students enthusiastically greeted the student models offered, ‘Thank you for your unselfish spirit. I reach across the waters and give you a BIG HANDSHAKE!’ (F190), then asked for models of subsequent assignments to be available before the submission date, rather than after, as was the case with the first assignment, for example: ‘It would be nice if U can show us a HD sample for this assessment. If fact it would be great to show a PS sample so that we can judge for ourself and know where we stand eventually’ (F239). By the third assessment task 278
however, LA was less accommodating of such requests. In response to the generic request quoted above (F241), LA responds: ‘The official guidance has already been provided in the specification for the assignment. However, I will be posting an example soon (on the understanding that it is not a “model” but only an example)’. Thus by the third assignment, the provision of a model had come to replace explicit enquiries and instructions, though LA’s caveat that ‘it is not a “model” but only an example’ suggests he was actively working to pre-empt and disallow its scrutiny.
The practice of providing exemplars of assignments was not without its critics. On two occasions, individual students voiced their concern that they might be accused of plagiarism as their work-in-progress resembled the models provided before submission dates. Other students in their course evaluations and email interviews criticised the practice: ‘I think an HD example could have consisted of a completely different subject whilst emphasising the points in writing good essays rather than basing it on the current actual assignment that we were working on’ (A7).
The next section develops further understandings of the concept of genre, as introduced in Chapter 4, in order to make sense of this set of regulative troubles and why some Malaysia students displayed heightened needs and frustrations in regard to explicating what was wanted in assessment tasks.
7.2.2 What’s in a genre? In Chapter 4, the concept of genre was developed to conceptualise the layer of cultural conventions that shape texts according to their purpose and the associated intertextual chain of ‘like’ texts. From Bahktin’s work it is understood that competence in genre types is typically inarticulate expertise and that flexibility in tailoring genre forms comes through mastery. It was argued that this study raises the issue of whether the ‘context of culture’ in which any genre is embedded applies across disparate settings temporarily linked by electronic networks. Kramsch and Thorne’s (2002) pertinent empirical study of online internationalised foreign language classes reviewed in Chapter 2 explained the emerging tensions and misunderstandings they observed with reference to subtleties of genre selection and ‘blurring’. They diagnosed the interactive trouble as ‘genre wars’:
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… not between individuals choosing ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ styles of writing, … but between two local genres engaged in global confrontation. Because genre is bound up both with global communicative purpose and a local understanding of social relations, genre is the mediator between the global and the local. It is all the more pervasive as it is the invisible fabric of our speech. It should not be surprising, then, that at the end of our analysis we find genre to be the major source of misunderstanding in global communicative practice. Because we tend to take our genres for natural and universal …, we don’t realize the local flavour they bring to the global medium. (p. 99)
Their findings empirically illustrate Featherstone’s notion of the global field as a zone of contestation between different cultural scripts, Bakhtin’s point that genre though often tacit and unarticulated are always in play, and the challenge of competing genre templates, intertextual referents and more generally, contexts of culture posed by deterritorialised education.
The additional consideration at play in this thesis’ case study, however, is the power invested in assessment protocols and their evaluation and how the implicit assumptions about which/whose genre is considered normal or appropriate works to differently position groups of students:
Evaluation condenses in itself both the grammar and its realisations. It is the point in which power speaks explicitly …. Evaluation whilst ensuring the reproduction of the classification, and through this, the distribution of power, appears embedded in the ‘normalisation’ or homogeneity assigned to index acquisition. (Bernstein & Diaz, 1984).
Bernstein’s distinction between rules of realisation and rules of recognition will be used in conversation with the data to further unpack this play of power in legitimating and ‘normalising’ certain genre in pedagogical contexts.
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7.2.3 Rules of realisation and rules of recognition for genre Bernstein (2000, p.17) distinguishes between rules of recognition and rules of realisation in pedagogical transmission. These are related and vary in line with the strength of classification of the pedagogical context and discourse:
The classificatory principle, strong or weak, will indicate how one context differs from another. The classificatory principle provides the key to the distinguishing feature of the context, and so orientates the speaker to what is expected, what is legitimated … Certain distributions of power give rise to different social distributions of recognition rules and, without the recognition rule, contextually legitimate communication is not possible.
The rules of recognition refer to understandings that allow individuals ‘to recognise the specialty of the context that they are in’ (p. 17), that is, to distinguish between the particular pedagogical context and external contexts with regard to its required roles, discourse, register or practices. Bernstein goes on to give an example where a ‘weakly classified context can create ambiguity in contextual recognitions’ (p.17). In this case study unit, the apparently weak classification of online student/teacher and student/student discourse, in which accounts of their worldly and work experience, humour and anecdote are welcomed, could produce ambiguous cues as to what is appropriate and permissible, and how this context might be discursively specialised. In addition, LA’s choice not to include classic case studies in his curricular selection also means that students were not given high status models of relevant genre – but rather, were exposed to each other’s draft versions thereof, perhaps giving mixed, ambiguous messages about what was considered legitimate. In this light, the Malaysia students’ questions to excavate the implicit rules for assessment could be understood to be testing the strength of the discursive classification operating in the assessment task, and how it was to be distinguished from the pedagogical interaction that preceded it, such as the small group discussion. Their questions could also be interpreted as checking how similar or different this educational setting was from others they had experienced.
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For Bernstein (2000), the rules of realisation refer to understandings that allow individuals to ‘produce legitimate communication … to produce the legitimate text’ (p. 17-18). ‘Text’ here refers to anything which attracts evaluation, and in the case study would include the assignments students produce for formal assessment, and their small group discussion postings which were peer assessed. The distinction between recognition and realisation allows for the possibility that participants might recognise the distinct discourse required, but be unable to produce it. For Bernstein, the rules of recognition and rules of realisation are how students internalise the classification and framing of their context: ‘We do not have classification and framing in our heads but tacit rules for the recognition and realisation of contextually specific meanings and practices’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 127). The tacit nature of such understandings resonates with the inarticulate expertise of Bhaktin’s parallel frame. The students tried to excavate these rules in their queries in order to produce the legitimate text.
Macken-Horarik (1996, p. 74) draws a link between Bernstein’s rules of recognition and realisation and the practices of students failing in her study of secondary subject English:
many students fail because they fail to apply the ‘right’ recognition rules to the literary response task in the Reference Test … successful students, on the other hand, do distinguish between the context of this task and those of classroom contexts. .. Thus what is ‘above’ the text in these situations is a function of which intertextuality is ‘in play’.
To articulate Bernstein’s rules of recognition/realisation with Martin’s notion of genre as semiotic context of culture, I would argue that the rules of recognition read or sample the linguistic level of register, that is, the text’s realisation in its field/tenor/mode choices. Thus the students’ typical fixation on surface issues of word limits, referencing conventions and formatting interrogated only what was empirically evident at the surface of the text. However, to produce legitimate versions of the privileged text, rules of realisation also need to read/sample the extra-linguistic or structural level of genre. This realm is less articulated, more a matter of socialisation through intertextual experience. Building from Figure 2 in 282
Chapter 4, Figure 3 attempts to visualise these layered relationships, with the rules of realisation nested within, a subsample of the rules of realisation.
Figure 3: Rules of recognition and realisation mapped over genre
genre Rules of realization field
mode
Rules of recognition ideational
textual
tenor interpersona l
Thus students, unaware of their own tacit expertise, found it hard to find the words to interrogate this dimension for producing the legitimate text except with reference to surface features. Similarly, LA did not articulate what makes the HD assignment textually effective, but described it understandably in more substantive terms:
[HD student’s] assignment was outstanding in terms of the quality of analysis and the demonstrated understanding of conceptual frameworks. For example, she didn’t get an HD grade for having a certain number of references but rather for effectively integrating scholarly perspectives into her analysis … The final marking criterion is about the overall professionalism of the report presentation - to score an HD it has to be outstanding. (F214)
He resorted to making the intertextual resources of the models he and others supplied do the work for him, in the hope that the necessary understandings would be ‘caught’. Bhaktin’s additional point, that flexibility comes with genre mastery, is illustrated in the students’ scrutiny of the model. As they attempted to pin its features (for example, word counts) down to the rules stipulated by LA, and hold 283
him accountable for any discrepancy, he with his tacit mastery could respond with a flexible tolerance, taking the criteria as indicative guidelines not prescriptive rules.
To summarise the above discussion, the stream of regulative trouble regarding assessment tasks and their textual presentation was dominated by Malaysia students who displayed a disproportionate thirst for guidance and models. Such needs at this stage of their transnational education were explained with reference to the extralinguistic construct of genre, which is understood to structure and shape text in culturally appropriate ways. Mastery of genre conventions is achieved by experience in an intertextual chain of ‘like’ texts. Such mastery is often tacit learning. With mastery of a genre comes a degree of flexibility in applying it. It was suggested that mastering a genre requires both learning the rules of its recognition, (what distinguishes it from other text types), and the rules of its realisation (how to produce a legitimate instance of the text type). The former was understood to interrogate the register, or linguistic realisation of ‘like’ texts. The latter was understood to require insights into or competence in the extralinguistic structuring of text, that is, its genre. Both students and lecturer alike in this case seemed to find it difficult to interrogate textual forms and structures beyond surface details, limiting their exchange to issues of word counts, referencing conventions, ‘format’ and ‘setting out’. Thus the eventual call for and supply of model assignments filled this void produced by inarticulate tacit knowledge. Such ‘genre trouble’ and the differencing of students in regard to the ‘default settings’ of implicit genre in assessment tasks could perhaps be predicted in any educational program, but particularly so in transnational education with its interactions between spatially distributed actors, in particular, at their first point of contact.
By arguing that the Malaysia students were differently positioned by the implicit defaults of culturally imbued genre underlying assessment tasks, am I slipping back into thinking of culture as an ‘out there’ reality, rather than the relational process outlined in Chapter 3? I would argue that this is not the case, on the grounds that genre are understood to rely on and stem from intertextual experiences. The Malaysia students who are new to the settings of the Australian university, or the Western discipline of Business, may not previously have been exposed to other ‘like’ texts from which they can draw their generative understandings, or are unsure 284
if their previous intertextual experiences are relevant in this setting. LA, by not using the classic case studies common in such courses (a tradition on which his innovation was modelled), has inadvertently stripped the curriculum of high status models of how such texts, typical of and unique to business education, are staged or presented, leaving it to students to define the ‘like’ intertexts. As the Malaysia students progress in their studies in this context, they will accrue experience in, and come to share, the intertextual coherence that sustains such specialised genre. Thus their cultural referents for such tasks will shift in line with their new contexts and new experiences. By this framework, they are not fixed, essentialised, or locked into atemporal cultural identities, rather they are perceived as in the process of gaining access to new cultural resources as required by the contingencies of the context, as previously separate worlds are brought together in the networks and routes of internationalised education. Nor will the genre templates remain essentialised and fixed, but rather the conventions surrounding this type of text and its structuring could well be impacted upon by the inclusion of new members in its intertextual chain.
Another reflection that needs to be made is to challenge the text’s slippage into generalisations about the ‘Malaysia student’ experience. The genre queries discussed above were made by some of the Malaysia students, not all. That the majority of such queries were made by Malaysia students, should not be read as meaning that all Malaysia students demonstrated such needs, or relative disadvantage. Rather the selection of the case study, being a first contact unit for a pilot group of students enrolled through a new international partner, attempted to heighten the possibility of new socialisation issues arising, in order to investigate how cultural differencing in turn may arise. The issue of assumed and implicit genre in assessment tasks is one such possibility that this study has demonstrated, but this should not be read that all international students will have problems in this realm, nor that domestic students will not have similar problems. At this stage of some of their careers, this issue posed a temporary problem.
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7.3 Third Problem: Local time, global space and glocal identities This chapter thus far has dealt with regulative troubles that emerged around naming practices, and implicit genre for assessment tasks. The third and final aspect of cultural differencing in the regulative register to be discussed concerns the delay Malaysia students experienced in receiving their first marked assignments. The discussion will initially outline how the differencing was empirically displayed and made textually evident in simple linguistic choices. The events producing expressions of differencing thus identified will then be explored with reference to tensions between local times, global space and the projection of cultured identities in internationalised education.
7.3.1 Textual exclusion Following Wodak (2002) on the textual construction of ‘them’ and ‘us’, a number of searches were conducted to identify how the pronouns ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ were used in Zone F. This zone was selected because, being the Question/Answer dialogic space LA established to handle queries and problems regarding the conduct of the course, it was typically devoted to the regulative register and its troubles. The personal pronoun, ‘we’ and its derivatives can carry two senses (Halliday & Matthiesen, 2004, p. 325): ‘speaker plus listener’; and ‘speaker plus other(s)’ but not including ‘you’, the interlocutor. The former is widely termed the ‘inclusive we’; the latter, the ‘exclusive we’. Using a search tool in the qualitative research software package, Nvivo, to identify instances of ‘we/our/us’ in their textual contexts, it became evident that the vast majority of ‘we/us/our’ invoked by students in this space was an exclusive ‘we’ which designated the complete student body in dialogue with ‘you’, the lecturer, who was not included in ‘us’. For example: ‘… can you show us how we are supposed to reference …’ LA occasionally used an inclusive ‘we’ at times to embrace himself and the students in the same learning community of business professionals, for example: ‘… as we all know, management is the art of achieving results through others’ (An40), but in Zone F, LA consistently reciprocated with the exclusive ‘we’ to refer to himself, the
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institution and staff as distinct from ‘you’ the students, for example: ‘We are in the process of opening up all groups to ‘browsing’ by all students.’
As a marked departure from this typical pattern of ‘we’ being all the students, the following three postings were distinguished by their use of the exclusive ‘we’ to refer only to the Malaysia cohort, as distinct from the domestic cohort. They were made by different Malaysia students over six days in the midst of (domestic) students’ complaints about the paucity of constructive feedback on receipt of their first marked assignment:
When will we Malaysians know of our assessments ? Is a local examiner involved in the markings ? (F158)
(Title: When for Malaysians?) When will the Malaysian students know our results? (F166)
I was wondering whether you might have an idea as to when we Malaysian students will be able to obtain our results to the first assignment (Assessment 2). I am concerned as if it is released any much later, we will not have the advantage of reading the examiner/marker's comments, which I would consider invaluable in ensuring we do a better job in our second assignment (Assessment 3). (F171)
These three postings, thus flagged by their marked linguistic choice, indicated that the Malaysia cohort, or members thereof, felt unfairly distinguished from other students by virtue of belonging to the ‘Malaysian’ cohort. LA replied to these queries on the sixth day:
I am sorry to report that there has been a delay with the results for the Malaysian students. Examiners have to first send the marked papers to me for moderation – I will do this on the day I receive them and will immediately post the results. I am expecting them in the next few days. You should have the feedback well before the second assignment is due. (F173)
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Thus it emerged that the assignments were in the proverbial mail, their physical matter crossing oceans, mountains, rivers and plains between the partner institutions’ localities. Ironically a complaint about the passage of ‘real’ time rendered salient the distributed nature of the relations in ‘real’ space, which had thus far been masked or irrelevant in the ‘timeless’ metaphoric ‘space of flows’ of the online environment.
This reply produced the first knowledge Malaysia students had that their assignments were to be locally marked, as per the contractual agreement between the partner institutions. DA, in an interview, offered further insight into the arising trouble, suggesting that these three postings were indicative of more widespread frustrations from the Malaysia students, not only over the delays, but also over the use of local markers:
DA:… and there’s been quite a lot of flack coming by email to us from the Malaysian students. R: Alright, so this is coming behind the scenes? DA: they feel hardly done by, but the funny part about it is, when we are doing the moderation of these assessments, the Malaysian students are being marked more severely by the Malaysian markers than we would have liked. Isn’t that interesting? (Ch1DA)
Despite the ‘cultural saming’ pedagogical design, this flare produced an issue of respective localities and their spatial distribution which served to produce a systematic distinction between two groups of students – those who used the term ‘Malaysian’ to refer to themselves, and the other students who become ‘local’ by default, the unmarked ‘normal’. Having established that the Malaysia cohort had felt ‘differenced’ by this series of events and contractual arrangements, as indicated by this regulative flare, I now explore the tension between local and global frames of reference that produced this schism between the categories of ‘local’ and ‘Malaysian’ students (and their markers).
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7.3.2 Glocal space and glocal identities Can ‘local/locality’ in this context be read as a proxy expression of ‘culture’, or is this precisely the nexus that is being unravelled by the cultural processes of globalisation? The delay of the assignments might be seen purely as a ‘real’ space/time problematic, unnecessary and avoidable perhaps in an online mode of pedagogy. In contrast, the Malaysia students’ reported sense of injury over the use of ‘local’ assessors, whose employment caused the delay, cannot be seen in the same light. This could be interpreted as a matter of feeling confined to a local cultural context by the contractual arrangements when they intended and felt entitled to participate in the relations of transnational education, or more possibly, a notionally authentic ‘West’-branded qualification. In other words, they had the larger horizon in mind, and were more prospective in their cultural orientation for this matter.
The concept of glocalisation (Robertson , 1992, 1994, 2001) highlights ‘the ways in which localities are “produced” on a globe-wide basis’ (Robertson, 1994, p. 33). Robertson disputes the simplistic polarisation of ‘global/universal’ and ‘local/particular’, and criticises typical problematics of global versus local interests, arguing that it is the ‘simultaneity and inter-penetration’ (p. 38) of these two frames that distinguishes globalisation from previous international relations. Localities in this view are not ‘things in themselves’ (p. 38) but relational categories, ‘a product of boundary-making’ (Robertson, 2001, p. 466). Thus the ‘localised’ identity produced for the Malaysia students did not arise from any solidarity achieved between category insiders (though this may have emerged retrospectively as a result of their shared sense of injury), but rather the localised identity was imputed, or constructed for them, by virtue of the intervening administrative layers embedded in the corporate contracts. They had cultivated a larger, ‘glocalised’ sense of their ‘local’ context, and were not aware that a boundary had effectively been erected around them.
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In this sense, Featherstone’s (1995, p. 10) expression, ‘range of foci’, helps overcome the ‘local’/’global’ binary and describes how malleable, contingent and adjustable ‘local boundaries’ can be:
It is the capacity to shift the frame, and move between varying range of foci, the capacity to handle a range of symbolic material out of which various identities can be formed and reformed in different situations, which is relevant in the contemporary global situation.
This tangle of interactive trouble, revealed only when the brave new world of ‘fully online’ education got caught in snail mail across the globe’s surface, could be reconstrued as a matter stemming from parties looking through different ends of a telescope – the Malaysia students seeing themselves as part of a larger picture, a wide range of focus with a global horizon, while the host university saw them framed within their local provider’s ‘range of focus’. The incongruence between projected identity maps and ‘local’ boundaries demonstrated here accords with similar disjunctures reported by Rizvi (2000), Kenway and Bullen (2003) and Bullen and Kenway (2003) (see Chapter 2) between how the higher education institution understands/represents the international student, and how the international students understands/represents themselves. The common point in these studies is how the ‘local’ cultured identity position that the institution respectfully offers the international student ultimately constrains who these students can be in such spaces.
7.3.3 Local space and local identity LA had welcomed the Malaysia students’ inclusion in the online interaction as a sign of the university’s ‘coming of age as an international provider’, thus rhetorically scoping the university’s ‘local’ field as larger than, and disembedded from, its physical location. On the flipside, where were the domestic students constructing their ‘local’ boundaries? Empirical access to such subjective ontological categories (Carspecken, 1996) was attempted through the email interviews conducted after the unit’s completion.
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As a comparative foil to LA’s rhetoric and the Malaysia students’ broader horizons, one domestic student expressed a strong opinion that the ‘local’ context which belonged to an exclusive, Australian ‘us’, should have been limited to some national if not smaller local scale. This student, who described herself as: ‘born in Zimbabwe, but have lived in Australia since I was 3. My parents are South African, but I definately identify with being Australian (whatever that is!)’(A2), was wary of Other participants and ‘their’ competing interests when it came to broader issues of globalising her local university:
R: You've chosen your local university, and have what sounds like a very proactive local study group. Do you see any tensions between having your local university also being a global provider? Are there any risks attached to this? SA10: There could be. The international students or even interstate students could perceive that we have an advantage by being able to drop and talk to our lecturers. Plus in my last course the international students got live lectures which we didn't for the same course, I know lots of our students didn't agree with that. I believe our uni should be more vigilant about the help that the international students are receiving.
She reported becoming aware of the presence of international students in the unit interactions ‘by their names and conversation over the [courseware]’ (A2), and felt that they added to the learning: ‘I think it was great, they added their cultural dimension to the conversation when issues were being discussed which made me think from a different point of view to our own culture’. However, in regard to the assessable small group discussion, she expressed a sense of impatience, injustice and resentment over having to deal with the non-standard English of the international students:
R: What are your reflections on using online learning internationally? Do you see any pros or cons in general, or regarding this course in particular? SA10: I love the international contribution, however I think many of them are not on the same playing field. Part of our assessement was to post our own case studies, and some of the language used by some international 291
students was attrocious. We discussed these at our study group to try to help each other out to understand what they were trying to say. I thought it was quite unfair to us, and could not see how those students (international) were allowed to do this course with such poor english. However there where others whose english was acceptable and their contributions were very wise and definately contributed to my learning. (A2)
This account firstly used an exclusive ‘our’ to denote all students, then shifted so that ‘we’ and ‘us’ are the local, domestic students, and the excluded ‘they’ are the Malaysia Others. She also reported purposefully not adapting her language to facilitate their participation:
R: Given the emerging language problems, did you find yourself adjusting your language in any way when interacting with the international students? SA2: I don't think I ended up adjusting my language really, but I thought very hard about it before I wrote something. I remember writing a complicated word and wondering whether they would understand it, and decided to use it any way, because if I didn't, I wasn't helping them to advance their english skills.
This student thus expressed a strong sense of ownership of English in contrast to the deficient ‘non-native’ Malaysia students who were considered learners. She thus denies them any ‘ownership’ (Higgins, 2003; Widdowson, 1994) of the English language and denies their usage equivalent legitimacy despite their shared history as a British colony and the Malaysian community’s public and private investments over time in English language proficiency (Nunan, 2003). Her critique highlights how tightly bounded the ‘local’ context was for this student, and the anchored, retrospective orientation of her cultural ‘range of focus’.
Her critique of the Malaysia students’ inflected language resonated in another way with the original problem of having ‘local’ markers for the Malaysia cohort. By LA’s account, he found on his moderation of the Malaysia assignments that the Malaysia markers had in fact been quite harsh in their assessments of the students’ work, in particular, regarding their English expression: 292
LA: Some of the markers were very hard, and actually much harsher in the tone of their comment than I would ever have been, in fact one of them I ah just wasn’t phsyically possible I must say to change the comments of the markers too much because I didn’t have the [orginal] form often, but one of them I did … The term was just too strong in the saying you know, “your English language is awful!” and I’ve changed it to, it didn’t actually say that, you know ‘Your English expression is…” something very harsh and critical, ah, so I said that, something like “There’s room for improvement in your English expression”. It’s just a softer way of saying that the person’s not quite right … R: How much does it impinge on your judgements you’re making in terms of assessment? Would you see the language problems in the assessment criteria, or would you look through the language competency to what they were saying? LA: I think I always look through the language to see whether they’ve got the ideas, some ideas straight …
In this account of events, control of word-perfect Standard English was upheld and wielded by the Malaysia markers as a necessary condition for success in this site of internationalised education, though LA suggested he was prepared to be more tolerant and inclusive of different Englishes.
The dissonance between the stances taken by various parties in this site demonstrate the variety of scripts constructing self and Other and the variable strength of boundaries between those categories, in terms of how much the differences are considered to matter. Such ‘difficulties of handling multiplicity and cultural disorder’ (Featherstone, 1995 p. 84) emerge in the tensions between globalisation and localisation. This empirical window into one participant’s subjective realm allows us to understand how some of the undercurrents and stresses in the ‘internationalised’ university are lived. This student wanted a ‘local’ university, not a global provider, and felt that her needs and rights were being impinged upon, compromised or marginalised by any accommodation of international students. She could see the advantages to herself in their inclusion, but for her, equity should be 293
interpreted as demonstrable and transparent equality, not through accommodation or circumstantial adjustments. Thus respect accorded to the cultural Other was construed as a displacement, erosion or unwelcome de-centring of her ‘local’ experience.
This student’s constructions of a strongly insulated ‘local’ context were not necessarily representative of all the domestically enrolled students. However, the account has been included here as a comparative foil to the complaints of the Malaysia students to illustrate how the presence of contested ‘local’/‘global’ boundaries, retrospective and prospective orientations, and differing ‘range of foci’ produced cultural differencing as a regulative problem in the interactions.
7.4 Conclusion This chapter focussed on how cultural differencing emerged as a pedagogical problem in the conduct of the case study unit, despite the undifferentiated design of ‘cultural saming’. The emergent troubles were framed within Featherstone’s (1995, p. 102) argument that globalisation has produced a singular field:
… now the world is a single place with increased context becoming unavoidable … a dialogical space in which we can expect a good deal of disagreement, clashing of perspectives and conflict, not just working together and consensus.
Three such flares of trouble in the regulative register were identified from the macrogenre reconstruction and explored using selected analytic resources from sociolinguistics, SFL in particular, and Bernstein’s theory of pedagogy. The first trouble arose over the treatment of Chinese names by the software, the heightened significance of these as semiotic resources in this mode, and the loss of certainty in interactions given the proliferation of naming protocols. The second trouble concerned the differential positioning of Malaysia students in regard to the implicit genre and rules of realisation embedded in assessment tasks, and the extra resourcing they needed to access such tacit scripts. The third trouble emanated from
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different horizons for ‘glocal’ identities producing unwelcome distinctions between groups of students.
These flares could all be viewed as troubles with ‘default settings’, with its intentional metaphorical play on computing terminology. By ‘default settings’ I mean the invisible decisions encoded into the pedagogical setting and design. Given the ‘increased context’ of internationalised education, unexamined defaults, be they encoded in software, assessment tasks, or identities attributed to self and others, amount to presumptuous assumptions that court trouble. Featherstone’s thesis ties his description of increasing cultural expressions to the postmodern condition, that is, of proliferating, competing knowledges producing proliferating uncertainty, at least in current times. In this condition, he argues it becomes ‘more difficult to retain lasting and oversimplified images of others’ (p. 103) which suggests that such issues will not be solved by merely resetting or updating defaults. As Meyer and Geschiere (1999, p. 14) point out: ‘identity has another side: it also has to relate to people’s fascination with globalisation’s open-endedness and the new horizons which it opens up.’ Of all globalising practices, internationalised education, with its promise of access to new high status cultural resources, should be open to the notion of shifting identities, ‘new symbolic modes of affiliation and belonging’ (Featherstone 1995, p. 110) and cultural complexities.
By adopting a pragmatic ‘cultural saming’ design for the regulative discourse, LA had presumed that all students would be able to decipher the tacit rules of realisation for the genre embedded in the assessment. The ‘local’ student had presumed that participants in the online unit should speak standard English. The Malaysia tutors had presumed that LA would demand standard English. The Malaysia students had presumed that they would be treated the same as other students. The institution had presumed that the default name fields would cope with their internationalised student body. When each of these precepts produced interactive trouble, there was someone to blame, identifiable because of their difference.
Through this theme, these analyses shed light on the more general enterprise of online internationalised education and its opportunistic discourse. As presented in 295
Chapter 1, the ‘business of borderless education’ is eager for new markets, and equally eager to slough off constraining considerations of cultural difference that curtailed previous models for the export of education, and the profits that could be derived. The contractual detail forged between the two institutional partners in the case study was shown to have produced its own constraints on the pedagogy, and this in turn, produced problematic expressions of cultural differencing. This analysis has shown that cultural differencing can flourish in unforeseen, subtle and protean ways when knowledge is sold in the global market. This does not discredit the high value that all participants placed on the student subsidy of the curriculum. It does however suggest that cultural difference will come to matter pedagogically in online internationalised education, and imaginary boundaries will be actively constructed, dismantled and re-constructed when any local institution goes global.
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CHAPTER 8: CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN ONLINE INTERNATIONALISED EDUCATION … lose the complexity and you have lost the phenomenon. (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 14)
Robertson (1992) chose to finish his influential book on the cultural processes of globalisation by flagging the university with global aspirations as one of the proactive ‘players’ in globalisation:
... the task of the sociological student of globalization must now include that of comprehending the bases and thrusts of movements in the field of education, not least because such movements are major sites of socialization into our greatly compressed world. Those movements are significant arenas for the study of what I referred to … as processes of relativization in the global field as a whole. In any case, universities have become significant 'players' on the global scene. Traditionally, they have contributed much to transnational communication through cross-national 'communities' of scientists and other academics. But recently universities per se have begun to act in a much more dynamic way with respect to the global field, and to the world spaces within it. (Robertson, 1992, p. 187)
Educational institutions, he suggests, are not marginal bystanders and passive victims of globalisation, but rather, one of the main events. This thesis has argued that internationalised online education makes a particularly good example of how this cultural aspect of the globalisation game is currently being ‘played’. This study has proceeded along the path Robertson suggests and has looked inside this new mode of online pedagogy, not just as a venue for globalised/globalising interactions, but as a set of practices that produce expressions and representations of cultural identities.
This study set out to establish how cultural difference was produced in the design and conduct of pedagogic interaction in the case study of an online MBA unit offered by an Australian university to an internationalised student group. The study
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was conducted as an ethnography adapted to the virtual environment, drawing on: the observation and recording of the interaction in the unit’s website; interviews and dialogues with the teaching and designer staff involved; email interviews with some students; and the collection of course artefacts and related documentation. It used the macro theory of cultural processes of globalisation and network society, with the meso theory of pedagogic and cultural identity orientations, to read the micro empirical events evident in the online interaction. This chapter will review the project’s findings, its theoretical and methodological framing, and its contributions to firstly, the sociology of education and, secondly to the practice of online internationalised education. It will conclude with reflections on the limits of the study and future research indicated.
8.1 The thesis and its implications This study was situated at the intersection of two fronts of change in the Australian higher education sector, being firstly an enthusiasm for technological means of delivery, and secondly a quest for international full-fee paying enrolments. Chapter 1 reviewed the discursive and historical context framing the study with a summary of policy shifts and government-commissioned reports providing ‘market intelligence’ to the Australian higher education sector on the emergent phenomenon of ‘borderless education’. In addition, the flavour of public media representations of the fledgling ‘e-university’ phenomenon was summarised. This scan illustrated the Australian higher education sector’s increasing enchantment and competitive involvement in online education in order to reach international markets, and a re – thinking of issues of cultural difference in this streamlined, business driven mode of delivery. On one hand, cultural difference amongst students is increasingly recognised as something to be embraced and celebrated as an asset, particularly under the most recent policy generation of ‘internationalisation’. On the other, past issues and concerns about cultural difference as a pedagogical complication have become less prominent as the sector moves to exploit technological means. In retrospect, the case study has neatly illustrated these contradictory dispositions, with its design of having the cultural diversity of the internationalised student body ‘subsidise’ the curriculum, while pursuing an undifferentiated pedagogy limited and constrained by the business contract negotiated between international partners. As
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the analysis of regulative troubles in the unit’s conduct shows, cultural difference as a pedagogical concern did in fact come to matter in a number of ways, despite the ‘cultural saming’ aspects of its design.
The review of literature regarding international students demonstrated how closely business interests in exporting education have influenced the sector’s engagement with these students. The review also demonstrated how any pedagogical engagement with international students as a category has typically been understood and managed through a one-dimensional rubric of cultural difference understood within a tired, essentialising metaculture. In contrast, this study built on the less dominant frames in this literature that avoid Orientalised notions of the international learner, and on a processual and relational metaculture better suited to the globalised and networked conditions of liquid modernity. With this frame, the analysis could demonstrate the variety of identity orientations students brought to the virtual interactions, and how the student subsidy design only offered restricted retrospective positions, that students could either articulate with, or trouble.
The review of literature regarding online education revealed a field split between programmatic advocates of visionary promise and pessimistic, nostalgic gainsayers, built on a fragmented research basis of mostly practitioner accounts. In contrast, this study built on the post-technocratic frame of Burbules and Callister (2000), with its distinction between ‘space’ as design and ‘place’ as usage, and its disaggregated, dispassionate gaze over the field of online pedagogy. Similar to the international student literature, a theme of business interests and imperatives is actively shaping this field of practice. This was evidenced in the case study university’s investment in the online mode as their brand’s competitive edge in the crowded MBA market. The burgeoning ‘how to’ literature draws heavily on constructivist notions, that promote high interactivity, peer collaboration and teacher-as-facilitator as model pedagogy for this mode. The lecturer in the case study was an enthusiast of online modes of learning, and adhered to this orthodoxy of high peer interactivity to the point of purposefully withholding his own involvement in the instructional register. Given the strength of the concurrence between the case study attributes and the ‘how to’ literature’s recommendations, it is suggested that this empirical study offers a largely representative case of how online internationalised learning is being 299
conducted, and insights drawn from this case may be validly extrapolated to inform other like sites.
The two literatures, that pertaining to international students, and that pertaining to online education, were shown to display common themes, in particular a fetish regarding interactivity, and business interests as their impetus. In addition, both a ‘gap’ and a ‘collision’ were identified between the bodies of literature. The collision loomed between the inadequately interactive international student heading for the interactively driven online mode of delivery. In the case study, the international student group were in fact shown to have participated widely, assertively and appropriately in the variety of interactive zones and tasks, thus challenging the Orientalised stereotype of the ‘passive’ learner. The relevant gap between the literatures stemmed from the absence of enquiry informed by sociolinguistic traditions of classroom discourse analysis, despite its heightened relevance to such linguistically mediated environments. To this end, this study has used Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse in dialogue with Systemic Functional Linguistics to undertake close textual analysis of the interaction, both to capture the whole ‘macrogenre’ event, and to analyse particular selected textual moments.
The macro theoretical frame situated the study in the penetrating context of cultural processes of globalisation with its disjunctural flows, relativisation, contradictory potentials and excess of cultural resources, and the commodification of knowledge made possible through the marketisation of education and the sale of positional goods. Globalisation was understood to influence micro processes, penetrating the daily imagination and consciousness of individuals, as much as it reshapes nation states and institutions. To derive a theorisation of cultural identities appropriate to these more ‘liquid’ conditions, the theoretical framework highlighted the logic of difference in the constitution of identities, and the processual, relational nature of identification as work-in-progress, as individuals negotiate the contigencies of the settings they pass through, and engage with the identity positions offered therein. Network society, and its affordance of compressed time and space, is understood to have radically altered the resources and means for identity production, including the simulated and imaginary discourses possible in virtual interaction. Pedagogy was also understood to project certain identity positions with which the student may or 300
may not ‘articulate’ his/her own local identity project. Internationalised pedagogy was shown through the analyses to be not culturally neutral as promoted by its enthusiasts, but rather intimately involved in, and reactive with, the varied identity projects of the students as they navigate and invest in cultural flows.
The methodological arguments and design addressed the ontological complexity of culture as lived and expressed in liquid networked conditions. A critical realist frame, with its criteria of epistemological caution, ontological richness and textual reflexivity, offered a stratified ontology distinguishing between the empirically available, the actual events and the underlying potentials and tendencies. This allowed the enquiry to address the open system complexities of networked communications in conditions of globalisation, around which it is difficult to draw boundaries in the tradition of ‘case study’ methods. Carspecken’s critical ethnography similarly offered a layered ontology to address the events as observed, understood and discursively constructed by the actors. Their interview accounts were valued because they offered ‘good enough’ (Luttrell, 2000) empirical access to their subjective constructions of events and the normative principles guiding their actions. A network of analytical concepts and typologies from Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse was operationalised through tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This facilitated nested interrogations of the online interaction’s design as macrogenre and then its conduct by e-turn texts, in terms of how cultured identities or processes of cultural differencing were invoked and displayed in this mode.
The macrogenre description of the unit drew out contradictory aspects of its design that aimed for firstly, ‘cultural saming’ in terms of undifferentiated curriculum and pedagogy, and secondly, ‘cultural differencing’ in the design of student subsidy to enrich curricular treatment of issues of cultural diversity. The design was redescribed as projecting a variety of contradictory identity orientations across its different aspects. In the conduct of the course, these contradictions played out through both compliance with the student subsidy design which was highly valued in students’ interview reports, and regulative flares of complaint and protest, including some where students felt either unduly or insufficiently differentiated. Participants’ accounts of the events demonstrated that the virtual interaction was not 301
considered culturally neutral, but rather, produced heightened senses of difference, and a variety of tactics to engage with such differing sensibilities.
Chapter 6 focused on how the student subsidy design in the assessable small group discussions precipitated overt constructions of cultural difference. Bernstein’s concepts of classification, framing and insulation were applied to the students’ constructions of cultural categories, through the SFL grammatical indices of mood and modality. This analysis distinguished between claims legitimated on the grounds of ‘knower mode’ and those legitimated through ‘knowledge mode’, and subcategories thereof generated from the data. The analysis displayed how the pedagogic design invoked a ‘comfort zone’ which made retrospective cultural identities ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’, then equally created a ‘discomfort zone’ when students attempted to cross the boundaries they had constructed to comment on each Other’s workplace scenarios. This trouble was understood as produced in the interplay between the de-centred market pedagogic identity required in the discussion task, and the retrospective cultural identities the student subsidy design had invoked. Aberrant student messages displayed differently oriented, more prospective identities that seemed to mesh more comfortably with both the global aspirations of the internationalised curriculum, its networked practices and the subject matter of global business.
The analysis undertaken in this thesis has allowed such tension in the design and conduct to be identified, and offers a fruitful way of thinking about future curricular designs for internationalised programs, in terms of what identity positions/voicings could potentially be offered and encouraged. Instead of assuming cultural identities to be fixed, inert and timeless, this thesis has shown how expressions of cultural identity can be produced in the relational contingencies orchestrated by pedagogic design. With these understandings, a curriculum could actively project the students into their imagined glocal futures, rather than respectfully protect their local presents or pasts. Such prospective design would no longer invoke ‘Where do you come from?’ but rather, ‘Who are you going to be in the timeless time and space of flows of network society?’
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The findings pertaining to the instructional discourse offer some additional implications for the education practitioner. Firstly, it was shown how Knowledge mode resources produced confident claims from the students, yet there was an unmet demand for such resources to reflect the diversity of students’ settings, in particular by those Othered by the ‘default settings’ of the Western curriculum. This could be construed as a politics of representation in the curricular selection: which students could see their lifeworlds reflected in the curriculum and which students could not? As well as addressing this representational inequity, ‘glocal’ curricular resourcing would also enrich the student subsidy dialogues and curricular outcomes. It is suggested that any assignment in internationalised programs that is based on students’ local circumstances should require some treatment of context, whereby the local circumstances (‘domestic’ or ‘international’) are situated in their national/ regional/ global relations and dynamics. This would invite students to engage with a more global and relational metaculture, and reduce the curricular privileging of ‘domestic’ students, whose context tended to be taken as ‘given’ in this case study unit.
Secondly, it was shown how Knowledge and Knower modes can work together, both to support claims, and to challenge them. On these grounds, this thesis would support ‘student subsidy’ strategies under certain conditions. With the additional analytical tools of pedagogic identity, cultural identities invoked and the operative metaculture, it is suggested that such pedagogic design should however consciously interrogate the metaculture implicit in its voicing, and offer students less retrospective positionings that are more congruent with the liquid, networked setting that the students are engaged in. It was also observed that more challenging and prospective expressions of cultural identities were produced when dialogue was possible between members of the same voicing position. For this reason, it is suggested that any purposeful groupings should avoid designating students as lone representatives of their position as this seemed to produce more essentialised, heuristic versions of cultural attributes. Finally, it was noted that the lecturer’s designed reticence in the instructional register effectively withheld more provocative frames that might have precipitated more problematised or open enquiries into culture and cultural difference. From this observation, it is suggested that the growing orthodoxy in ‘how to do online education’, which casts teacher as 303
mute facilitator in favour of peer interaction, should be challenged. As a modus operandi, it seems to miss the opportunity to add value to these commodified settings.
As well as being produced as a curricular asset, cultural differencing was produced as a pedagogical problem in the conduct of the unit. This was explored through the analysis of three flares of complaint and trouble in the regulative discourse (Chapter 7). The first regulative flare was sparked by the mistreatment of Chinese-heritage names by the courseware’s construal of metadata fields. Choices in naming practices were understood to realise both identity and the tenor of situational relations. In the online mode, names were also prominent as cohesive devices making links between e-turns. Given the array of traditional and hybridised naming practices that were evident, this trouble with the default settings played out to produce growing uncertainty and sensitivity around the potential of cultural offence through mis-namings. The second regulative flare was a thread of postings aiming to excavate the implicit rules embedded in the genre required in assessment tasks, typically made by Malaysia students. The lecturer’s strategy of providing models of assignments was understood as an attempt to offer intertextual resources to these students so they could derive the tacit ‘rules of realisation’. The third regulative flare was sparked by the real time delay for Malaysia students in receiving their assessment feedback. Their complaints were analysed as expressions of prospective, glocalised identities constrained by the administration’s localised categories and practices. This flare was related to other competing ‘range of foci’ to highlight how boundaries and categories of differing strength were variously constructed by different parties in the interaction. The series of flares were related through the metaphor of ‘default settings’, being the presumptuous assumptions encoded into software, assessment genre and administrative categories. The fact that students at times protested that they were insufficiently differentiated, and at other times, inappropriately differentiated by such default settings, speaks to the unpredictable cultural politics involved in the global field created by online internationalised education.
For the practitioner, it is suggested such unpredictable trouble could be largely addressed by embracing a metaculture that can recognise and celebrate the new 304
logic of glocalised student identities. These are identities that are located in time and place while simultaneously plugged into global flows and opportunities, and enriched by the dialectic between different ‘range of foci’. All students, especially at the point of entry into the globalised field of online internationalised education, can be understood to be coming from potentially (but not necessarily) different intertextual experiences, so pedagogic time and effort invested in making the tacit rules of genre expectations explicit will dignify both the students’ diverse backgrounds, and their rightful presence in sites of internationalised education. It is also an opportunity to open up any inherited canonical genre to new influences. This includes recognising and legitimating the variety of World Englishes, if not other languages, in the enterprise of globalising education. In regard to the default settings embedded in pedagogical design and its systems, institutions need to ask themselves, ‘On whose terms are these students asked to participate?’ and whether the answers accord with the institutional aspirations to be global players. Finally, as any local institution evolves into a global provider, it needs to open new horizons for its local students as well, and give them the opportunity and resources to take up glocal identities, by relativising and relating their local experiences to the penetrating global flows of ideas, images, technologies and people. Given the competing push/ pull/ mix potentials inherent in globalised contact, the practitioner should not be surprised if expressions of diverse, contingent and changing identities emerge in internationalised education relations. It is suggested that a metaculture embracing glocal identities would be more open to this dynamism and less prey to the tactic of ‘wilful nostalgia as cultural politics’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 155), by which only retrospective identities are invoked and legitimated through the ‘intellectual habit of fixing’ (Meyer & Geschiere, 1999, p. 14).
By using Bernstein’s temporal distinction between retrospective, decentred and prospective identities, being identities oriented to the past, the present and the future respectively, this thesis employed an analytic vocabulary for cultural identities that displaced the traditional emphasis on spatial relations (culture mapped onto place), and allowed it to be understood with reference to relations over time. Online interactions happen despite place, and identities expressed therein can be anchored by, or referenced to communities of past, present and future affiliations. This reconfiguring allowed identities to be understood more as processes in progress, 305
facing sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards in time, and at other times, engaged in the here and now. Through the concept of pedagogic identities, education has been drawn in and accounted for as a process implicated in launching or propelling pasts and presents into variously constructed futures.
The ephemera of online pedagogic interaction as the conduit for such processes has thus been shown to be no inert medium, no clear window pane, through which to observe cultural identities. The design actively made certain identity positions available, shaping students’ expressions of cultural identity through the design of the interaction and its affordance of imaginary, second-order discourse. To add to the complexity, different aspects of the curriculum, assessment and pedagogy offered a variety of competing such orientations. Students, perhaps particularly so in highly commodified settings such as MBA education, have their own agency and ability to either articulate with the subject positions offered, or resist them in the conduct of the interaction. Thus the expressions of cultural identity produced in such pedagogical sites are not independent truths, but rather relational and contingent positions taken within the means and spaces made available in the interaction. This suggests that despite the facts that students are sharing ‘the same field, the same bounded space’ (Featherstone, 1995, pp. 123-134), pedagogical design cannot ignore factoring in the potential play of cultured identities, but rather, has to be prepared for volatile reactionary engagements that are less predictable and more complex in their logics and trajectories (Urry, 2003).
The practical implications of this contribution engage with closely held values and normative principles of how to deal with cultural difference in pedagogical settings. The case study unit’s student subsidy device was carefully designed to be respectful of students’ cultural differences and sought to garner that diversity as an enriching aspect of the global encounter. The ethics behind the practice would be considered exemplary and laudable, being inclusive and respectful of difference, embracing ‘where one comes from’. However, the pluralist metaculture framing this aspect of design seemed at odds with the enterprising, speculative self-projects of the students, and the symbiotic contract between the international institutional partners. What kind of graduates were these partner institutions hoping to produce when selling or sourcing their educational products offshore? With a renovated sense of 306
how cultural processes are lived in these more liquid times, such courses and the larger enterprise of globalised education could have a much more purposeful and coherent design offering resources for prospective cultural identities, and membership in new networked alliances and communities. As global markets in education become less experimental and more commonplace, and educational routes become more entangled, pluralist notions of static inherited cultures must become increasingly unsustainable as the theoretical basis for pedagogic design. Such constructions are locked into the impossible task of protecting some nostalgic sense of cultural separateness, while the whole enterprise participants are engaged in is about ‘complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson, 1999), intersection and ‘interpenetration’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 100). Moreover, the choice to prolong such retrospective cultural constructions in the face of change needs to be accounted for. Sustaining the institutional construction of the international student as an exotically cultured Other thus becomes a form of self-interested border protection, reinforcing who is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, protecting default settings and the interests of those privileged by them.
The thesis thus offers practical insights into the nexus between design and conduct of online internationalised programs, and how the complexity of macro cultural politics and identities in the globalising world will inevitably be present and at work within micro pedagogic interactions. Rather than creating some utopian, liberatory space that is ‘unfractured by national boundaries, a “space” where people of all nations can in theory mix together with mutual ease’ (Wertheim, 1999, p. 24), the gossamer threads of the online interaction were shown to produce the very complex fabric of cultural globalisation. Cultural identities found their expression in new semiotic modes and continued to be invoked and to impact on interactions. What markers there were in the textual means available, such as names and labels for nationality and ethnicity, were amplified and intensified in the absence of other cues. The global/local tensions in internationalised education were shown to not resolve in an either/or outcome, but rather coexist in mutually antagonistic yet productive relations, that is, a both/and outcome of competing potentials.
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8.2 The thesis and its contributions The preceding section drew out practical implications from the findings of the study. Beyond this contribution to understanding the cultural politics embedded in online internationalised education, the thesis also contributes more generally to the sociology of education through its methodology and analytic processes. Though sharpened for the context of online pedagogy, these tools are applicable to other modes and sectors of education.
This thesis has drawn on the metadialogue between Bernsteinian theory of pedagogic discourse and Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyse and characterise the case study’s online interaction - warts, trouble and all. This contribution purposefully deflated the utopian hyperbole of online learning advocates, and engaged with these pedagogic sites as populated by ‘people neither revolutionary nor perfect, armed with ordinary ways of understanding each other’ (Burkhalter, 1999, p. 74) involved in practices circumscribed by contractual detail, everyday understandings, and administrative imperatives, like any other pedagogy. Rather than approach online pedagogy as a brave new world, this thesis demonstrated that it can be productively understood through established bodies of pedagogic theory, and benefit from the legacy of such efforts. Through such a lens, online pedagogical interaction has still been able to display its distinguishing features, such as its enhanced capacity to invoke imaginary discourse, and to deal in holographic categories. The macrogenre overview displayed how the instructional and regulative registers in this mode could be assigned different space/time in this mode of interaction as distinct to their nesting in the talk of the face-to-face classroom. In addition, the application of SFL and Bernsteinian theory to derive the concepts of ‘regulative flares of trouble’ and ‘student subsidy of the curriculum’ offers lines of enquiry that could interrogate the nexus between pedagogic design and its conduct in any mode of pedagogy. The synergy between Bernsteinian theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics gave precise analytic tools with which to ‘vivisection’ the online text and see how its various parts functioned both separately and together. This frame was particularly attractive for the textual environment of online interactions, but again, would be equally relevant and valuable for any pedagogic setting.
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Given the empirical setting in the electronic flows of cyberspace, the methodology was also challenged to adapt ethnographic precepts to virtual ‘realities’ where the privileging of ‘sight’ and ‘experience’ needed revisiting. The study’s critical realist framing, in dialogue with Carspecken’s (1996) careful treatment of validity in making objective, subjective and normative claims in ethnographic studies, aimed to achieve an ontologically rich and epistemologically cautious design with which to ‘see’ the larger context beyond the empirically available surface of online postings. Such framing would be equally applicable in other modes of pedagogy, to extend the enquiry beyond what can be found in the educational setting.
This study of online pedagogy is fairly unique in its choice to include accounts of interactive troubles as significant yet routine moments to analyse, make sense of, and derive insight from. These moments are usually either written out of accounts of online pedagogy or spotlighted as ‘critical incidents’. By combining both trouble and routine within the macrogenre overview, this study could interrogate troubles as ethnographic events that are very telling of the normative order and what is needed to sustain it. One set of troubles that has not been analysed in any depth here is that pertaining to technological mal/functioning, because such issues fell outside the scope of this particular study. However, their considerable impact on how this case study unfolded suggests that future research needs to go looking for such trouble and probe such moments in order to analyse them as one distinguishing and normal (as opposed to aberrant) aspect of online pedagogy. The practice of ‘disaggregating’ the academic role, dispersing design and conduct duties to educational designer and multimedia technician also compounds the picture, and warrants more research.
8.3 The thesis and its limitations The research design was necessarily pragmatic and ‘good enough’, acknowledging its limitations as to what was possible in the time and resourcing frame from the outset. In particular, what demands could be asked of the lecturers, university staff and the participating students were carefully balanced to avoid stretching their good will. In addition, it became evident after the case study had commenced that the research design had overlooked a set of actors, being the tutors and staff of the
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Malaysian institution. Their contribution to the case study’s events was rendered invisible at the empirical surface of online interaction, and their actions and participation accessible only through the lecturer’s, designer’s and students’ accounts. Additional resourcing may have helped gain access to these agents and their accounts.
Where Carspecken would advocate careful systematic moves from raw data to its eventual theoretical interpretation, in practice the empirical and theoretical domains were impossible to hold apart. The process was much messier and interpolated. As outlined in Chapter 4, Bernstein (2000, p. 135) highlighted the need for a ‘permeable’ external language of description that can be reshaped by the empirical field in ethnography and which is not confined to rigidly reproducing the internal theoretically derived model. This abductive modus operandi, ‘zooming in and out’, was needed for theory and data to make sense of each other. In the analytic chapters it became evident that while theory had informed the methodology and research question, empirical events served to open new lines of theoretical enquiry and thus needed to recruit additional theoretical resources.
Another limitation was the relatively poor response to the call for students to participate in the email interviews on completion of the unit. Of the 18 students approached, 8 ultimately participated in the process, only one of whom was from the Malaysia cohort. This self-selected group would not be considered a valid sample of the total 79 completing students from which to extrapolate patterns and propensities, but that was not the purpose of the study. Each interview offered unique insights into other ontological realms for example how the online interaction was framed, understood and lived in multiple ways. In particular, the email interviews produced accounts of students’ elective silence in the online interaction, and other such decisions behind their online ‘actions’. Such insight was not available to be interpreted from their absence at the empirical surface. More interviews could have added to this richness.
The research delved into one single case study, which it has been argued was representative or illustrative of a number of trends shaping practices in online
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education, in particular by its constructivist code of the ‘teacher as facilitator’, and by embracing the international student as an asset to the curriculum. Though it can serve as an illuminating study, the limitations of this design must be acknowledged when drawing conclusions to apply elsewhere. However, the research question was ultimately interested in ‘how’ cultural difference came to matter, and here, the case study does serve to alert and inform practitioners about cultural potentials that can be considered and proactively managed to promote the desired ends. Where the theoretical framework highlighted the commodification of knowledge in postmodernity and the role of information technology in this trend, these developments impacted on the research as well. The enthusiasm for online pedagogic solutions and the search for international markets were both understood as symptomatic of newly impinging business discourses and imperatives shaping the higher education sector, as outlined in Chapters 1 and 2. For this reason, the research site was purposefully selected within the highly ‘mercantalized’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 51) discipline of Business Studies, and its lucrative market of full fee MBA programs. This setting produced its own challenges. The ‘exchange value’ of such branded qualifications rests to a large degree on their reputation, and thus the enterprise is very vulnerable to critique. Gaining access to such a site was not easy as a result. Some sites approached would not sanction an independent study within their operations. Access to the case study site was eventually gained through personal contacts and approaches made at senior management level, an indication of the degree of trust and wariness involved in the agreement.
The privilege of access and trust was not taken lightly, and most probably infused relations between the researcher and the researched with my habitual overly ingratiating manner. This position may be familiar to other researchers involved in ‘researching up’. The irony of employing a ‘critical ethnography’ design (which seeks to balance researcher and researched relations on the assumption that the researched are at a disadvantage) was not lost on me. In this setting, the researcher as a postgraduate scholarship student was researching the practice of business leaders, managers and senior academic staff. The disparate status however does not in any way diminish the risk that the case study personnel took in granting me
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access, and their interests still had to be protected with rigorous ethical procedures and member checks.
The commercialised status of such sites should also be considered as potentially heightening the staff’s ‘impression management’ (Dingwall, 1997, p. 56) in their interviews. This effect is difficult to eliminate from the data. As an example, in one quick email exchange, LA made the metatextual aside: Must go (no time to proof so this is 'from the heart' which is good for research but perhaps bad for my reputation!) (CILA1). This candid comment could suggest that in the more formally staged face-to-face interviews, he was able to more carefully manage the impression he was making. It could equally suggest that we had by that stage established enough mutual trust for him to be less circumspect. As education becomes more business oriented and enterprising, I suggest that independent access to research sites, and design that can claim to access some ontological level beyond a carefully constructed discourse for public consumption will become more difficult. This begs the question whether there will remain any ontological realm, any space or position from which lecturers can speak that is not compromised nor inflected by the commercial interests of the enterprising university.
There is much else which may have been valuable that has not been included in this study, such as the historical particularities of relations between Malaysia, China and Australia as a context to the interactions studied. Such considerations were pointedly not pursued to allow the focus to stay on what cultural identities were produced in situ, that is, online. However this historical backdrop could be interpreted as both the ‘excess of context’ produced by processes of globalisation, and as aspect of the methodological conundrum of where to validly draw a boundary around the case study. Similarly, the ethnography itself produced many tantalising events worthy of analysis that did not fit the purview of this study. Textually, there had to be some arbitrary boundary drawn around the effort.
8.4 This thesis and the future In time this study will offer a historical snapshot, capturing in its ethnographic account the practices and principles informing this emergent stage of a new
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pedagogical mode and reconfigured educational routes. In time, we may well look back in bemusement at its technologies and practices. However, early adopters, in their enthusiasms and visioning, will irrevocably shape how the practice is to be imagined and what channels its development will pursue. It is telling that even over the life of this project, ‘on-line’ has lost the affectation of its hyphen, as the expression and its referent practices have become naturalised and everyday.
There is the potential for multiple strands of future research stemming from this study. The marketisation of education has proceeded apace, and is no longer limited to the higher education sector with more impact evident in the practices of the schooling sector. While this study has plotted the university sector’s early engagement with business imperatives and marketisation policies, future research is needed to track how these practices are normalised and embedded in both sectors, and how international markets and competition impact on developments. Similarly, the affordance of online education is being embraced in the schooling sector as a means to extend more specialised subject offerings to dispersed localities. This raises questions of new pedagogies and practices in this sector which an ethnographic study such as this could help illuminate. Meanwhile online learning is increasingly becoming a routine aspect of on-campus studies, with ‘blurred’ pedagogies evolving. This new field of practice, its promises and its refraction across disciplines and different student groups, warrants further research. With regard to how cultural processes of globalisation play out, such research remains timely and crucially important. If anything, the question, ‘can we live together?’ (Touraine, 2000), is becoming more urgent and pressing, under the shadow of terrorism, reactive ‘paranoid nationalism’ (Hage, 2003) and refugee crises. Flows of information and ideology by means of electronic networks are deeply implicated in the escalating frisson of cultural relativisation, and any relations invoking cultural identities deserve close and rigorous research. These include relations within pedagogical settings. Future research also needs to be done on identities forged outside and beyond the structures of nations, and how such identities may be projected, facilitated or compromised by pedagogical innovations. Finally, this study could inform intervention studies, whereby an internationalised program is designed with glocal identities in mind, and the outcomes and experiences evaluated. 313
Over the life of this thesis, Australia has suffered a decline in international enrolments with public concern expressed over the inevitable impact on higher education funding (‘Unis depend on foreign students to stay afloat’, D. Jopson & K,. Burke, The Age, 7 May 2005). Online pedagogy has continued to be enthusiastically funded, to become as essential to on-campus study as it is to offcampus modes. The speculative global consortium for online university provision, Universitas 21, has produced its first cohort of online MBA graduates, with triumphant publicity (E-school a lesson in business, The Australian, 15 June 2005), reporting strong demand in China, India and the Middle East. This thesis will not be the end of the story.
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APPENDIX A
EXTRACT OF SUMMARY LOG
This extract is provided as an example of the field notes and log kept each visit to the online site, with description of activity in each active zone.
MONDAY 21 July – Day 22 Have been worried about the poor response to the request for informed consent feedback, and how bound I am to the ethical process I have had approved. Talked to Parlo about it this morning … talked through options eg a) ask LA to repost request, b) consider announcement as informed consent – non response as no problems with it… c) email all students individually. Parlo recommended that I raise the matter with LA, as co-researcher in the cross-institutional proposal, and as teacher in the space… So I’ll talk to LA about it. LA has dropped me a copy of an email chain with a Malaysian IS: re 1) access problems – obviously quite frustrated – talks about 5 days without access. Has contacted helpdesk to no avail - customer role in complaint/power 2) does not like way name is generated in discussion page.. LA asks for preference re name. S replies re appropriate options, in contrast to variety of forms of address given in online forums. “Hope they don’t call me ‘Harry Potter next! (just a joke, Sir). In summary, I prefer to be called “T ..” but I would like to be listed in the discussion group as ‘T.. C.. S…..”. Interactive trouble in other students’ usage of wrong form of address…. LA responds “I have had enough contact with Chinese people to understand the convention of using the surname. However, like many Australians I get confused about whether a Chinese name is presented in traditional format (t.. C.. S…..) or in ‘Western’ format (CS T…). ‘ – so raising issue of possible other readings, interference . The University’s system has been erroneous in entering the names of some of our Malaysian students. My apologies for the incorrect entry of your name. I have arranged to have it correted.’ Then offers instruction about how to address himself – “I wonder whether you and your colleagues in Malaysia find it a bit strange to address their professor by his informal first name.. With students I try to encourage informality to improve communication and to signal my accessability, but I appreciate that some may be more comfortable with formal titles and greetings. ‘ So representation of self to others to do with establishing a parity in the regulative.. signals that this is ‘ironic’ given work behind titles. Has signalled a) own cultural awareness b) pedagogical reasoning behind choices c) flexibility `THREAD A three postings (a 128-130) by same IS, with third copy of second, second as elaboration of first. I am …. From KL, Malaysia. Location – not culture., but “from” equals background, heritage…. THREAD B B108 LA responds to B99 – student launching from a reading. LA Evalutes then probes the student’s response to more explicit exposition of reading et.c.. “You acknowledge that you have drawn on his, but if you are thinking analytically (which is what we are all aiming for) you will be able to identify the similarities and differences...’ so coaching in the cognitive/regulative. THREAD E Series of student queries/suggestions about ‘discussion’ protocols. E7 - LA thanks S for suggestion but exerts power and right to discretion: ‘I will monitor the groups and consider what to do if any are totally non-functional’. In E9 , LA elaborates on ‘participation protocols’ very explicitly outlining possibilities of territory/turf disputes and interactional trouble re interfering; “..beware that the members of other groups may not want ‘outsiders’ to participate. As a courtesy, if you … have something valuable to contribute to another group then you could ask their permission to join the discussion.’ “We are evolving our processes here so please let me know if you have other suggestions’
THREAD F F4 – LA reiterates advice of E9 – but more strongly? “No, you don’t have to participate in other groups. In fact, it is probably best if you don’t do so unless you have something really valuable to contribute – otherwise the group members might find ‘outsiders’ unwelcome. Series of panicky queries (EG is looking like high maintenance!) about assessment schedule F8 – referencing answer from LA, with explanatory paragraph, including example… F9 – student waves a warning flag re lack of interaction “I’m hoping our group … won’t turn out to be ‘one of the minority who flounder for lack of engagement’ , but so far it’s not looking good. Hopefully it will pick up. Interactive trouble in silence? F10 – IS from Malaysia with IT account problems posts case study assignment using tutors log on. Later – new announcement (post13) to group explaining absence/silence of Malaysian students and how to address them by surname… proactively warding off interactive trouble???
Mon, Jul 21, 2003 -- Welcome to Week 4 Hi all, Could I encourage you all to participate in the discussion of your group. Some groups are doing very well with all members engaged in discussion, while others have inadequate participation. Unfortunately, there have been administrative delays and problems getting our Malaysian cohort of students into the system. Please give them any support and assistance you can. Incidentally, the convention for Chinese names is to put the family name first. Thus, in Chinese format my name would be ‘x…y…’ and you would call me 'x…'. If you are unsure, I'd suggest you ask your fellow students how they preferred to be addressed. Have a great week,
Working my way through the group discussion tasks.. Variable quality of case study write up, but I think the display aspect of the task will be very helpful for the less able student. Discussion as it goes on starts to engage with the literature, but the link is not all that evident. Active international students participating well, with considered and thoughtful prompts. Have responded to the five students who have given their consent… ‘Thanks ….- I will be in touch after the course has run if following up with an interview.’
APPENDIX B
INTERVIEW SCHEDULES AND CONSENT FORMS
LECTURER/ INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER INTERVIEW 1 INTERVIEW CHECKLIST AND PROMPTS CURRICULUM • What knowledge is selected for inclusion in this unit? • What knowledge is excluded? • How do your understanding of who the students will be affect these content decisions? • How you plan to stage the students’ engagement with the curricular content? • How do your understanding of who the students will be affect this planning of stages? KNOWLEDGE OF THE STUDENT • How would you describe the students in this course? • What do you know about the students enrolling in this unit? • What do you predict their needs to be? • Where do you get these understandings from? • What requirements/prerequisites are necessary before international students are accepted into this program? PEDAGOGY • What interaction have you planned as part of the unit design? • How do you envisage these forms of interaction will proceed? • How does your knowledge of the student group inform this design? • Have you developed any interaction protocols or guidelines, and what is your reasoning behind that? • What are you hoping to achieve with these modes of interaction? • How do you see print/online/communication resources working together? • What experiences do you draw on to guide your design and conduct of internationalised online courses? ASSESSMENT • How are you assessing the students’ learning in this unit? • Why did you choose these activities? • How does your understanding of the students inform your design of the assessment tasks? MODE • How does working in an online environment affect your teaching decisions? • What particular characteristics of online interaction do you take into consideration when designing the unit? CONSTRAINTS between what you can do and feel you should do. • When you consider what you have designed compared to what you would ideally design, what constraints are there on your design and practice? • What concerns if any do you have about offering on-line courses to international students? OTHER COURSE SUPPORT • What other study-related interaction do students on your course have access to? • How do you expect such interaction to proceed? ROLES • How did the lecturer and instructional designer roles contribute to the design of this unit?
LECTURER/ INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER INTERVIEW 1 PARTICIPANT GUIDE
In the first interview the following topics will be raised. You are welcome to raise other matters that you think may be pertinent.
CURRICULUM - what is selected and how it is organised KNOWLEDGE OF THE STUDENTS - description of the student body and their needs PEDAGOGY - how you have planned the interaction and course materials to engage the student ASSESSMENT - what assessment tasks are designed MODE - how the choice of online delivery affects curriculum, pedagogy and assessment decisions CONSTRAINTS - what stops you from doing things as you would like to OTHER COURSE SUPPORT - other avenues of course related support available to the students ROLES - how the lecturer and instructional designer roles articulate
LECTURER /INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER INTERVIEW 1 - DEMOGRAPHICS PARTICIPANTCODE:
SITE/COURSECODE:
AGE:
Male/Female
PRIMARY LANGUAGE:
OTHER LANGUAGES:
WHAT CULTURAL GROUP(S) DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH? QUALIFICATIONS: Level Years
Where
Institution
Language of study
TEACHING EXPERIENCE: What teaching experience do you have? (for example, in what sectors, in what kinds of settings, on-line or face-to-face, what content, what level…?)
OTHER WORK EXPERIENCE:
ANY OTHER PERTINENT BACKGROUND?
TEACHER/INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER SECOND INTERVIEW GUIDE CURRICULUM • Given your knowledge of who the students were in retrospect, are there any adjustments you would make to the content of the curriculum and how you organised it? • How has your experience of this unit affected the way you will design curriculum in future versions? KNOWLEDGE OF THE STUDENT • How would you describe the students in this unit? • What needs did they display? • How sound were your predictions about the students? • Were you in any way surprised by the nature of the student group? • How has your experience of this unit affected the way you will understand future student groups? PEDAGOGY • Did the interaction proceed as you hoped? Disappointments, or satisfaction – elucidate rationale/judgemental criteria behind. • What were the valuable aspects of the interaction achieved? • What were the less valuable aspects of the interaction achieved? • Did your role as teacher proceed as you predicted? • Did the students interact how you expected? • How will this experience influence your future design of pedagogy in this sort of unit? ASSESSMENT • When you reflect on the students’ performance in the assessment tasks, did the tasks achieve what you were hoping for? • Will this experience change the way you approach curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in future unit offerings? If so, how… and why…. MODE • How did the online mode affect your practice? • What effect did being on-line have on your interactions in this unit? • Were you surprised in any way with how the on-line communication affected the conduct of the course? CONSTRAINTS between what you can do and feel you should do. • Did you find yourself constrained in any unforeseen way? How did this affect your practice? OTHER COURSE SUPPORT • What other study-related interaction did students on your course access? STIMULATED RECALL Identify particular incidents/exchanges in the unit interaction, or in teacher log – teacher/designer to reflect on and interpret what happened here – how they understood what was happening and their rationale behind the pedagogical decisions they made at the time.
TEACHER/INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER SECOND INTERVIEW PARTICIPANT GUIDE The following topics will be raised, and discussed in terms of reflecting on the unit just conducted, and how this experience might inform your future practice. You are welcome to raise other matters that you think may be pertinent.
CURRICULUM THE STUDENTS PEDAGOGY ASSESSMENT MODE CONSTRAINTS OTHER COURSE SUPPORT ROLES
Then you will be invited to outline your interpretation of particular events, either identified by you as significant, or identified by the researcher from an analysis of the web discussion texts.
STUDENT INTERVIEW/EMAIL DIALOGUE International choice: • Why did you choose to study with this university? • Did you have any worries about studying with an Australian university when you enrolled? • Were your worries valid? On-Line choice: • Why did you choose to study on-line? • Did you have any worries about studying on-line? • Were your worries valid? Expectations and experience: • Was this unit what you expected? Were you surprised, pleased, disappointed about any aspect of the course? (for example, the materials, the choice of curriculum, the assessment tasks, the teaching.) • What would you change about this course? Mode: • • • • •
What did you think about the on-line communication? Was it what you expected? Did you contribute much? Did you get what you hoped for out of the on-line interaction? Did being on-line affect your learning in any way?
Other course support: • Did you interact with anyone else beyond the unit website to help you with this unit’s requirements? Reinscribing: • How will your experience in this unit help you in the future? STIMULATED RECALL Identify particular postings/ exchanges involving this student. Probe reasons behind actions/moves. Reflection on responses made. How does the student make sense of what happened.
STUDENT – BACKGROUND AND DEMOGRAPHICS NAME:
__________________________________________
COURSE OF STUDY: ___________________________________________ EMAIL ADDRESS FOR INTERVIEW: _______________________________
AGE:
Male/Female
WHAT CULTURAL GROUP (S) DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH? EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND: Level
Years
On or off campus study?
Institution and location
TOWN AND COUNTRY OF RESIDENCE:
FIRST LANGUAGE: OTHER LANGUAGES: OCCUPATION:
CURRENT WORK ROLE:
WORK HISTORY:
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE WITH ON-LINE LEARNING:
OTHER COMMENTS YOU WOULD LIKE TO MAKE?
Language of study
SUPERVISORY STAFF INTERVIEW Targeting of market • History of servicing international market, motivations • Recruitment/marketing strategies Knowledge of student body • Who are the international students? • What do you understand their needs and interests to be? • How does your knowledge of who the students will be inform program design? • How do past experiences inform current practices/policies? • What staffing considerations do you take into account for programs with international student body? • What requirements/prerequisites are necessary before international students are accepted into this program?
Choice of online mode • History of offering courses in on-line mode • Reasons for choice of on-line delivery • Evaluation of this mode – strengths and weaknesses • Staffing considerations with online delivery Curricular policy/design • How does the international student market affect the design of curriculum? • How does on-line mode affect the design of curriculum? Pedagogical policy/design • How does the international student market affect the design of pedagogy? • How does the on-line mode affect the design of pedagogy? Assessment policy/design • How does the international student market affect the design of assessment tasks? • How does the on-line mode affect the design of assessment tasks? Constraints/concerns • What constraints are there on your ideal practice? • What hopes/concerns do you have about on-line delivery to international students?
Cultural difference in online education for international students Researcher: Ms Catherine Doherty Email:
[email protected] Information for Students I am writing to invite your participation in a study about how cultural difference might influence online courses that include international students. This is a doctoral project in education based in the Centre for Innovation in Education at the Queensland University of Technology. The aim of the project is to examine how international students and Australian educators work together to deliver online educational programs where teachers and students come from varied cultural backgrounds. Your Director of Studies has agreed to the project on the condition that the teaching staff and students involved also agree. I am asking you to participate in two processes: Firstly I need your permission to access any course-related electronic class discussions, for this unit of study through the unit’s website. This would be similar to my sitting in the classroom and recording the discussion, if you were in a face-to-face class. It will not include access to any private emails between individual students and teachers. Secondly I would like to interview some students, asking you to reflect on your experiences in the unit. I will conduct this interview by a series of brief email exchanges after the end of the unit. This project, and whether you chose to participate or not, will have no effect on your grades or assessment. If you choose to participate, your identity and that of your institution will remain anonymous. When reporting on the project in my thesis and any associated articles, I will substitute pseudonyms for all participants and institutions. I will not include any information concerning your identity or your institution’s identity in the research material or published findings. You are assured that: The contents of interviews and the course communication will be confidential, and that there will be no way by which you or your institution can be identified. You have the right to withdraw consent at any time during the project. If you have any questions about the project, or your participation, you can ask the researcher at any stage. You can email me:
[email protected] If you have any complaints about how this research is conducted, you can contact the Secretary of the QUT University Human Research Ethics Committee (
[email protected])
IF YOU ARE WILLING TO GIVE YOUR INFORMED CONSENT PLEASE REPLY BY EMAIL TO:
[email protected] with the following text: I declare that I have been informed about the Queensland University of Technology doctoral project on cultural difference in online education for international students. I understand what will be required of me if I consent, and the confidentiality of my comments. I freely give my consent to take part in the project.
IF YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO GIVE YOUR INFORMED CONSENT PLEASE REPLY BY EMAIL TO:
[email protected] with the following text: I do not give my consent for my course contributions to be used as data for the Queensland University of Technology doctoral project on cultural difference in online education for international students. I would appreciate your email response either way so I can be sure of your support or otherwise. CATHIE DOHERTY
Cultural difference in online education for international students Researcher: Ms Catherine Doherty Email:
[email protected] Information for Lecturers/Tutors I am inviting your participation in a study about how cultural identities and cultural difference might influence the way courses for international students are designed and conducted in on-line settings. This is a doctoral project in education based in the Centre for Innovations in Education at the Queensland University of Technology. The aim of the project is to examine how international students and Australian educators work together to deliver educational programs where staff and students come from varied cultural backgrounds. I am asking you to participate in three processes: Firstly I need your permission and assistance to access any course-related electronic class discussions, for one semester-long unit. This would be similar to sitting in the classroom and recording the discussion in a face-to-face class. This will not include access to any private email contact between teachers and individual students. Secondly I would like to interview the lecturers/tutors and instructional designers involved in the particular unit observed, to share and reflect on their experiences. If you agree to participate, I aim to interview you twice for about 40 minutes – once before the unit and again after its completion. The interviews will be audio-taped using a tape recorder, with the agreement of the participants. Thirdly, I would appreciate your assistance in gaining access to any in-house course materials, be they printed or on-line. If you choose to participate, your identity will remain anonymous, and anything that you say will remain confidential. When reporting on the project in my thesis and any associated articles, I will substitute pseudonyms for all participants and institutions. I will not include any information concerning your identity or your institution’s identity in the research material or published findings. You are assured that: The contents of interviews and the course communication will be confidential, and that there will be no way by which you, your colleagues, or your institution can be identified. You have the right to withdraw consent at any time during the project. If you have any questions about the project, or your participation, please ask the researcher before giving your consent. You can email me:
[email protected] If you have any complaints about how this research is conducted, you can contact the Secretary of the QUT University Human Research Ethics Committee (
[email protected])
IF YOU ARE WILLING TO GIVE YOUR INFORMED CONSENT PLEASE SIGN BELOW: I declare that I have been informed about the Queensland University of Technology doctoral project on cultural difference in online education for international students. I understand what will be required of me if I consent, and the confidentiality of my comments. I freely give my consent to take part in the project.
Name: ……………………………………………………………………………………. Date: ……………………………………………………………………………………. Signature: …………………………………………………………………………………
APPENDIX C state ACT
uni
MAPPING ONLINE INTERNATIONALISED COURSES IN THE AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR, 2002 graduate coursework - internet delivery?
ANU flexible delivery' includes electronic/internet delivery for Grad Dip in Legal Practice, and Farm Forestry units in Grad Cert in Forestry. No distinction for internatioanl students. Teaching offered in China, Singapore and Malaysia. Commencing in July 2003 the NGSM will offer a Master of International Management (taught in Chinese Mandarin) to be held in Canberra - Australia. University of Canberra
Fully online (Internet delivery through WebCT), online with complementary printed materials …, support through electronic access to lecturers and tutors and so on. These courses are not avilable in Canberra for international students on a student visa. : Grad Cert in Clinial Trains Management, Grad Cert in Education, Master of Education, Grad Cert in Environmental Statistics, Grad Cert/Diploma/Master in Facilities Management, Grad Cert in Information Access and Delivery. Master of Internet Communication, Mater of Knowledge Management, Master of Marketing COmmunication, Grad Dip in Property, Grad Cert in Records adn Archives Management, Grad Cert/Dip in Sports Management, Grad Cert/Dip/Master in Technology-Enhanced Language Learning, Master of Tourism Management.
NSW Avondale College Charles Sturt
Seventh-Day Adventist. Only on-shore offerings for international students. big on 'distance education' - print packages, teleconferencing and online forums. Seems complete spread of offerings are available in distance mode. "As the largest Australian providers of distance education to overseas students, Charles Sturt University is at the leading edge of the delivery of information technology services." MBA boasts 'attracting students from all around the world for enrolment'.
Macquarie
UNE
UNSW
University of Newcastle
"Macquarie One World" slogan for online/offshore/distance programs.Major 'internationalisation' policy mention to develop 'online or substantially online or distance programs thorugh … for domestic and international students. Twinning/offshore offerings in Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico adn Singapore. uses WebCT across lots of programs.Also mixed distaince/online mode. MBA is entirely online. Other international online offerings include Bachelor/Masters of commerce, economics.. Legal studies, fincial admin, e-commerce.UNE Online - major portal. No mention of online delivery in website, MBA - not even distance ed profiled,."Flexible education' discussed in T&L unit websites, but not evident in public face/course descriptions. MBA oncampus offered under different code for IS but no other changes - No mention of online delivery in front webpage. Separate GraduateSchool.com is a fully owned subsidiary of the University of Newcastle. It was established in 2000 in response to the changing needs of our postgraduate student body. Our online approach goes beyond the campus to provide you with access to quality postgraduate coursework programs." Online programs include Business, Music Technology..
Southern Cross
University of Sydney UTS University of Western Sydnet
MBA is in offered in oncampus and distance mode - workshops in Asia Pacific. No emphasis on 'online' aspect - more a distance/mixed mode model. some offerings in Health Sciences, Medicine and Rurual Management by distance education/flexible learning to international students. TO BE CONTINUED> offshore courses offered in HK, Malaysia, Singapore,china, NZ with "UTS staff'. No profile re online delivery to international students. widely spread twinning arramgements for typically business/management/law courses. No profile re online delivery.Some use of WebCT in course delivery
University of Woollongong
has developed twinning arramgements in a number of countries. Uses 'flexible delivery' which is mixture of on=campus and virtual support. Seems to have offloaded distance programs, and refers students to Deakin, USQ, and Open Learning Australia.
Batchelor
on webpage, profiles of study centres set up in various NT centress to support Batchelor students. No information re RATE program, or international enrolments.
NT
NTU wide range of postgrad coursework open to international students - search shows ''external' but this term is not clarified, or promoted in any way. Similarly, virtual or online delivery is not evident/profiled, and without a general search tool on their webpage, it's difficult to ascertain any more detail. Queensla nd Bond
international students welcomed in all courses - no profile re external/virtual/online delivery.
CQU
Griffith
James Cook UQ
QUT
international students loom large in their corporate identity. Strategy of distributed campuses, in QLd, Aus, Fiji, HK, Sinapore, Malaysia, some devoted to international students only. 'Internationally recognised for flexible and responsive learning systems'. Mission includes offering distance/online courses, to be 'acknolwedged as a leader in flexible teaching and learning...Vision statement includes: Develop and implement innovative teaching and learning practices, with a major emphasis on distance, open and flexible learning approaches incorporating the development of resource based and on line learning" though eactly which courses are offered online is difficult to see. MBA is offered by 'distance' and oncampus mode. Griffith is a partner in "open learning Australia' and has some offerings to students in distance mode in this frame. Not a salient profile in online offerings, to domestic or international students. Graduate School of Management has 'offshore' 'web dependent' offerings and prides itself on flexible learning.for working and overseas students. seeks international enrolments. Offers an online preliminary program for the MIT/.MBA programs, which is offered oncampus or in mixed mode. international students invited on campus on webpage - very difficult to find reference to distance/external/online learning, not even possible to link to Universitas21 offerings. In the Faculty of BEL inernational students are told to 'consider the additional opportunities available ot them, including twinning programs, exchange.studyabroadprogams, and programs offered off-shore.' though these aren't made evident. The UQ Ipswich, its flexible delivery lighthouse innovation, is not offering totally online postgraduate courses yet. But did find a job advertisement for MBA online faculty to staff the universtas21 offerings. "online teaching' is profiled as an adjunct enhancement to mainstream courses. MBA has been recognised by Asia Week, but is not offered off shore or online. International MBA is offered with a Chinese and French graduate school residence for a semester in each country..
USQ Delivery of on-line learning/programs is a major push at USQ, with prominent featuring of its awards and profile in this area on its webpage. Wide range of programs offered - info tech, business, and education in particular - at various postgrad levels, cert --> Masters. MBA and Master of e-Businessoffered on line. Also profiles large international student enrolments. University of the Sunshine Coast
MBA offered online. International agreements with Shanghai University.MBA and other postgrad courses offered internationally in external mode.
SA Adelaide
External online learning not given any profile. Business offerings are all internal. Internatioanl students courted - currently 2000 of 16000 all. Online resources/communication as adjunct to on campus study.
Flinders
University of SA
most 'external' study is in postgrad areas of nursing, and some education. More emphasis on off-shore programs - Scandinavia as well as Asia. Online profile not very developed. Large portfolio of off-shore offerings. Online offerings available in postgrad business faculty, and via Asian and European partners.
Tasmania Australian Maritime College University of Tasmania
offers an MBA (Maritime) by distance mode, not online as such. uses WebCT across lots of programs. Distinguishes between "web supported, web dependent, and web based/fully online" MBA is described as 'flexible delivery' but involves intense day long workshops. Also offered in Asia in week long mode.
Victoria Ballarat increasing its emphasis on onlinelearning" but MBA does not mention online delivery - 'flexibility' deals with other aspects. Little attention to IS on webpage. some distance courses in education and counselling. Christian orientation. Christian Heritage College Encourages international students on campus recognised as major distance provider - includes online offerings. MBA as on or Deakin off campus. Technological provision features in their identity. International students encouraged for oncampus study Use WEBCT. MBA offered on campus on and off shore. Online forums can be La Trobe accessed from webpage Marcus Oldham agriculture and horse graduates College MBA suite - no mention of external/online offerings, but rather intensive f2f University of sessions. Melbourne has developed off campus mode, but not integrating IT much. MBA not offered Monash for international students yet. fully online postgraduate courses offered in education, fashion, applied science, RMIT not business. MBA not offered flexibly. postgraduate coursework offered in Me-BA, applied sciences, engineering, Swinburne health, and IT. Online course availability easily idnetified in mode choices. Victoria international onshore and offshore delivery high profile, no mention of online delivery in MBA. Policy preparing move into online teaching, using WebCT WA Curtin
Edith Cowan
no mention of flexible delivery for MBA. Hard to assess online developments no access to such listing in handbook. Research proposal 2002 to look at potentially moving into online delivery. range of pg fully online offerings in HR, IT, and education. FASCINATING Bulletin board discussion re racism for/against international students.
Murdoch uses WebCT to support online materials and tutorials. MBA offered oncampus. International student webpage - no mention of online. Claims 15% of students are IS. Working on proposal of streamlining flexible delivery to incorporate slim print, complimentary online, and face-to=face, technologically so if necessary. online course offerings in MBA. Notre Dame University of WA difficult to access detailed course info re more off website. International students encouraged.. WebCT offered to all staff. MBAs offered offshore in Perth, Singapore, Jakarta, Shanghai and Manila, using blocks and fortnightly tutorials. . Multi-state Australian Catholic University OPEN LEARNING AUSTRALIA
distance/flexible delivery function for consortium of unis: Curtin, Griffith, Macquarie, Monash, RMIT, Swinburne, UniSA. Website not very helpful!
APPENDIX D1 - Quantitative analysis of e-turns in first assessable small group task day 15-16 day 17-18
GROUP a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s
pre 4 0 2 0 0 2 2 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 14
day 23-24 day 25-26 day 27-28 day 29-30
date 14-15 date 16-17 date 18-19 date 20-21 date 22-23 date 24-25 date 26-27 date 28-29 post 5 7 0 4 5 1 0 5 3 4 2 0 4 1 6 10 7 2 6 2 7 6 2 12 4 3 0 4 5 5 2 8 5 7 1 0 18 5 8 8 3 2 3 3 0 1 0 0 10 1 1 6 2 0 3 0 3 0 1 3 5 2 6 4 2 0 0 3 1 2 3 0 3 0 3 3 10 6 0 15 7 2 1 6 9 6 7 0 6 0 2 9 1 3 17 3 2 1 1 3 7 4 6 9 4 0 1 1 3 3 5 6 2 0 0 0 2 1 1 6 2 2 0 0 1 0 4 3 2 0 1 3 0 2 1 10 0 0 0 6 0 13 9 9 0 0 0 3 0 2 7 6 70 31 23 59 80 63 87 114
TOTAL 0 12 28 1 4 2 0 13 4 0 0 5 2 0 5 1 0 6 8 91
31 42 74 32 56 16 25 38 16 40 38 47 36 23 17 13 19 43 26 632
POSTINGS mean BY STUDENT ACTIVE student presumed LA+DA+adm TOTAL in POSTING STUDENTS posting IS active 1+1+2 27 4 6.8 0 0 42 5 8.4 1 2+0+0 72 5 14.4 1 1+0+0 31 5 6.2 2 1+0+0 55 5 11.0 2 0 16 3 5.3 0 0 25 3 8.3 0 0 38 5 7.6 1 0 16 4 4.0 1 0 40 4 10.0 1 0 38 5 7.6 1 2+0+0 45 5 9.0 1 0 36 5 7.2 2 0+0+1 22 4 5.5 1 1+0+0 16 3 5.3 1 0 13 2 6.5 0 0 19 3 6.3 1 0 43 7 6.1 7 1+0+0 25 6 4.2 6 13 619 83 7.5 29
APPENDIX D2 - Quantitative analysis of e-turns in second assessable small group task Day57,58 Day59,60 Day61,62 Day63,64 Day65,66 Day67,68 Day69,70
GROUP 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 2g 2h 2i 2j 2k 2l 2m 2n 2o
Date 25,26 7 6 4 16 9 5 5 6 5 5 4 18 8 4 5 107
Date 27,28 0 2 4 1 13 3 2 4 8 0 0 18 0 1 6 62
Date 29,30 4 12 4 0 1 0 0 2 3 3 0 0 12 3 6 50
Date 31,1 Date 2,3 1 11 10 19 4 2 8 15 10 2 3 4 4 8 5 10 3 5 2 13 6 5 16 26 5 14 0 6 4 0 81 140
Date 4,5 14 8 8 6 3 5 9 6 8 3 5 17 8 4 0 104
Date 6,7 12 0 7 7 1 2 3 12 1 1 11 5 0 2 0 64
post 5 5 0 0 8 3 0 9 3 12 17 7 7 9 3 88
TOTAL 54 62 33 53 47 25 31 54 36 39 48 107 54 29 24 696
ACTIVE LA+DA+a dmin STUDENT STUDENT postings POSTINGS S MEAN # 0 54 5 10.8 1+0+0 61 6 10.2 0 33 5 6.6 0 53 6 8.8 0 47 5 9.4 0 25 4 6.3 0 31 4 7.8 0 54 6 9.0 0 36 5 7.2 0 39 4 9.8 0 48 6 8.0 0 107 6 17.8 0 54 6 9.0 0 29 5 5.8 0 24 6 4.0
PRESUMED IS ACTIVE 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 3 2
APPENDIX E
MAPPING THE SHARED INTERACTION
DAY
What's happening? Typical, routine, according to script
Trouble? Disruption?
pre
Opening announcement introduces field, sets up regulative order, and invites selfintroductions. Second announcement outlines assessment in brief. Orientation ('tutorial') to communicative tools and rules of engagement. Self-intros serve as complaint re 'too much', LA ceases to greet functionality checks? Explosion of intros. individually. emotional daunting by identity Standard genre of intros. LA in socialising displays mode - modelling, instructing, guiding.
location in ids
2
83
9
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
94
1 to 7
Modus operandi explicated in weekly announcement. Teacher sets up expectation of 'I don't have the correct answers as there are none…" also of student subsidy by design. Strands of humour. Overt socialisation agenda (into a) online, and b) MAsters level study from LA. some backlash to wordy posting (b43)
PNG student raises 'wantok' system - links to other PNG contact. Heuristic use of proverbs from non-western cultures and other concepts.
1
23
61
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
87
First introductory postings by Malaysian students. Multiple forums open and active. Students taking initiative in posing and leading discussions. LA intermittently but purposefully active.
E1 - IS asks if curriculum is biased to Western writers. Email from IS pushing staging structures, re small group setup. Some tech glitches.
contradictory lessons in how to use Chinese names. E1 - IS asks whether curriculum is Western biased. IS students access to online discussions delayed due to delays in enrolment process. Regulative tone of mutual respect made explicit. Wantok system raised, B58
15-21
growing contributions of IS in discussions.
E3 - DS complains re non-participation of IS in group discussion. Complaint from IS re naming.
Cultural identity and differences figures in what way?
Assessment
Announcm'ts
Thread Cgeneral Thread B- issues & Module 1 hints
Thread A Intros
Thread D Module 2
Thread E Feedback
Thread F Ask LA
Thread G - Thread H First Module 3 Module 4-6 groups
Second Groups
TOTALS
5
15
20
9
20
2
0
0
0
0
0
71
E3 - DS complains re non-participation of IS in group discussion
initial case narrative duefirst group discussion starts
2
6
20
3
9
7
10
0
0
14
0
71
22-28
LA trouble shooting on patchy participation in Small group discussions underway. eruption small groups and reactions to this.IS emails of queries and problems as Malaysian cohort complaint re delay in access, naming problems. Others complain about technical gain access. Start of detailed glitches. Delays causing emotional responses. genre/assessment enquiries.
Naming issues produced by software fields. LA coaches students in naming conventions and reiterates code of respect,…Complaint re cultural bias of textbook.
group discussion 1
2
8
6
12
25
1
24
0
0
145
0
223
29-35
wrapping up of first group discussion consideration of Malaysian student late access and delayed participation marked by offer to 'pro-rate' this group discussion according to second. Students invited to do assess peer's participation. Continuing stream of detail genre/assessment questions. DIsucssions in module fora tend to be drawing on personal experience and anecdote rather than course concepts. Students running all aspects of discussion.
Apologies for relative silence in group discussion space. Complaint about cultural bias of textbook. IS complains about how his name is represented in Blackboard. DS asks for weekend extension for all students given work roles. LA alerts univ powers to naming problem for international students.
Malaysian students sytematically differentiated by delays in access, causing different assessment regime put in place. discussion ends Some discussion of cultural differences regarding ideas of course. LA emails uni re but encouraged to extend naming problem.
3
3
1
2
6
0
13
3
0
268
0
299
36-42
regular weekly announcement re staging. New module 3 forum open for business. Student subsidy emerging in offering different cultural frames (PNG and Malaysian). Flourishing practice of detailed questions re assessment requirements and referencing practices.
many experience technical hitches submitting assignment. HelpDesk and peer assistance to trouble shoot. LA can't provide missing ref for course resource, but discounts its importance.
students offer own different cultural frames on course material, and invite more comment. DS constructs Others as more 8 aug- case primitive (lower down Maslow's hierarchy study 1 report due 8 aug of needs)
4
1
0
4
0
0
51
14
0
205
0
279
43-49
LA travelling in China until 19 Aug. Had preloaded his regulat announcements. Much activity devoted toassessment details and troubles with technical submission process. Discussion gets back on Track in Mod 3, Thread G. SO WHAT"S NORMAL HAS SHIFTED TO PROBLEM SHOOTING AND INTERMINGLED COMPLAINT.
